Greenwire reports that a poll by Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project found that 64 percent of respondents said they would “prefer the administration place more emphasis” on protecting natural resources. And only 23 percent said they support placing a greater emphasis on domestic energy production “by maximizing the amount of national public lands available for responsible oil and gas drilling and mining.
NAFSR Follows Up on OneUSDA
The National Association of Forest Service Retirees, better known by the acronym NAFSR, followed up on the OneUSDA concept, which we previously covered here. As most of you know, changing the Forest Service name or logo in any way shape or form is a highly touchy subject with many retirees.
I was told that NAFSR had reached out to the Department and were told that Secretary Perdue’s OneUSDA vision is focused on increasing the effectiveness and efficiency in the Department to better serve the American people. He outlined four objectives dealing with review of policies, processes, directives, awards, telework. They were told none of these objectives included changing the name of the Forest Service. I’d like to thank NAFSR for their work and encourage retirees to join. You can also check out their website for items of interest (including some stuff about the “improving NEPA” effort). When I was trying to get a handle on Wildfire Bills, I found their analysis very helpful. It’s not that easy to get relatively unbiased analyses of legislation, and I appreciate that also.
Hello, everyone.
Earlier this week, I introduced to you a broad vision called OneUSDA.
We are one family working together to serve the American people. And if we are to fulfill our mission – to make USDA the most effective, most efficient, most customer focused department in the entire federal government – we must function as one single team.
You all may know that I love sports and frequently use sports examples to explain concepts. One of the best came from the story of an underdog basketball team from a tiny Indiana high school that makes it all the way to the state championship game, portrayed in the movie, Hoosiers. Coach Norman Dale, for the longest time, never let his players shoot the basketball in practice, opting instead to focus on fundamental drills and what it meant to move together. At one point he tells them the whole point: “Five players on the floor functioning as one single team: team, team, team. No one more important than the other.”
And that’s us. Team, team, team USDA. We are all important to one another and to all Americans.
So every change we detail today and in the weeks and months ahead is to make us function as one single team.
I will be forthright with you. Some of these changes may be drastically different than the old way of doing things, and that’s okay.
All of them point to our first strategic goal: to ensure our programs are delivered efficiently, effectively, and with integrity.
To that end, today I am directing USDA to:
· Restore sanity and commonsense to a cumbersome, labor-intensive, and costly departmental directive review process;
· Enhance the Secretary’s Awards and Recognition Program so that we can properly celebrate our accomplishments toward achieving all of our strategic goals;
· Amend our telework policy to one that works for the American taxpayer and for our colleagues who come to the office each day; and
· Review a wide array of directives – through Human Resources and the General Counsel’s Office – to create policies and processes that are transparent and consistent for the employee, the supervisor, and the American citizen.
And this is just the start. I am serious about holding everyone accountable, but most especially every leader and every supervisor, and that starts with me. OneUSDA only works if, like Coach Dale did with his players, we turn the focus on the fundamentals. Are we doing right by the taxpayer? Are we doing right by our colleagues?
I hope that you will join me and approach this change as something exciting, something that reorients our mission, and something that helps us be OneUSDA.
Thank you very much and happy New Year.
Sonny Perdue
Secretary
Inspiring Science: Co-design and Co-producion
We’ve been having a discussion about how to design a study to understand owl/fire relationships with the results being accepted by the people on both sides. A while back I write about “what science related to policy should have” in my Eight Steps to Vet Scientific Information for Policy Fitness post here.
Let me tell a story.. one day back in the 80’s a researcher told me that management should listen to her findings. I ran a lab for the National Forests that did the same kind of lab work with QA/QC protocols. I asked about her QA/QC protocols. She said “researchers can’t afford to do that on our grants.” I said National Forests can’t afford to change management on research without QA/QC.
But I’m not an outlier on this.. here’s the text of a speech delivered by Sir Peter Gluckman, the Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand on January 18, 2018, titled “Science to Inspire Humanity”.
