Community Sourced, Shared and Supported
With a new Republican President and a Republican-controlled Congress, how will this affect the Forest Service and the BLM?
Regarding the picture: I did some processing with a High Dynamic Range (HDR) program to get this artsy view. It is interesting that it enhanced the flames better than in the original scan, from a Kodachrome slide. I shot this while filling in on an engine, on the Lassen NF, back in 1988.
Seems like you can’t talk about national forest management these days without also talking about wildfires. As an environmentalists I’ve gotten used to being blamed for wildfires no matter what the truth or the reality really is. Heck, environmentalists were even blamed by Montana Senator Steve Daines for this summer Roaring Lion Fire on the Bitterroot National Forest…even though that fire was started by some irresponsible teenagers and a lawsuit against a proposed timber sale and roadbuilding project in the area was filed – not by any environmental group – but by a local homeowner/property owner who happens to be a former U.S. Forest Service smokejumper and the owner a wood products manufacturing company. Go figure.
From the Missoulian:
In the decade between 2006 and 2015, humans started nearly half of the 73,110 wildfires on national forest lands.
Campfires were responsible for one-third of the 33,700 human-caused wildfires in that decade. Those fires burned over 1.2 million acres.
This year saw 8,500 acres burned in the Roaring Lion fire outside Hamilton. Four young people were charged last week with negligent arson, a felony, for allegedly leaving the campfire that started that wildfire, which destroyed 16 homes and cost $11 million to fight.
“It’s a significant issue for us,” said Jennifer Jones of the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire and Aviation Management office in Washington, D.C. “We have a finite number of fire personnel and equipment. The more that we have to allocate to fight human-caused fire, the fewer we have to fight the fires we can’t prevent, which are those caused by lightning.”
How does all of this affect current forest policy?
Here are two worthwhile reads regarding the role of forests in global warming / carbon sequestration. In addition, item “C)” raises and supports the question: ‘if there is no long term correlation between temperatures and CO2 then how can CO2 be the largest factor contributing to Global Warming?’. Everything we do is predicated on that one big “IF” yet, most refuse to acknowledge the lack of a direct correlation.
A) Pacific Northwest forests: Carbon sink or carbon source?
“Active forest management in dry forest ecosystems plays a critical role in reducing fuel loads, conserving functionality and biodiversity, and returning forests to a natural, resilient condition that is capable of responding to wildfire in a more socially desirable and ecologically beneficial way”
IMHO regardless of whatever role CO2 plays, healthy forests require, at a minimum, forest management as needed for the safety of society. The above quote simply illustrates that a “hands off” policy does not fit the needs of all forest ecosystems nor does it fit at all times within the need to maintain a specific forest ecosystem in order to support species dependent on the sustainability of a particular forest ecosystem niche. This in turn leads to the need for landscape level forest planning for all federal forest holdings.
– 1) “the single biggest contributor to climate change is CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. Indeed, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel emissions in recent years have been roughly ten times higher than emissions from the next largest global source, land use change, including deforestation”
—> See “C” below about the “inconvenient truth” that there is no proven long term relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures. This does not rule out the possibility that, as yet, undetermined interactions with other variables could have an impact on the role of CO2 in global warming.
– 2) “there are many excellent reasons to support planting trees in WA state … However, mitigating the threat of climate change is not among those reasons, based on the available science.”
– 3) “Thus, the management of forests to accumulate carbon must not delay or dilute the phasing-out fossil fuel use.”
—> agree – but not because of CO2 emissions:
—- a) Health – pollution dictates a reduction in the use of hydrocarbons and an increase in the use of alternative fuels to replace the extraction of below ground hydrocarbons and an increase in the use of sound, sustainable forest management to reduce the risk of Catastrophic fires.
—- b) Geologic ramifications of hydrocarbon extraction and hydraulic pumping include surface subsidence and earthquakes.
C) The Question as to the pertinence of CO2 to Global Warming
We must consider the inconvenient truth that ice cores from Greenland and Vostok, Russia show that over the last ~ 100,000 years, temps have been significantly higher than today by more than 2 degrees centigrade when CO2 was 2/3rds of what it is now. So is CO2 really the cause of global warming?
Greenland Data – Mankind has lived in significantly warmer climates than current temps over the last 11,000 years with CO2 levels at 2/3rds of the present levels (current CO2 levels corroborates their extrapolation of CO2 levels to the present).
Global Mean Temperature Anomaly – 1880 – Present – Note 2000 – 2016 only shows a 0.3 degree centigrade increase versus the Greenland and Vostok Data and corroborates their extrapolations to 2000.
Vostok Data – Mankind has lived in significantly warmer climates than current temps over the last 140,000 years.
So the question is: how does all of this affect current forest policy?
This job interview of a former Forest Service employee by Tuolumne County Supervisors didn’t go well.
Supervisor Evan Royce noted he wanted to be explicit with Boroski, trying to make sure they are on the same page, by saying, “I think we have experienced a lot of extreme environmental influence on public lands policy and in Tuolumne County 78% of our county is publically owned and that has a huge effect on our communities, and we fight very hard on this board to try to protect our communities and represent them in a way that will preserve our quality of life and prosperity…looking into the future, as we are about to adopt a general plan and we’re dealing with new forest plans, it’s very critical to us that if we are going to do business with you that you represent us in that way and you help us combat the radical environmental influence that you see from groups like Center for Biological Diversity. That’s what we want.
