Let’s Discuss: Your Priorities and Bold Innovations to Carry Out Recommendations from The Wildfire Commission Report

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There is much to talk about in the Wildfire Commission Report.  Kelly Martin has offered to talk to us about it (she is a member of the Commission) via Zoom, so please let me know if you are interested.  Today, though, I had heard that Commission members were making Hill visits to highlight priority actions.  I don’t know what they came up with as priorities, so hopefully someone will let us know.  But I thought it might be fun to generate ideas here.  There is plenty of expertise among TSW readers.  The way the Report is written, it’s an emergency- so that gives us room to think outside the box.. way outside the box!

Here’s mine.

1. Workforce.  Of course, give wildland firefighters a living wage and what they are already owed.  Work on housing.  How about a CE for FS and BLM to develop sites on federal land to house workers? Perhaps for workers’ RVs or trailers, or provide those to them at reasonable cost? Maybe used FEMA trailers? Cheaper and quicker than building permanent housing, as some places are trying. What else can we do?

Perhaps synchronistically, I received in my mailbox this morning a post from a person whose pseudonym is N.S. Lyons, who writes a Substack called The Upheaval.  He was talking about the failure of security systems in Israel at the border, but I thought this might be relevant to this topic.

One of the most famous sayings of the legendary U.S. Air Force pilot and strategist Col. John Boyd, who helped develop modern maneuver warfare (and is maybe best known for inventing the “OODA Loop”) was: “People, ideas, machines – in that order!” While warfighting devices were and are important, as are doctrines, tactics, and stratagems, these are all less important than the people doing the fighting, planning, and organizing – and are far less adaptable and reliable. As Boyd would often harangue Generals in the Pentagon, usually to no avail: “Machines don’t fight wars… Humans fight wars!”

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Today we have come to practically worship technology and complexity for its own sake, believing it to be the sorcery that must be able to solve our problems once and for all. Except far too often it actually doesn’t – it just creates the illusion of having done so, while our own capacities have actually diminished and our vulnerabilities to entropy-induced system failure have increased. In this way, technology has increasingly become a false idol, squatting in the place of or even preventing genuine human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptability.

People, ideas, machines.. indeed! So let’s invest in them. First.

2. Build Trust About Use of Beneficial Fire. Having fuels experts live in their communities (see 1) will help.  I would add Congress asking the FS to stand down on plan revision until each Forest finishes (including litigation) a plan amendment that develops  1) PODs, or equivalent mapping of potential operational sites  2) conditions and places for prescribed fire and wildland fire use and 3) programs to understand and reduce human-caused ignitions.  The amendment would include an EIS for ongoing maintenance of PODs and maybe some programmatic stuff for prescribed fire and wildland fire use.  By doing this with an open, public process, communities could quickly get on board with understanding how PODs related to their own efforts and can coordinate.  Right now in many places it appears that communities are doing the “random acts of mitigation” without the kind of knowledge that fuels and fire suppression folks from the agencies have available.   My thinking is that building trust with individual humans who live in their community, and the kinds of discussions and public involvement that would come with an amendment, will build a solid relationship for working together on mitigation and beneficial fire.  If Forests just proceed with plan revisions, fire will be one of many things on a relatively small sample of forests.. is it or ain’t it an emergency?

3. Commission or Workgroup on Wood Waste Utilization.  When I read these recommendations in the Report, I thought “we’ve been working on this for forty years now.” And I know some of the folks who continue to work on it today.  We have long had grants for this kind of thing, and yet..  Ten years or so ago, I was in a meeting with DOE who wanted to try something at a gigantic scale, and The Wilderness Society who was afraid if we developed markets for small diameter woody material that they would take over politically and the environment would be sacrificed.  So all the bright young Colorado entrepreneurs at the meeting gave up.  Then there is the question of supply, that 4FRI was developed in part to deal with.  When I look around I see excellent efforts by some FS researchers, by Extension faculty at land grants, by entrepreneurs and so on, and yet…we’ve lost capacity in terms of forest economists and utilization specialists.  Weirdly we spend more money on modeling problems in the future than on solving problem right in our face (emergencies!). What’s up with that?

