Community Sourced, Shared and Supported
FSC US invites your participation in the second public consultation of the supplemental requirements for FSC certification of lands managed by the US Forest Service. Your review and input in this process is essential for a successful outcome, and we hope you will take some time to share your perspectives with us.
The 30-day consultation period closes on July 3, 2016.
Dr. Jack Cohen – Fire Science Researcher with the U.S. Forest Service – explains current research about how homes ignite during wildfires, and the actions that homeowners can take to help their home survive the impacts of flames and embers. This video was produced by the National Fire Prevention Association.
“Uncontrolled, extreme wildfires are inevitable. These are the conditions when wildland-urban interface disasters occur – the hundreds to thousands of houses destroyed during a wildfire.
Does that mean that wildland-urban interface are inevitable as well? No! We have great opportunities as homeowners to prevent our houses from igniting during wildfires….There a lot that we can do to the little things – to our house and its immediate surroundings – in order to reduce the ignition potential of that house.” – Jack Cohen
Please watch and share this video. Your home can survive a wildfire if, as a homeowner, you know what to do and take these simple steps to prevent your home from igniting during a wildfire.
On June 14, the Idaho federal district court refused to grant a temporary restraining order against a timber sale on the Payette National Forest. The court’s review of the merits of the case was cursory, and instead it focused on the standard for granting an injunction. A key question is whether the injunction would be in the public interest.
The Payette Forest Coalition had participated in developing the project, and had intervened in the case on the side of the Forest Service. In determining the public interest, the court noted that, “the Project was developed in a collaboration between the USFS and a diverse group of stakeholders, including the Intervening Defendants.” The court also stated that, “the collaborative efforts of all Defendants in developing the Project is in the public’s interest,” and finally, “the public has an interest in supporting the collaborative process that was used in this case to develop the Project.” The court denied the TRO (citing a number of other factors in the public interest as well).
There is no evidence that the plaintiff environmental groups challenged the assumption that this collaboration was in the public interest, which, based on many discussions on this blog, should probably be considered a debatable point.
Some more fuel for the fire on the merits of backcountry fuel reduction.
“The idea that you can preclude large wildfires through forest-wide thinning is snake oil, very expensive snake oil. And not only does the taxpayer pay for ineffective fire protection, but we degrade our forest ecosystems in the process.”
From High Country News, hcn.org….
June 14, 2016
By George Wuerthner/Writers on the Range
Critics of public lands like to say that timber jobs declined and mills closed over the last 20 years because environmental protections such as the Endangered Species Act and other laws made the cost of logging skyrocket. This complaint is repeated so often it is usually stated as unqualified truth.
If you believe the rhetoric, the way federal lands are managed has been the problem. If only there were more private owners of the land, local economies would prosper, and there would bestable, long-term stewardship.
If only that were true. But if you compare the mostly private wood-products industry in the state of Maine to the West’s experiences on public land, you find that environmental regulations had little to do with the demise of logging.
Ninety percent of Maine is forested, and more than 93 percent of the state’s land is privately owned, mostly by large timber companies that sell trees to the wood-products industry. If private lands lead to prosperity and healthy landscapes, Maine should be the poster child for the country. And unlike the West, Maine, imposes minimal regulations on private landowners. There are also almost no listed endangered species in Maine to harry the timber industry.
Yet today, the forest-products industry in Maine is a shadow of its former self. In 1980, there were 25 pulp and paper mills in the state. Today, two-thirds of those mills are gone. Since 1990, the state has lost 13,000 of its approximately 17,000 paper-industry jobs, including more than 2,300 in the past five years. The decline continues. Associated wood products companies in Maine have also seen a decline – everything from wood furniture, wood flooring and clothespin producers have closed up shop.
The decline in both employment and production in Maine was caused by the same forces that drastically cut forest industry jobs in the West: foreign competition, which brought in cheaper wood products, technological advances and new automation that allowed computers instead of people to run machinery. High energy prices and labor costs also played a role as plastic and steel moved in to replace wood.
Think about the brightly colored plastic Adirondack chairs for sale at Home Depot now replacing the wooden chairs on which they are modeled. Instead of wood rafters, steel-beam has replaced two-by-fours in some construction, and so forth. The decline in newspapers and print materials has also dramatically altered demand for pulp production. All of these factors are affecting the West’s wood industry as much as they affect Maine.