Second, science must be embedded in society at every stage. This means the science community must be open to discussion on what science is undertaken (before it is undertaking it), how it is done, and what practical implications might be drawn from it. Concepts like co-design and co-production and extended peer review need to be more than slogans. These concepts need to be implemented in ways that enhances scientific rigor while ensuring valid public values about the research agenda and the application of science and technology.
Some science policy literature suggests you should give up on science once it becomes a weapon in policy science-slinging. But there is another way. Co-design and co-production and extended peer review (including of proposals) would be a great deal of work, but this might be the size of topic to try it out. Maybe USGS, NSF, the FS could all fund it jointly and the state universities would participate?
I also think his “science roadmaps” to facilitate prioritization and coordination are interesting ideas. See his blog post here.
Sexual Harassment in the Forest Service- What Would You Do?
Let’s take a look at this Congressional testimony by Lesa Donnelly. Here are some claims she makes:
- Region 5 is equivalent to the rest of the Forest Service
- The problem is more or less the same across land management agencies
- In the Obama administration, political leaders were responsible for the different reactions (the difference between Vilsack and Jewell)
We have been reporting egregious incidents of sexual harassment, work place violence, discrimination, and reprisal to Secretary Vilsack since 2009 to no avail. Forest Service investigations invariably are turned against the employee reporting incidents. Reprisal is swift and severe. There are very few instances of accountability for the perpetrator. In fact, perpetrators often receive what we call “disciplinary promotions.” Before any cultural change can occur, the agency must acknowledge the scope of the problem and be willing to make a good faith effort to address it. USDA and Forest Service have been unwilling to do this despite mountains of evidence of harassment, discrimination and reprisal against women, people of color, and people with disabilities
For this series of posts, I’d like to focus on sexual harassment alone rather than the broader world of discrimination.
It is important to point out that Congresswoman Jackie Speier, Congressman Peter DeFazio, and Congressman Raul M. Grijalva wrote a letter to USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong in November 19, 2014. They were highly concerned about the sexual harassment, attempted sexual assaults, gender discrimination, and whistleblower retaliation against women in Region 5 of the Forest Service. They asked for an investigation. As of this date, no investigation has occurred.
There are two clear indicators that the USDA and Forest Service are unwilling to acknowledge the pervasive and endemic discrimination against women and minorities. First, the comments made this year by Chief Tidwell are indicative that the Forest Service has no true intention of preventing and eliminating the discrimination against female employees. After the Huffington Post article on the Grand Canyon and Region 5 women was published this past summer, Chief Tidwell sent an email to all Forest Service employees, referring to it and telling the employees that the incidents were, “older allegations.”Then, less than a week ago, Chief Tidwell had an all employee “Webinar” meeting. He referred to the recent Washington Post article and this Hearing, again stating that our claims are, “older allegations.” These public comments are Chief Tidwell’s continuing attempts to minimize the serious civil rights incidents that he is fully aware of, and to undermine our efforts to have them acknowledged and addressed. Yes, some of the incidents occurred awhile ago, but he failed to state that these employees are still being harassed and are still in the EEOC system because of continued reprisal and the agency’s absolute refusal to settle EEO complaints.
I recommend reading all the testimony. I wonder what Secretary Jewell did and how successful that was?
While there is much room for improvement in her response to the issues, I commend Secretary Jewell’s quick call for an investigation, the investigator’s professional interviews and data gathering, the transparency of the process and results, and Secretary Jewell’s decision to open up the investigation across the Park Service.
Maybe all the FS needs to do is emulate that? How could we find out how well it worked?
I also took a look at the military to see if they’d figured it out. Apparently they have not, even in terms of assaults, according to this and this story. Despite the fact that they (have an entire system set up to deal with them that looks much more sophisticated than the FS or USDA, here.