California had a 50-member working group on “advancing collaborative action on forest biofuels” (of course biofuels is only one use of woody waste) and produced a report in 2022, plus they have some zones of agreement with ENGO’s so perhaps some of those folks could be tapped to anchor a national Commission or Workgroup.  Whatever we have been trying has not been working, and needs organized, comprehensive and dedicated attention.  Key stakeholders are small businesses with experience in the space, technology folks, economists and utilization operations specialists, communities and ENGO’s.  If we keep doing what we always did, we’re going to get what we always got.

And finally (a girl can dream…)

4. Stick a Fork in the Current Admin’s MOG Initiative..err.. climate resilience and adaptation  initiative.  Parsing out what treatments are best to protect OG  or any forests from wildfire.. would be best developed by fire amendments to forest plans.  All hands on deck.  Focus.  This is what climate adaptation looks like.. worked out day by day with resource professionals and communities in specific places.  Many excellent folks are working on MOG who could be working on fire amendments to forest plans, collecting data, etc.  Emergency? Yes if you really want to protect OG and mature stands (at least from wildfire).

The Ethical Paradox of Oil and Gas Use (Everyone Does It) Versus Production (Those Folks are Bad)

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Apologies to all, I had thought to be back to The Smokey Wire sooner.  I spent some time with the Public Lands Foundation in Cheyenne Wyoming, meeting many BLM folks and others dealing with access issues to public lands in Wyoming.  Then the next week, I was off to the Salamander Resort in Middleburg, Virginia, with The Breakthrough Institute, to experience how the other 1% lives and mix with admitted coastal wonky elites...here’s the agenda of that session. I’ll post some of the videos once they are up.  The next week I was back West to Rapid City, South Dakota with field trips to Wall, South Dakota to see efforts dealing with dispersed recreation and the restoration of black-footed ferret with the Rocky Mountaineers retirees’ group.  I hope to upload presentations on the latter so that you all can enjoy a virtual field trip.

What the three trips had in common was some amazing young people working on the problems of the day.   From getting minerals from seawater and enhanced rock weathering at TBI to restoring ferrets at the Wall Ranger District, to research at the Rapid City Forest and Grassland Research Laboratory, to regulating pore space for CO2 sequestration at the BLM.    Perhaps these are stories that are too much “in the weeds”, so to speak, for media to pick up on, but they’re out there.

So that’s one commonality that I observed on these trips.  The other was the omnipresence of gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles (and trains, in the case of Cheyenne and Rapid City). Even in urbanized places in Northern Virginia and the District, I noticed many vehicles, and in fact, ended up in the DC morning rush hour from Middleburg one morning.  Even with excellent public transportation, as there is in NoVa, there are many, many, cars and trucks.  And of course recreationists coming from the Midwest to recreate in South Dakota and Wyoming.. cars and RV’s. This seems obvious.

And yet, when I look at my news outlets, such as Center for Western Priorities, or others, there are frequent articles on the badness of oil and gas production when it is done domestically.  In fact, there was a major environmental group push against the Biden Admin for the Willow Project.  Who knows what random goodies will be thrown by the Admin (perhaps some MOG treats?)  in attempts to placate these groups?

But what is that really about?  Do these groups think that outsourcing to say, Iran and Venezuela is environmentally more desirable?  Not to think like an economist, but reducing supply does tend to raise prices, and we care about poor or even middle-class people not being able to get to work or not affording food because of high gas prices. And we are shipping lots of military stuff abroad which runs on.. fossil fuels.

Some of us remember the oil embargo of 1973..this from an interview with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of RI:

“One in five gas stations in the country had no fuel to sell whatsoever,” Colgan said. “By January 1974, oil prices worldwide had quadrupled, and that led to a whole bunch of economic and political consequences” that are still present today.

When asked what it was like living through the oil crisis, Whitehouse shared that there were odd and even days to get gas, decided based on the last number of each person’s license plate. For example, if your license plate ended with a seven and it was an odd day, you could get gas, but if it ended with a six and was an odd day, you could not.

Whitehouse outlined the dilemma faced by oil companies at this time: “Do you keep your prices level because you have an obligation to your country and your customers, or do you follow the international cartel and take advantage of its price gouging?”

