The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views

Today’s Seattle Times reports on a 5 million board foot timber sale conceived and consummated as a part of fighting the Wolverine Fire near Lake Chelan in Washington State. The sale, which cut a 50-mile long, 300-foot wide “community protection line” through spotted owl critical habitat and over streams, was logged primarily after rain had stopped the fire’s advance 8 miles from the Lake Wenatchee and Plains communities it was intended to protect. Contemporaneous Forest Service and FWS employees’ objections to the logging were overridden by the Wenatchee River district ranger.

Under normal circumstances, the National Environmental Policy Act would have required the Forest Service to assess this logging in an EA or EIS. But, Forest Service rules include an exception to NEPA analysis “[w]hen the responsible official determines that an emergency exists” and the actions are “urgently needed to mitigate harm to life, property, or important natural or cultural resources.” 36 CFR 220.4(b). In this instance, there is no written record of that determination having been made by “the responsible official,” or anyone else, for that matter. That’s the norm for Forest Service firefighting, which seeks to fly under NEPA’s radar using this regulation without ever following the regulation’s own terms itself. To the best of my knowledge, at no time does a Forest Service responsible official document that “an emergency exists” and that a particular action is “urgently needed.”

In the Wolverine Fire, the Forest Service’s behavior and facts on the ground belied any urgency to log this timber. If an urgent need to protect life or property had existed, the Forest Service would have warned the Lake Wenatchee and Plain communities to be prepared to evacuate. There are three levels of evacuation alert – Level 1 (Be Ready), Level 2 (Leave Soon) and Level 3 (Leave Immediately). At no time did the Forest Service put these communities on even the lowest level (Be Ready) evacuation alert. In contrast, Holden Village and Lucerne, which the Wolverine Fire actually threatened, received evacuation alerts and were evacuated.

When a wildfire threatens national forest visitors, the Forest Service also closes the area to public visitation. But here, when logging began, the Forest Service began relaxing public closures in the Wolverine Fire area, including reopening the Pacific Crest Trail to hikers.

Unaddressed in the news article is whether this 50-mile fuel break would have prevented the fire from spotting over the line. Had weather conditions been such that Lake Wenatchee or other communities actually been threatened (which they were not), it’s a fair bet that the fire could have jumped the line readily. In fact, the Forest Service warned that the Wolverine Fire might even jump Lake Chelan, which is a lot wider and less flammable!

The following press release is from Wilderness Watch. – mk

New Legislation is an Assault on the Very Idea of Wilderness and the Values of the Wilderness Act

The Sustainable Trails Coalition is attempting to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act

MISSOULA, MONTANA – Last week Utah Republican Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee introduced the so-called “Human-Powered Travel in Wilderness Act,” a piece of legislation that would ride rough-shod over the Wilderness Act of 1964 by opening up America’s National Wilderness Preservation System to mountain bikes and other machines. The bill would also allow chainsaws and wheeled devices like carts and wheelbarrows in Wilderness.

For over 50 years the Wilderness Act has protected wilderness areas designated by Congress from mechanization and mechanical transport, even if no motors were involved with such activities. This has meant, as Congress intended, that Wilderness has been kept free from cars, trucks, ATVs, snowmobiles, bicycles, and all other types of motorized and mechanized transport.

“We see this for what it is—an assault on the very idea of Wilderness and the values of the Wilderness Act. Make no mistake, the goals of the Sustainable Trails Coalition are one of the biggest threats to the National Wilderness Preservation System,” said George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch. “At a time when wilderness and wildlife are under increasing pressures from increasing populations, growing mechanization, and a rapidly changing climate, the last thing Wilderness needs is to be invaded by mountain bikes and other machines. “

It’s noteworthy that the Sustainable Trails Coalition had to enlist the help of some of the most anti-environmental and anti-wilderness members of Congress to carry their legislation. According to the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Mike Lee each have a lifetime environmental voting score of just 10 percent, while the most recent LCV scorecard gave Senator Hatch a zero percent and Senator Lee four percent.

Earlier this year, over 110 conservation and Wilderness organizations from across America wrote all members of Congress urging them to oppose attempts to amend and weaken the Wilderness Act and Wilderness protections by allowing bicycles in designated Wilderness. A copy of that letter is here: http://bit.ly/1VFoL1U

In the letter, the groups wrote: “These mountain bikers erroneously claim that mountain bikes were allowed in Wilderness until 1984, but then banned administratively by the U.S. Forest Service. This claim is simply not true.”