If I were Chief, I would get a team led by a strong advocate with high visibility and access, possibly the Associate Chief. I would get groups of victims, supervisors of harassers, and the frontline Employee Relations, EEO, and HR people together and listen carefully to what they had to say about how to stop this. What would you do? Feel free to share your own stories, and what you think might have helped. Also, if you would like to write something longer about your ideas, email it to me and I will post it.
Litigation weekly January 19, 2018
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to enjoin the Tower and Grizzly fire salvage and restoration projects on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. (9th Cir.)
(Update) The Forest Service was added to a case against the BLM involving approval of a plan for construction of oil and gas wells on the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests. (D. Colo.)
(New case) A recreational gold miner in Georgia challenged the authority of the Forest Service to monitor or regulate noncommercial activities associated with recreational mining. (S.D. Ga.)
The Power of Storytelling and Forest Service Culture
My dream at the time, (in the mid-90’s) was to collect stories that reflected organizational culture and put them in a book for new employees. I received many stories through the Data General (email for FS folks at the time), and still have many of them. I plan to post them here as time and space allow. If people would like to contribute some now, we can post them here. My idea was that you would tell the story and then reflect on what you think the story tells about the culture.
Recently, I ran across this piece in Forbes:
The eclipse of storytelling in the 20th Century
Anthropologists always knew that storytelling is a universal feature of every country and every culture, even if, for most of the 20th Century, storytelling got very little respect. As so-called scientific approaches to life became dominant, mechanistic, machine-like thinking was everywhere triumphant. Analysis was king. Narrative was seen as either infantile or trivial.The phenomenon didn’t just affect storytelling. In retrospect, the 20th Century can be seen as a giant experiment by the human race to find out what could be accomplished if organizations treated people as things and communicated to them in abstractions, numbers and analysis, rather than through people-friendly communications such as stories.
Employees became “human resources” to be mined, rather than people to be minded. Customers became “demand”, or “consumers” or “eyeballs”, to be manipulated, rather than living, feeling human beings to be delighted. Storytelling was only one of many elements that suffered “collateral damage.”
The whole experiment can be seen as a success to the extent that the material standard of living of a proportion of the world’s population for a time improved. But the experiment was an abysmal failure in most other respects. It made human beings people miserable. And organizations steadily became less and less productive, as the need for innovation grew.
Regular readers know that stories, personal experiences, photos and scientific studies are all fair game for commenting and discussion on this blog. For new readers, as we discuss topics like sexual harassment or government shutdowns or whatever, let it be known that stories are honored and valued here.
“Spotted owl suffers more from logging than wildfire”
When I saw that headline, I had a hunch that Chad Hanson would be involved. The paper is here.
The USFS aimed to salvage timber from 11K acres, about 11% of the 97K acres burned by the King Fire. One of the new paper’s authors, Monica Bond, wrote a commentary arguing against the salvage. El Dorado forest supervisor Laurence Crabtree’s response is here.
Spotted owl suffers more from logging than wildfire — study
That’s the issue at the heart of competing studies in California, the most recent of which suggests post-fire logging — not severe fire — is the real threat to the spotted owl.
In a study published this week in the scientific journal Nature Conservation, research ecologists said they found that owl populations suffered after the so-called King Fire in 2014 in the Eldorado National Forest because of post-fire logging.
Furthermore, the authors said, previous research by scientists missed that point and blamed a loss of owls in some areas on the fire itself, even though those areas hadn’t been occupied by owls in the first place.
“Most studies of spotted owls and fires in California found little to no effect of fires on owl site occupancy, but the King Fire study results contradicted these. Now we have a better idea where the King Fire results came from — it was post-fire logging and pre-fire abandonment,” said Monica Bond, a wildlife biologist with the Wild Nature Institute and co-author of the study.
The researchers said they found that in fire-damaged sites that had owls prior to the fire, where less than 5 percent of the area was logged, 12 of 15 spotted owl sites were occupied after the fire.
In sites where 5 percent or more of the area was logged, two out of six owl sites were occupied, they said.