“Of course, they chose the latter,” Whitehouse said, explaining that oil companies chose to take advantage of their customers, rather than make gas affordable.

So O&G companies have not always acted well. Perhaps that’s a reason for hate. OTOH some of us also remember the financial crisis and banks being too big to fail and all that.  And yet.. we don’t see daily in the press  the need for better regulation of them. In fact, our friends in the financial industry do things like naming the CEO of Aramco to their board of directors.

The Biden Admin is all on domestic production of strategic minerals.. but not O&G. Or maybe DOE kind of is, but DOI is not.  It’s all puzzling to me.

Meanwhile there are people working every day, human beings, citizens of our country, whom I don’t think deserve this scapegoating. Union jobs, paying a family wage, diverse folks working that bring us what we are using every day.  So what is all this really about, and how do we “un-hate” ourselves out of it?

In fact, many of the folks most against  fossil  production use more than the average person, as in this article on Robert Bryce’s Substack.

Of course, Bloomberg can spend his vast fortune however he wants. According to Forbes, he’s the 11th-richest person on the planet, with assets worth $96.3 billion. (Bloomberg.com doesn’t include Michael Bloomberg in its rankings of the world’s richest people.) And the former mayor of New York City does not live modestly. As I noted in these pages in March, Bloomberg owns about a dozen houses. He’s also one of the biggest users of private jets. As I explained:

According to ClimateJets.org, Bloomberg, or people connected to him, used five aircraft which emitted about 3,197 tons of CO2 in 2022. That number puts Bloomberg in the top 10 of all private jet owners in terms of emissions. For comparison, the average American is responsible for about 16 tons of CO2 emissions per year. In other words, Bloomberg’s fleet of jets is emitting about 200 times more CO2 per year than what’s emitted by the average American.

Recall in announcing his $500 million grant to Beyond Carbon, Bloomberg claimed he wants to move “beyond fossil fuels” and replace them with renewable energy. Last year, Bloomberg, or people connected to him, flew on his private jets to New York, New Jersey, Florida, Bahamas, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Bermuda, Switzerland, France, Costa Rica, Brazil, Israel, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. All that flying required burning about 328,000 gallons of jet fuel. For comparison, that’s about 670 times more than the volume of gasoline consumed by an average American motorist in a year.

Also, recall that in 2021, Bloomberg said, “We’re in a race to save Earth from climate change.” It’s unclear to whom Bloomberg referred when he used the royal “we.”But given his predilection for far-flung houses and private jets, it seems that the media mogul and near-centibillionaire is a lot like the rest of us when it comes to using hydrocarbons.

How can we both use something- in fact it’s vital to our economy-  and say at the same time, that the (domestic only?)  folks that produce it are bad and need to be shut down? Or is it simply that it’s easier to shut down things here than other countries (the policy equivalent of logging the flat ground).

Aside from obvious potential class issues related to workers.  I wonder what that does to people internally to live with that contradiction if they really believe what they say about production. To me, it’s a bit as if the Deuteronomic food laws said “you can eat shrimp, but only if the Canaanites produce  it for you .”  I find it all very puzzling.

I haven’t seen this discussed anywhere, and I am curious about what TSW readers think.

A Three Sisters Wilderness Trailhead Information Station First Season Finale

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Note from Sharon: Les has been away and I got confused about the order of these posts.  So I will start posting them again, hopefully in the correct order.  The last one was posted in this series can be found here.

By Les Joslin

The last trailhead excitement of the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station’s inaugural season occurred on September 6, the next-to-last day of its 1992 scheduled operations. It had been a fairly busy day. By 1600—just an hour before scheduled closing time—I’d assisted 139 visitors entering the wilderness, and the exodus of day-trippers was in full swing. Two of those handed me surprises.

The first, at 1620, brought me a note from a seasonal wilderness ranger requesting assistance with a fire at Moraine Lake. He hadn’t reported it to the fire dispatcher, so I wondered just what he had. I radioed the dispatcher that I would be leaving the station to “check out a situation” at Moraine Lake and would keep them apprised. The second surprise was at 1625. While I was preparing to leave for Moraine Lake, an upset woman handed me a loaded .45-caliber pistol she’d found somewhere on Broken Top. “A child could have found it and….” I thanked her, secured the pistol in the station, and left on the three and one-half mile walk to Moraine Lake at 1630.