“Mountain bikes are exactly the kind of mechanical devices and mechanical transport that Congress intended to keep out of Wilderness in passing the Wilderness Act.  Bikes have their place, but that place is not inside Wilderness areas,” explained Kevin Proescholdt, Conservation Director of Wilderness Watch.

“We believe that this protection has served our nation well, and that the ‘benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness’ would be forever lost by allowing mechanized transport and other machines in these areas.”

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Happy 4th of July, everyone! George Ochenski, the Monday morning columnist for the Missoulian (and a tremendous mountaineer, backcountry adventurer, hunter and fisherman), has this piece in today’s paper.

There will be a lot of blustering about freedom by politicians today, but you can bet there won’t be any talking about one of the greatest opportunities for true freedom in the United States today. Namely, our incredible system of designated wilderness areas where anyone can roam free under the open sky and take in what’s left of nature “untrammeled” by mankind.

It’s been more than half a century since Congress passed the 1964 Wilderness Act and President Johnson signed it into law. Much like Yellowstone National Park, the preservation of large blocks of public land as wilderness is an American idea of which each and every American should be proud. These are not the king’s hunting reserves, these are public lands open to all to enjoy, but not destroy.

While many individuals and organizations were involved in the passage of the original Wilderness Act, Montana enjoys the distinction of being home to one of the main movers – Stewart “Brandy” Brandborg, who was the head of the Wilderness Society when the act was signed into law. Born and raised in Montana, his father the forest supervisor for the Bitterroot National Forest for 20 years, Brandy’s dedication to the preservation of wilderness for future generations has never flagged and continues to this day with tremendous energy, despite heading into his nineties while still living surrounded by the beauty of his beloved Bitterroot Valley.

What Brandborg and his cohorts understood then – and what is even more evident now – is the tendency of human beings to overrun the natural world in their seemingly never-ending quest for wealth and resources. But those very activities that have taken mankind to unheard of heights of civilization have not been kind to our fellow creatures on the planet.

Road-building, massive clearcuts, damming rivers and dewatering them for irrigation, mines, gas and oil wells, fencing, extensive overgrazing, and development have all seriously reduced the once continent-wide wildlands to a mere fraction of their former size. Now, thanks to mankind’s intrusion into the natural world, species hover on the brink of extinction, migratory routes used by wildlife for millennia have vanished under concrete and steel. Meanwhile, the spawning runs for anadromous fish such as salmon that provided vital streams of life to both man and wildlife are now disrupted by enormous dams that turn cold, clean, flowing waters into still, warm and often stagnant reservoirs.

These are are all very real, very well-documented impacts and easily observable to anyone who will take the time to look. The one place you will not find these harsh intrusions on the natural world is in wilderness, which is why it is the only true solution to the problems now facing so many species.

Unfortunately, although Brandborg and his fellow wilderness advocates stood strong and proud to support wilderness for wilderness’ sake, that’s not the case with many of today’s wilderness groups. Having largely abandoned championing wilderness as the last bastion of the world that once was, many of today’s large and well-funded wilderness groups have turned to justifying wilderness designation by lauding the economic benefits rather than the preservation of still-existing ecosystems and the plethora of natural life they contain.

But pandering to the interests of resource extractors under the rubric of collaboration is a losing game. Nothing illustrates that more clearly than the recent announcement by Weyerhaeuser to shut down the former Plum Creek mills in Columbia Falls and then plead a “log shortage” as the cause. That Montana’s highest elected officials bought that line without doing any research is shameful.

The truth is Weyerhaeuser hasn’t bid on timber sales since its takeover of Plum Creek. Instead, the mega-corporation found it more convenient to blame environmentalists for trying to preserve what’s left of Montana’s forest ecosystems. And if anyone doubts the condition in which Plum Creek left its lands, a quick trip up Gold Creek off the Blackfoot will reveal the miles of weed-infested stumpfields that remain as Plum Creek’s rapacious legacy.

On this Independence Day, we should be proud of the freedom wilderness provides us. Free to hike, camp, fish, hunt and wander in the mystery, beauty and silence of the natural world without intrusion from today’s hectic, mechanized society. Wilderness needs no justification – and it would do a world of good for our politicians and their collaborator pals to understand that. As wilderness hero Brandy Brandborg still espouses, we need more, not less, wilderness in which we can all be free for generations to come.

Posts and comments in this and other forums reveal widespread misunderstanding of, and sometimes disrespect for, the viewpoint of others.  The graphic may help to make clear the difference between two world views, recognizing that both are strongly held and that both have merit.

Application of these opposing philosophies to land management results in totally different outcomes.  While short-term effects may be readily apparent, long-term impacts are often unpredictable. To make matters more complicated, the “goodness” of each outcome is dependent on the viewpoint of the observer, as the graphic’s text demonstrates.