The most recent study, conducted by researchers critical of logging, adds to a debate with policy implications; Congress is weighing legislation to change forest management activities and speed the approval of logging operations in areas damaged by wildfire, which some lawmakers say will reduce chances of subsequent fire.
The owl, too, is under federal review, as the Forest Service pursues a conservation strategy to protect the population. California spotted owl numbers have declined in the past 20 years, according to the agency, due to threats to habitat and competition from the barred owl, which has invaded the spotted owl’s territory.
California spotted owl isn’t listed as endangered, but the authors of the study are leading an effort to have it listed by the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The study’s lead author, Chad Hanson, is a research ecologist with the John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute, which opposes such legislation and is critical of logging on federal lands generally.
Recently burned forests — called snags for the dead trees left standing — are beneficial to spotted owls as hunting territory, Hanson said. Owls nest in deep woods and hunt in more open areas.
“We call this the bed-and-breakfast effect,” Hanson told E&E News.
In a news release, Hanson said of the study, “This is good news for declining California spotted owls because this is something that we can control — we can make policy decisions to stop post-fire logging operations in spotted owl habitat.”
A researcher whose work was questioned in the new study, Gavin Jones, took issue with some of the findings.
Jones, a graduate research assistant at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told E&E News that his studies showed without a doubt that high-severity fire negatively affected spotted owls.
Those findings from the King Fire were “entirely unambiguous,” Jones said.
Jones said he doesn’t rule out that post-fire logging could be detrimental to spotted owls and that research in that area has been limited.
And while Jones said he’s more of a scientist than a policy advocate, he added that campaigners for less logging sometimes take the view that all wildfire is good and all logging is bad — when the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Even severe wildfire is good in patches, Jones said.
“Is all severe fire good? We’ve found it’s not good,” Jones said. “I think there’s this basic problem of missing the nuance.”
New Study About Forests Impacted by Extreme Mortality
http://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/bix146/4797261
Massive tree mortality has occurred rapidly in frequent-fire-adapted forests of the Sierra Nevada, California. This mortality is a product of acute drought compounded by the long-established removal of a key ecosystem process: frequent, low- to moderate-intensity fire. The recent tree mortality has many implications for the future of these forests and the ecological goods and services they provide to society. Future wildfire hazard following this mortality can be generally characterized by decreased crown fire potential and increased surface fire intensity in the short to intermediate term. The scale of present tree mortality is so large that greater potential for “mass fire” exists in the coming decades, driven by the amount and continuity of dry, combustible, large woody material that could produce large, severe fires. For long-term adaptation to climate change, we highlight the importance of moving beyond triage of dead and dying trees to making “green” (live) forests more resilient.
Friday Funny- LMP Safety Issue
Denise Downie was kind enough to send this cartoon in.. “This was drawn by Rex Norman, retired public affairs officer on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. I watched Rex draw this cartoon during the 2005 planning transition meeting at Lied Lodge in Nebraska.”
Should Book on USFS Include a Chapter on Discrimination/Sexual Harassment?
Fellow NCFP Bloggers,
As you may know, I am editing a book to be published by the Society of American Foresters, 193 Million Acres: Toward a Healthier and More Resilient US Forest Service. It’s a collection of essays by a wide range of observers that examine the state of the agency from a variety of viewpoints and propose solutions that would address challenges the agency faces.
Clearly, one of those challenges is discrimination and sexual harassment within the agency, the topic of much discussion on this blog over the last few weeks. I have two questions for you:
Should one or more chapters of the book be devoted to this complex and difficult topic?
And who might write such a chapter? It would take someone who can be dispassionate in describing the situation and proposing realistic actions the agency might take to address the issues. It would also take someone who can complete such an essay in the near future: the book is scheduled to be published in August, and I would need a draft in the next month or perhaps six weeks.
Feedback welcome!
If you like, contact me directly at [email protected]. All communications will be held in confidence. — Steve Wilent