I arrived at Moraine Lake not quite an hour later to find the youngster paid to be a wilderness ranger in tee shirt, shorts, and sandals—certainly not the prescribed uniform of a Forest Service wilderness ranger—and a disheveled, middle-aged camper poking around a large smoldering log inside a burned patch. “You really look the part,” the young wilderness ranger wisecracked about my uniform and yellow hardhat, fire pack, and tools.

“And what about you?” was my cold response.

“Well, er…,” he evaded.

“That’s what I thought. What happened here?”

“His camping stove…like, exploded…and caught the dry tree and brush…like, on fire.”

“So why’d you send me that note?”

“I didn’t want the responsibility….”

“What are you paid for?” was my rhetorical reply as I broke out my radio, advised Redmond Dispatch I was mopping up a small fire, and began doing that slipknot’s job while he sat and watched. An hour later I called dispatch, reported the fire out, didn’t mention the so-called wilderness ranger, and without a word to him left for the Green Lakes Trailhead in disgust.

The next day at the trailhead I served 126 wilderness visitors, turned the pistol over to a Forest Service law enforcement officer, and closed the station for the season.

That first season of trying the Green Lakes Trailhead Information Station on for size, those fifty days of serving 4,079 national forest visitors—2,847 day users, 118 of them on horseback; 679 backpackers beginning or completing overnight trips; and 556 visitors who didn’t enter the wilderness but required other information or assistance—convinced me that a staffed station at the most-used entrance to Oregon’s most-visited wilderness was an absolute necessity.

I put it all in my report. Wilderness visitors and the wilderness management effort needed knowledgeable wilderness information specialists not just to impart information and understanding visitors needed for successful wilderness experiences, but to provide a range of emergency services from first aid and dead car battery assistance to receiving and transmitting search and rescue needs and wildfire reports.

Forests and Wildfires in the West Over 2,500 Years

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This graphic tells a fascinating story. It’s from a press release about a new paper, “What the extreme fire seasons of 1910 and 2020 – and 2,500 years of forest history – tell us about the future of wildfires in the West,” by Philip Higuera, Professor of Fire Ecology, University of Montana and Kyra Clark-Wolf, Postdoctoral Associate in Ecology, University of Colorado Boulder
Tue, October 17, 2023.

NY Times on “How Megafires are Remaking the World”

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Firefighters- mysteriously absent from this NY Times story.

 

What’s interesting to me about this NY Times story  is that discussion of adaptation.. most notably, in this case, fire suppression.. is completely missing when discussing bad potential future outcomes. Nothing against reporters.. not having specialists who understand complex topics  is a business decision of the Times.

Dr. Hodges, a conservation ecologist at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, also found herself worried about wildlife. She had been studying some Western screech owls that had been nesting in the heart of the fast-moving inferno. “That speed of fire would be difficult for animals to evacuate in front of,” she said. Had the owls escaped in time? And after Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, what would be left for the survivors?

Fire is a natural phenomenon; some species actually benefit from its effects and even those that don’t can be remarkably resilient in the face of flames. But as fires intensify, they are beginning to outstrip nature’s ability to bounce back. “Not all fires have the same impact,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “These megafires are not good for ecosystems.”

Megafires, which dwarf typical wildfires in size, have an immediate ecological toll, killing individual plants and animals that might have survived more contained blazes. In the longer term, changing fire patterns could drive some species out of existence, transform landscapes and utterly remake ecosystems.

Not that long ago, fires were thought to be good and natural.  Fish in streams which had died off would come back, and trees regrow on their own time and so on.  And smoke was not studied as a problem.

But now we have “megafires” from climate change (and other causes) which are bad.  Because they are larger? But of course fires are larger, since suppression folks are building big boxes where possible and using wildfire for resource benefits.