The land on left side, of the photo, while controlled (but virtually unmanaged) by the U.S. Forest Service, belongs to you.  Study the photo and ask yourself “On how much of my land do I want Nature to take its course?”.    Al of it?   Some of it?  None of it?   If  “some”, what percentage?

Your land managers (Congress and the Forest Service), and your fellow readers, await your decision.

Factoid:  National Forests contain 36 million acres of formally designated wilderness areas or ~19% of the land area.

The editor of the Flathead Beacon has a new column following up on Weyerhaeuser’s announcement last week that they were shutting down two mills and a large administrative office in Columbia Falls, Montana.

You can read: “What Changed? A lot happened between then, when Weyerhaeuser spent $8.4 billion on Plum Creek, and now” here.

It was interesting to see that in May Weyerhaeuser sold its pulp business to International Paper for $2.2 billion. So too, it was interesting to see that earlier this month Weyerhaeuser sold it’s liquid packaging unit to (Japan-based) Nippon Paper for $285 million. I didn’t know about either of those transactions.

The Flathead Beacon and most of the media coverage in Montana continues to largely ignore another important piece of the puzzle here: something called Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs).

Ironically, Dave Skinner (sometimes a commenter on this blog) is also a regular Flathead Beacon columnist and he wrote this piece for the Flathead Beacon on REITs and the Weyco-Plum Creek merger back in December 2015.

As I recently pointed out, while Dave and I don’t agree on much, I do agree with much of Skinner’s analysis of REITs, and specifically how it pertained to the Weyerhaeuser-Plum Creek Deal.

Here are some important snips not to be missed in Dave’s article:

“That Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek are merging might have surprised some Montanans. Not me. Why not? Well, I guess it’s time to remind everyone America’s timber beasts are dead, replaced by a new kind of beast – Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)….

REIT’s must pay 90 percent of untaxed annual profit to shareholders, who are then taxed 15 percent on their capital gain. All things being equal, a dollar in a REIT pays back 35 percent more to an investor than a dollar in an otherwise-identical integrated company. In the Wall Street universe, where billions chase hundredths of a point, that was a big fat hairy deal….

Significantly, America’s all-time greatest integrated timber barony, Weyerhaeuser (Weyco for short), held out the longest … in fact, lobbying Congress for tax treatment that would render the company equivalent to a REIT in terms of tax burden and shareholder return. For that effort, in 2008 Weyco scored a reduction in income tax to 17 percent, saving $182 million.

Nonetheless, with REITs paying zero – Weyco kept spinning off mills (and people) in order to get under the REIT manufacturing-asset threshold, converting to REIT in 2010….

REITs aren’t focused on timber, except as a means of generating what stockholders crave – cash.”

Regarding the notion from the Flathad Beacon editor that in 2013 “there was a level of optimism in the [timber] industry” and “housing starts were up”….I’m not sure that’s true.

Well, housing starts may have slowly inched in a slightly upward direction by 2013, but as this chart from the U.S. Census Bureau clearly illustrates, U.S. housing starts are still just a fraction of what they once were.

A rough estimate is that during the period 2000-2006 the U.S. had about 12.45 million housing starts. During the same time frame, but from 2009 to 2015, the U.S. had about 5.95 million housing starts.

That means that the U.S. had a whopping 4.7 MILLION LESS housing starts from 2009-2015, compared with pre-housing bubble burst period of 2000-2006.

Please, let that number sink in for a second. That’s a lot less demand for 2-x4’s, plywood and building materials.

Also, in 2013 the U.S. timber industry knew full well what was coming down the pipe – the October 2015 expiration of the U.S.-Canada Softwood Lumber Deal. Of course, I can’t recall one single timber mill owner, logging lobbyist or politician telling Montana citizens about this. Nope, they were too busy telling the public how a handful of pesky “environmental extremists” were the reason for the timber industry’s problems. In fact, the public was basically keep about the expiration of the deal until the weeks leading up to it.

The Beacon did run this article in September 2015, in which the Montana timber industry finally starts to come to grips with the expiration of the Softwood Lumber Deal with Canada, and also the weak Canadian dollar, which was making the U.S. market much more attractive to Canadian timber corporations.

In fact, in that September 2015 article, Todd Morgan of the very-much pro-industry Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana said the economic aftershock will continue to weaken the industry for some time.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see mills taking some down time, either by shortening shifts or through curtailments,” Morgan said.