A revealing look at their approach to forest plan collaboration.
This piece in the New York Times from Christopher Ketcham seems worthy of discussion on this blog. In Montana, public lands issues have been the centerpiece of pretty much every single statewide campaign this year. However, to date, not one politician in Montana has said anything about last week’s verdict in the Bundy Trail, and what that may mean for the safety of thousands of public lands employees in our state, or the future management of America’s public lands. Then again, I’m not sure I can think of one single example of where any statewide politician in Montana has ever said anything negative about ranchers that graze their livestock on our federal public lands for literally pennies on the dollar, at a tremendous impact to native wildlife, watersheds and the heath of our range and forested ecosystems. -mk
With the jury acquittals last week of Ammon and Ryan Bundy and their accomplices in the 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon last winter, the lives of federal land managers in the American West got a whole lot more difficult.
This was more than just a court victory.
The Bundys landed a blow against a culture of public service embodied by the federal employees responsible for maintaining law and order and protecting our wildest Western landscapes. And while we don’t know the reason for the acquittals in what seemed like an open-and-shut case of guilt, it comes against a backdrop of deep antipathy in parts of the West toward the environmental regulation of the hundreds of millions of acres of rangeland, forests and national parks managed by the federal government on behalf of all Americans.
This hostility is particularly strong in the high desert of southeastern Oregon that is home to the refuge, described by the environmental historian Nancy Langston in an Op-Ed article earlier this year as “a place of bitterly contested human histories that remain potent today.”
The federal land managers I’ve spoken to — rangers, biologists and law enforcement officers, almost all of them so fearful they won’t go on the record — worry that extremist copycats who seek to undermine the federal public lands system will be emboldened by the verdict.
Environmental groups barely register. And it’s a good bet that the partner-named law firms on this list are not doing much public interest litigation.
The article this is taken from was about the novelty of Earthjustice being on the list, and its focus on EPA. It added:
“Garcia said these fee awards play no role in determining which cases her attorneys will take and that Earthjustice does not depend on them for financial sustainability. They made up less than 4 percent of the group’s more than $54 million in revenues in 2015, according to its annual report for that year. The vast majority of Earthjustice’s revenue comes from charitable contributions from foundations and individuals.”
But who does Congress want to punish?
Preserving Drinking Water is just one of the many reasons that Landscape Level Sound Sustainable Forest Management Is Needed everywhere including our National Forests. This doesn’t preclude hands off management nor does it preclude tailored management to provide for the desires of society when it fits within acceptable parameters as dictated by:
The following are quotes from various synopses of related articles:
A) Fixing Water By Fixing Forests
B) U.S. Cities Go to the Source to Protect Drinking Water
C) Forest Trends: “State of Watershed Investment 2014”
D) Report: Protecting Drinking Water At Its Source
Twin Lakes, near Bridgeport, California, hasn’t been intensely developed, solely because of its remote location. There are clusters of private cabins. The terrain would make for an outrageous ski area but, it is too far out of the way to be successful. So, the best use of this land is to preserve it.
My Instagram: www.instagram.com/larryharrellfotoware/
Snowing on the Soup Complex Sept 22, 2016
On September 17, an arsonist is suspected of setting six fires along a remote one-mile stretch of gravel road near the Soup Springs campground on the edge of the Modoc’s South Warner Wilderness. Four of the fires were contained promptly at less than a half-acre each and a fifth was held to less than 300 acres after a couple of days. The sixth, called “Soup 2,” escaped initial attack. Blown by westerly prevailing winds, it moved uphill to the sparsely-vegetated wilderness where, over the course of a week, it burned about 2,200 acres.
From their outset, these ignitions threatened one “uninhabited structure.” Details regarding the structure are unknown. But, of one thing I’m confident, it’s not worth the $5.4 million spent fighting this fire.
On day 2, for example, over 900 firefighters were assigned to the fire as it burned largely, and appropriately, unchecked into the wilderness. On day 3 alone, the Forest Service spent $909,655!
Why spend so much money watching a fire burn into the wilderness, with nothing of consequence threatened and season-ending rain in the forecast? One explanation might be the $2.3 million in “indirect” costs the Modoc national forest is allowed to charge to the fire. With the fiscal year about to expire at the end of September, every national forest has an incentive to spend as much as possible against the agency’s $1.6 billion wildfire suppression account. Which may help explain how the Forest Service managed to spend its largest fire appropriation in history during a decidedly uneventful national forest fire season.
This article, “Study Finds Protected Forests on Public Land Burn Less Than Severely Logged Areas,” discusses a study on Ecosphere (full text – open access).
Note that the study was performed by three activists who are strongly opposed to logging: Curtis M. Bradley (Center for Biological Diversity), Chad T. Hanson (John Muir Project), Dominick A. DellaSala (Geos Institute).
From their paper’s conclusion: “In general, our findings—that forests with the highest levels of protection from logging tend to burn least severely—suggest a need for managers and policymakers to rethink current forest and fire management direction, particularly proposals that seek to weaken forest protections or suspend environmental laws ostensibly to facilitate a more extensive and industrial forest–fire management regime.”