So there’s the acres burned (function of “some unable to suppress, plus some WFU”), severity (function of fuel loads onsite plus fire attributes). Then there’s windspeed, which likely differs by day.  The more human-caused ignitions, the greater the change one will take off on a high-wind day.  Which is not to say that climate change doesn’t have an impact.. but other factors include difficulty in finding and keeping fire workers ..by paying them (!)and a variety of others.

Plus there is the great incursion of the Military Industrial complex into the wildfire space, on the basis of being able to put fires out more quickly.

Globally, the risk of catastrophic fires could increase by more than 50 percent by the end of the century, the United Nations reported.

It could of course.. or it could decrease by 50%, depending on your assumptions about the success of new technologies. Or if countries around the world decided to not pay firefighters appropriately…

This discussion seems to argue that the sand racer is capable of adapting to wildfire as a species, or perhaps is implying that things will be messed up if fire happens where it did not formerly happen. But did it “not formerly happen” due to suppression or other human factors? Isn’t evolution a process that should be allowed to work? Or can’t be stopped from working when environments change for whatever reason.

The Algerian sand racer, a Mediterranean lizard, lives in a variety of habitats, only some of which experience frequent fires. In a 2021 study, researchers found that lizards collected from fire-prone sites reacted quickly to the smell of smoke, flicking their tongues and running around their terrariums. “In places where fire is not a common threat, lizards did nothing,” said Lola Álvarez-Ruiz, a biologist at the Desertification Research Center in Spain, who conducted the study.

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Fires that consume more fuel may also produce more smoke per unit of area burned, threatening animals far from the flames.“All air-breathing animals are going to be impacted by smoke exposure, because the chemicals in smoke are toxic,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.Smoke inhalation can do more than cause respiratory problems. For months after severe peatland fires produced record air pollution in Indonesia in 2015, Bornean orangutans vocalized less frequently and their voices became harsher.

But if you have lots of material on the ground to be consumed, then what else can you do besides burn it (note “more smoke per unit area”)? Maybe haul some to a sawmill to reduce fuels?

“You could walk half a mile, and you wouldn’t see a single living tree,” said Andrew Stillman, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Increasingly, these fires seem to create habitat conditions that are outside of the norms that these species are adapted to.”

This seems to be an argument that large treeless acreages after wildfire are more common now than before- however for much of history we didn’t have satellite imagery.  But I think what’s interesting about this is the idea of “what species are adapted to.” How long does it take for adaptation to occur? Generations are different lengths of time in different species. I think the fear may be that conditions have changed enough that current species will be unable to adapt.

That may be true even for fire-loving animals, like the black-backed woodpecker. The birds nest in scorched trees and feed on the beetle larvae that colonize the charred trunks. But they prefer patches of burned trees that are near stands of leafy, living ones, which protect their fledglings from being picked off by predators, Dr. Stillman and Dr. Tingley, of U.C.L.A., found.

After the enormous Rim fire in California in 2013, scientists searched for the woodpeckers at nearly 500 sites across the expansive burn scar. They found just six birds. “Even though it had created all this great burned habitat, it wasn’t the right kind of burned habitat,” Dr. Tingley said.

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Fewer clusters of living trees can also reduce regrowth. “In many places, we’re not getting regeneration because the seed source is lost,” said Mr. French, of the National Forest System. “It honestly looks like someone went in and just set off a bomb.”

In dry areas, even before climate change was thought to be a thing, we were aware that some tree species can have trouble regenerating without help.  We developed and  adopted the primitive technologies known at the time as “collecting seed from appropriate sources,” “planting trees” and “protecting seedlings’ which seems to be coming into vogue again.

Scorched, vegetation-less soil, which does not absorb rain well, can also hamper regeneration. Flash flooding after fires can wash ash and sediment into rivers and streams, polluting the water, killing fish and reshaping waterways.

After the Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona in 2002, repeated flooding washed away fertile soils that had taken more than 8,000 years to develop. “That has cascading impacts on the kind of plants that can grow,” said Jonathan Long, an ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, who conducted the research.

What’s particularly interesting about the way that this is reported is that if you click on the link, the study says..

 the second site, Swamp Spring, was treated in 2005 by placing large rock riffle formations and vegetation transplants to prevent further incision and stimulate wetland development. The treatment was soon followed by cessation of channel incision and reestablishment of native wetland vegetation, while headcutting caused extensive erosion at the untreated site for eight years.