Well, that’s exactly what happened. At the end of September 2015 the Beacon reported that “Executives at Tricon Timber announced that roughly half of the mill’s workforce was being laid off Sept. 25, citing the tumultuous American timber market.”

Tricon’s VP said “said low lumber prices, the declining Chinese market and the looming expiration of the softwood lumber agreement between the U.S. and Canada all played key parts in the company’s decision.”

Even Julia Altemus, with the Montana Wood Products Association, who never misses a chance to blame environmentalists, admitted in the article:

“The state’s entire industry is struggling amid this situation. She said the industry has laid off a total of 235 positions since March. ‘People are just trying to do more with less,’ Altemus said. ‘It’s a matter of economics.’”

Also in September 2015, Julia Altemus told Montana Public Radio this:

“If you go back to March 1, about 235 lumber or mill workers have been laid off. That’s a huge hit to the industry and all the mills are suffering about a $2 million to $3 million loss in the first 6-months of the year. [It’s not] been that bad since the first part of the great recession back in 2007/2008….the markets are terrible.”

So just like the Flathead Beacon’s editor asks in his column “What Changed?” I must ask the same exact thing. What DID change from the dire situation outlined above – the results of which were entirely of the result of global economic realities and “terrible” markets.

Well, what changed in one of the largest wood products companies in the entire world came into Montana and purchased Plum Creek Timber Co for over $8 billion, making Weyerhaeuser a $25 billion new kid on the block. Weyerhaeuser’s purchased came with those 880,000 acres of (largely cut-over, entirely unsustainably logged) Plum Creek private timber lands and Weyco jumped whole hog into the REIT shell game that Skinner described so well.

What else changed? Well, we’re in the middle of a heated election cycle so of course all the politicians had to blame someone. So both republicans and democrats seized the opportunity to blame Weyco’s closures of two mills and an administrative office on “activists,” “fringe environmentalists” and the federal government.

I’ve said it before, so might as well say it again. If we’re going to continue to let politicians and big business incorrectly identify the problems, and just blame all the world’s problems on ‘fringe environmentalists,’ how in the world will we have good solutions? Or sustainable communities? Or science-based management of our National Forests, including budgets needed to do all the backlogged bona-fide restoration work?

Maybe that will change too…but I’m not counting on it.

There’s a reason the Montana Public Radio story on Weyerhaeuser’s announcement that they were closing two mills and an administrative office in Columbia Falls opens with “One of the world’s largest private owners of timberlands….”

Weyerhaeuser owns 880,000 acres of private timberland in just Montana, and in total they owns/controls 13 million acres of private timberlands. The company is worth $25 billion dollars. As Montanans will recall, they purchased Plum Creek Timber Company in November 2015 for $8 billion, a move that surprised many people in Montana, including our entire Congressional delegation and the governor.

Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, the corporate executives at Weyhaeuser and Plum Creek knew that these closures were coming?

Some of us weren’t very surprised. I agree with Dave Skinner about very few things, but I agree with much of his December 2015 analysis of something called Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), and specifically how it pertains to the Weyhaeuser-Plum Creek Deal. Give Skinner’s “The New Timber Beasts” a read.

“That Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek are merging might have surprised some Montanans. Not me. Why not? Well, I guess it’s time to remind everyone America’s timber beasts are dead, replaced by a new kind of beast – Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)….

REIT’s must pay 90 percent of untaxed annual profit to shareholders, who are then taxed 15 percent on their capital gain. All things being equal, a dollar in a REIT pays back 35 percent more to an investor than a dollar in an otherwise-identical integrated company. In the Wall Street universe, where billions chase hundredths of a point, that was a big fat hairy deal….

Significantly, America’s all-time greatest integrated timber barony, Weyerhaeuser (Weyco for short), held out the longest … in fact, lobbying Congress for tax treatment that would render the company equivalent to a REIT in terms of tax burden and shareholder return. For that effort, in 2008 Weyco scored a reduction in income tax to 17 percent, saving $182 million. Nonetheless, with REITs paying zero – Weyco kept spinning off mills (and people) in order to get under the REIT manufacturing-asset threshold, converting to REIT in 2010….

REITs aren’t focused on timber, except as a means of generating what stockholders crave – cash.”

Let’s also not forget that just 8 months ago the U.S.-Canada Softwood Lumber Agreement expired. Almost immediately Canada starting flooding the U.S. markets with lumber and wood products. The fact that the Canadian dollar has been so weak compared to the U.S. dollar also made the dumping of timber into the U.S. much more profitable for the Canadian timber industry.

Did anyone in Montana’s Congressional delegation or Gov Bullock do anything about the expired Softwood Lumber Deal? Nope. Is it a part of their campaign ‘stump’ speeches? No. The Missoulian actually did a very good editorial on the issue last October.