These days, most of the new sawmills and pulp mills built in the United States are in the South. Trees grow faster there, and unlike the Western United States, they can reach harvestable age in a decade or two. To the timber industry, the longer you have to wait to cut trees, the higher the risk. Your trees might die in a forest fire, a beetle outbreak or some other natural event. So locating your mills in places where you can grow a tree to merchantable size quickly is a smart business practice.
Furthermore, most of the Southern timberlands are flat and accessible year-round. In the steep mountains of the West, road construction costs are far greater, and snow limits seasonal access.
So that’s the picture: The decline of the Western wood products industry – like that in Maine – occurred because of economic realities that favor other regions of the globe. Blaming environmentalists, endangered species protection, or environmental regulations is easy. But blame fails to explain a changing world, or help us understand its nuances.
Unlike Maine, the West has an alternative. Its abundant public lands – in particular its wilderness areas, national parks and monuments – provides the foundation for another future for the region. While not all the changes that come with the “new” economy are welcome – take sprawl and increased impacts from recreational users – they can be managed if we make intelligent choices.
The West boasts iconic wildlands like Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks, the Owyhee Canyonlands and the Gila Wilderness. In the end, federal ownership and protection of wildlands and open spaces is far superior to the Maine model of private ownership and maximized profits. Our model gives us the chance to manage forests sensibly, and it offers at least some potential for a more sustainable future for Western communities.
George Wuerthner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an opinion service of High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in Bend, Oregon, and is an ecologist who has published 38 books about Western environmental issues.
Western Governors’ Association Policy Resolution 2016-08: Species Conservation and the Endangered Species Act.
Key areas, according to the WGA, that need to be addressed in the ESA in addition to reauthorization include:
This article from the Payson, Ariz., Roundup, “Salvage Logging Can Reduce Danger For Decades,” mentions a recent paper from the PNW Rwesearch station. It’s not that recent — 2015. I think this is it.
The news article summarizes what some folks on this blog have said:
“The unlogged stands had relatively low fuel loads right after the fire, but the downed wood still ready to burn built up steadily for the next 20 years. The greater amount of wood on the ground remained measurable for 40 years after the burn.
“In the logged stands, the amount of brush and wood and debris on the ground increased right after the fire. That’s probably because the loggers harvested the trunks of the trees, but left behind branches and other debris. After that, the amount of fuel on the ground declined steadily and significantly — without the slow death and toppling of the big trees killed by the initial fire.”
The study looked at fuels, not erosion, habitat, etc.
To further the discussions of fire and forest management in the Sierras, here’s an article of interest, “Ancient Forests of the Sierra Nevada,” by Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Ph.D., Texas A&M University. Thanks fo Dick Powell for passing this along.
I recommend Bonnicksen’s book, America’s Ancient Forests: From the Ice Age to the Age of Discovery. Ought to be required reading for foresters — and anyone else with an interest in forest management.
Robin Stanley has published a commentary on wilderness and roadless area designations over on the Not Without a Fight! blog, FYI. Ron Roizen
William the Conquer kicked the peasants off his land so he could have a private hunting reserve for himself and his guests. Unlike William the Conquer, our government has only kicked the handicapped, the poor, the children and the elderly off of the government land and instead has reserved it for the wealthy and the healthy.
This article describes the draft revised plans for the Inyo, Sierra and Sequoia national forests (from an ag industry perspective). The way it characterizes the plans’ approach to fire, maybe this approach would make Robin Stanley happy:
The preferred alternative, known as Alternative B, would replace wildland-urban defense and threat zones with a “risk-based wildfire restoration zone and wildfire maintenance zone” to allow for “strategically located fuel reduction treatments along roads, ridgelines and connecting areas with lower fuels to support larger landscape-scale prescribed burning.”
Under the heading “Ecological Integrity,” the preferred alternative calls for improved habitat for endangered and protected species and old-growth forest areas. It also calls for removal of some large and old trees in areas designated as wildfire-protection zones.
This will hopefully lead to some scrutiny of the “best available scientific information” behind the strategy. I find it hard to believe that the local residents could be convinced to give up their “wildland-urban defense and threat zones.” And then there’s the question of whether this science has any relevance to the forests of Idaho or elsewhere.
And then there’s the question of whether this approach is consistent with the natural range of variation for ecological conditions for at-risk species so that it really does improve their habitat. If so, it would be a win for everybody. Except the timber industry doesn’t like it.
But – I commend the Forest Service for treating fire planning as a core element of these plan revisions, and putting this out in public for discussion.