The theme of this piece seems to be that “scientists (var. ecologists) tell us really bad things  may happen more in the future, if we don’t do anything like fire suppression, tree planting, or wetland restoration.”  This is actually not all that unusual, either for reporting or for scientific papers.

When Monumentizing Goes Wrong?: The Case of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

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This is related to yesterday’s post..Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks is considered to be a co-managed federal unit between the Cochiti Pueblo and the BLM. It’s been closed for three years.

Here’s a story from KRQE News 13.  The story starts out with how difficult it was to find anything out about the closure and when it might be reopened:

The National Monument was closed to the public in the 2020 pandemic shutdown and it remains closed today. Why? KRQE News 13 went digging for answers.

For months, emails and phone calls requesting interviews with the state’s Tourism Department, the Bureau of Land Management, the Secretary of the Interior’s Office, Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernandez, and Senator Martin Heinrich were answered with replies such as, “We will not be providing a comment or participating in this story at this time.”

Cochiti Pueblo leaders also declined to comment. The BLM updated the statement on its website on April 28, during the weeks of KRQE’s requests for information. Finally, the BLM agreed to chat via Zoom.

“BLM has been meeting regularly with the Pueblo,” said Jamie Garcia, an outdoor recreation planner with the BLM. “We have been in discussions about what reopening looks like.”

This isn’t very transparent.  Conceivably it could have been possible to give that answer sooner. One wonders if the co-management aspect may have made it more difficult to arrive at one answer that could be communicated.

On to the Monumentization aspect:

A ‘Double-Edged’ Sword

Garcia said they’re addressing long-standing issues including over-visitation, staffing needs, and resource protection, alongside Pueblo de Cochiti. “We’ve had such high recreation use and we want to make sure that we are taking a step back and really looking at that big picture item there, and seeing how we can move forward in a more sustainable and responsible way,” Garcia told KRQE News 13.

The Cochiti Pueblo remains closed citing Covid-19 restrictions, blocking road access to the national monument which sits on BLM land. As part of the presidential proclamation, the site is managed by the BLM in “close cooperation and partnership” with the Pueblo.

“I suspect that the designation of the National Monument was a double-edged sword,” said Dr. Smith. “On one hand, it provides resources and legal protections for preservation. But once someone sees a national monument on a map, it’s close to Interstate 25, it’s close to the Albuquerque-Rio Rancho-Santa Fe metropolitan areas — then that just becomes a magnet to draw more people,” Smith explained.

DR. GARY SMITH, UNM PROFESSOR

There’s a calculus here.. do more resources show up in enough quantities to deal with the enhanced visitation from Monumentizing? What, I wonder, was the Monument protected from?

Data published in a government-issued 2020 science plan shows visitation levels each year since the monument designation. In 2000, Tent Rocks recorded 14,674 visitors.

In 2001, that jumped to 25,000 annual visitors with the presidential proclamation. And since then, visitation has soared to more than 100,000 people a year before the covid shutdown.

(Tent Rocks Visitations by Fiscal Year )

“But even before the pandemic, I recall seeing activity discussions between the BLM and Cochiti trying to think about how to handle the large crowds, that it was having a detrimental impact on the landscape that they were joint stewards to preserve,” explained Smith.

During Spring Break 2018, KRQE News 13 reported on the massive line of cars waiting to enter Tent Rocks National Monument. Visitors were waiting 90 minutes just to park their vehicles.

“In the past few weeks, they’ve been over-capacity,” said Danita Burns during that Spring Break surge in 2018. “People from Australia, people that are coming in from Japan. It’s quite the destination now,” she said.

Monuments can attract tourists from outside the area.. this may be good for some in local communities, but lead to problems of overcrowding and reduction of the experience for locals and wildlife.

According to the pre-2020 data report, “Current visitation is nearly three times the original planned capacity,” which was designed to hold about 50,000 visitors annually. That’s been a concern for those working at the site.

Dr. Gary Smith with UNM students at Tent Rocks in 1992.

Timed ticketing, fee increases

So, will visits to the monument move to timed ticketing? Garcia says an online reservation system along with a fee increase has been proposed.