So far – and so very predictable – all the breaking newspaper stories on Weyerhaeuser’s pending mill closures feature Montana’s entire Congressional delegation and Gov Bullock singing the same exact tune: We need more National Forest logging.

Zinke even went so far as to blame Weyhaeuser’s closure on “activists.” Not to be outdone, Senator Daines was positive the closure was the “result of frivolous lawsuits by fringe environmentalists and excessive regulations.”

I was curious about those statements, so on the morning following Weyhaeuser’s announcement I called the lead timber sale planner for both the Flathead National Forest and the Kootenai National Forest. According to the U.S. Forest Service Weyhaeuser has bid on zero timber sales on either of these National Forests.

I also got a message from someone at Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics who wonders if it was even legal for Weyhaeuser to bid on National Forest timber sales in the western U.S. because they export so many raw logs (and jobs) to Asia. I’m looking into this more, but here’s the email I got:

“Isn’t Weyhaeuser barred from buying NF timber in MT because it exports raw logs? I think that Weyco cannot buy national forest logs because it exports its own unprocessed logs. Weyco doesn’t buy NF timber in the west. It does, for example, in Arkansas, but that’s east of the law’s 100th meridian log substitution bar.”

Here’s some else where considering.  For the past two years the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Region, which includes all the National Forests in Montana and the National Forests in Northern Idaho, met their annual timber harvest goals. A Washington Post investigation into U.S. Forest Service timber sales in Montana (following Sen Tester lying to Montanans on  Montana Public Radio) found that only 4% of all U.S. Forest Service timber sales in Montana were unable to be logged because of litigation. For his ‘whopper’ of a lie, Senator Tester was given four pinocchios by Glenn Kessler, the Post’s “Fact Checker.”

Also, in March 2015, the Flathead National Forests Joe Krueger said this on MT Public Radio:

“A big factor that constrains how much wood products is coming off the [Flathead National Forest] is our existing budget. So that number of 28 million board feet of timber that we’re projecting as our timber sale quantity is constrained by budgets.”

Has anyone in the Montana Congressional delegation introduced a bill or calling on the rest of Congress to increase the U.S. Forest Service’s timber budgets? Nope.

Fact is, for the past two years in Montana the U.S. Forest Service could do an unlimited number of 3,000 acres timber sales on 5 million acres of National Forest land in Montana via a Farm Bill provision [and Gov. Bullock’s secret, no public notice, no public input nomination process). These timber sales would be “categorically excluded from the requirements of NEPA” and there would be no opportunity for the public to object, or appeal, these timber sales.

How much of this 5 million acres of National Forest lands in Montana available right now for ‘fast track’ logging have actually been logged? I’d put the number at about 5,000 to 10,000 acres actually logged, but that’s just a rough estimate.

Have Zinke, Tester and Daines called for more Congressional funding for this potential 5 million acres of Farm Bill logging in Montana? No they have not.

Perhaps it’s time for Rep Ryan Zinke, Sen Steve Daines and Sen Jon Tester to “put up, or shut up” when it comes to their complete failure to give the U.S. Forest Service the budgets they would need to do all the additional public lands logging they claim they want. Perhaps it’s time to admit that global economic realities, NAFTA, boardroom decisions by $25 billion corporations and other economic forces far greater than a handful of “activists” might really be at work here.

The workers who are being laid off and the people of Montana deserve to know what’s really going on here. Hopefully the Montana news media will dig a little deeper in the coming days and weeks and provide some answers.

UPDATE (June 23, 7pm): The Missoulian just posted this follow-up article, in which the Supervisors of the Flathead National Forest  and Kootenai National Forest have this to say about Weyco and Plum Creek’s attempts to (n0t) bid on any timber sales since 2007.

Chip Weber, supervisor of the Flathead National Forest, and Chris Savage, supervisor of the Kootenai National Forest, confirmed that Thursday.

Weber noted there have only been two smaller timber sales offered in the Flathead since Weyerhaeuser absorbed Plum Creek this spring. Savage said neither Plum Creek nor Weyerhaeuser have bid on sales in the Kootenai National Forest since approximately 2007. He estimated 300 million to 400 million board feet of timber have been sold in that time.

“I do know they have emphasized harvesting off their own lands,” Weber said.

Tom Ray, Weyerhaeuser Montana Resources team leader, did not return phone messages Thursday. Just before 5 p.m. he sent an email saying he was tied up in meetings, adding, “At this time we don’t have anything to add to our public comments we made yesterday.”