“We have not implemented anything yet, but it is something we would like to do, make sure that we can keep up with growing costs of supplies and demand,” Garcia told KRQE News 13.

Meanwhile, locals are still seeing advertisements for Tent Rocks, and still waiting for the monument to reopen. “Oh, I’ll look forward to going back again, for sure,” said Smith.

Dr. Smith said his colleagues and friends have been messaging him, asking for updates about the monument. “Do you think Tent Rocks will open this spring? How long can they keep it closed? You know, so it’s – everyone wants to know,” Smith said.

The Bureau of Land Management says it will update plans for Tent Rocks on its website, but they have yet to provide a timeline on when the national monument will reopen. Part of that depends on when the pueblo decides to open its gates to the public once again.

It seems to me that Monumentizing, in some cases,  is like many politically symbolic activities.  Someone announces something that sounds good and makes a splash… then leave the same old folks with the same pots of dollars and competing priorities to actually carry it out.

Co-Management with Tribes: A Roundup of Info Attempting to Clarify

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We read in news stories about co-stewardship (I think everyone at Interior and USDA is working on this) and co-management.

Co-stewardship is explained in this Joint Secretarial Order. It seems to be about sharing information and knowledge and working on stuff together.

The definition of co-management seems hard to get at, possibly because different reporters use the term differently. This seems relatively clear from  this High Country News piece:

The distinction between co-management and co-stewardship — terms the federal government uses for agreements to collaborate on land management with tribal nations — is subtle but important. “Co-stewardship” covers a broad range of collaborative activities like forest-thinning work in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest in partnership with the Hoonah Indian Association, where Indigenous knowledge can be included in federal management. But “co-management” is more narrowly defined. In those instances, tribal and federal governments share the power of legal authority in decision-making of a place or a species. This is the case with Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico, which is co-managed by the Pueblo de Cochiti and the Bureau of Land Management, and with the salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest.

In this story, also in HCN, they talk about Bears’ Ears and the new Arizona Monument as being co-managed:

The designation creates a commission for tribal nations with ancestral ties to the area — in this case 13 distinct tribal nations — to manage the lands within the monument alongside the federal government, similar to the commission established for Bears Ears.

As we previously discussed on TSW, though, establishing an advisory commission does not necessarily lead to sharing decision-making authority with the group.  The Black Hills National Forest, for example, has a FACA committee but the committee does not “co-manage.” The current Admin always holds all the legal cards in any decision and in any litigation, to defend or not or settle.

There is a fascinating legal paper by Monte Mills worth taking a look at if you are interested. The below is from pages 145 and 146.

As for delegation of authority, Obama’s Proclamation differs from the proposal submitted to the him by the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.
The Coalition carefully dissected the issue of what constitutes a lawful delegation of authority to tribes and premised its proposal on the basis that a delegation of authority is permissible insofar as it is not total, and remains subject to the final decision-making authority of the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior.417 Instead of delegating complete authority, “the Tribes and agency officials will be working together as equals to make joint decisions.”418
Though a modification of the Coalition’s proposal, Obama’s Proclamation establishes a substantive framework for collaborative
management of the Monument:
The Secretaries shall meaningfully engage the Commission or, should the Commission no longer exist, the tribal governments through some other entity composed of elected tribal government officers (comparable entity), in the development of the management plan and to inform subsequent management of the monument. To that end, in developing or revising the management plan, the Secretaries shall carefully and fully consider integrating the traditional and historical knowledge and special expertise of the Commission or comparable entity. If the Secretaries decide not to incorporate specific recommendations submitted to them in writing by the Commission or comparable entity, they will provide the Commission or comparable entity with a written explanation of their reasoning.419

This sounds a bit like a “response to comments”, but OK. Bottom line- does co-management mean that feds and Tribes are peers in decision-making- any decision needs to be agreed upon by both parties?  Or are Tribes “the most important stakeholders to listen to.” I’m sure these would be functions of specific legal authorities.  Either way, is there a reason not to co-manage everything if the legal aspects could be worked out?

Finally, from the second HCN article:

While many see co-management as a step toward land return, environmental historian and ethnobotanist Rosalyn LaPier, who is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe, and Métis, has pushed back against that idea. In an interview with High Country News last week, LaPier said that the federal government should be ready to return public land to tribes who want it now, without requiring co-management as a first step. “The federal government doesn’t want to let go of their say over public lands and allow Indigenous people to take leadership. And we’re fully prepared to take leadership,” LaPier said. Pointing to intensifying wildfires in the Western U.S., which are due in part to a century of fire suppression, she added, “Why would Native nations want to co-manage with the United States, when the United States government has shown over and over again how they mismanaged public lands?”

I wonder if there’s a list of the Tribes who want land return ASAP.

Cyanobacteria in Wyoming: Toxic Mystery

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Shoshone National Forest hydrologist Gwen Gerber and Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality staffers Kelsee Hurshman, Ron Steg and Jillian Scott check out the shoreline of Brooks Lake Creek just below the outflow from Upper Brooks Lake. Although the water flows through a remote, wild, high-altitude landscape, the watershed is plagued by potentially harmful algal blooms. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

The toxic mystery of Wyoming’s backcountry cyanobacteria blooms

Water quality specialists have found evidence of so-called blue-green algae blooms in rivers, frozen lakes and even in seemingly pristine subalpine watersheds. From Wyofile.

Many unknowns

A mysterious environmental influence — or combination of factors — is believed to be triggering the blooms. There are theories, but DEQ employee Ron Steg, who leads the agency’s Lander office, is clear: There’s no saying exactly why cyanobacteria are striking this area every summer.
“This particular watershed, the geology is high in phosphate,” Steg said. “It could be atmospheric deposition. We don’t know, and that’s why we are studying this.”
The DEQ is specifically examining what’s going on in the Brooks Lake watershed in detail because its 234-acre namesake lake has struggled with algal blooms that, on the worst occasions, have been implicated in fish kills so severe that fish went belly up miles downstream in the Wind River. Since 2018, Brooks Lake has occupied a slot on the Wyoming DEQ’s “impaired list.” At one time, fingers were pointed at Brooks Lake Lodge and its formerly surface-discharging sewage lagoon, but problems with nutrients and cyanobacterial blooms higher in the watershed have led to a more holistic investigation.
The Brooks Lake watershed, however, isn’t the only place in Wyoming where people and their pets are finding harmful cyanobacteria blooms in unlikely places.

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Then there’s the backcountry. Cyanobacteria blooms are often associated with abundances of nutrients, like fertilizer from agriculture, and warm water typically found at lower elevations. So why are blooms showing up in places like Togwotee Pass?

Gerber, the Shoshone National Forest hydrologist, doesn’t have any firm answers, but she has noticed a trend within the 17 waterbodies on the national forest where cyanobacteria have been detected in high enough concentrations to warrant an advisory. All of them except for one, she said, are located in the Absaroka Volcanic formation — which suggests a component of the geology could be a contributing factor.

TRCP Video on Expanding Access to Public Lands

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6000 or so rights of way in Region 1 FS.

I’ve been traveling the last two weeks (and this week) and was fortunate to attend the Public Lands Foundation annual conference in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Thanks to them for putting on an excellent program! The topic was access and we heard from all kinds of interesting folks, from County Commissioners, to a ranch LLC President, to the State Director. We didn’t talk much about the corner crossing issue. At the Conference, Joel Webster of TRCP (the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership) had an excellent presentation on access. Joel said that it was equivalent to this video, so here is the video.

It starts kind of slowly (IMHO) but about 8:15 starts talking about easements and the difficulties of figuring out what is public and what isn’t, and how TRCP and others are working on it. It includes an interview with an FS Region 1 Lands person. The video mostly focuses on hunting as hunters (maybe) tend to traverse the landscape more than other kinds of recreationists.

As a recreating person, more access for me is an unalloyed good. At the same time, even hikers impact wildlife. So perhaps it raises the question of how alloyed the good might be in some cases. And of course people, including hunters can exhibit poor behavior, and who pays to clean it up? Nothing in the federal lands business is simple..

And a great big shout-out to FS and BLM lands folks!!!

Public Lands Litigation – update through October 5, 2023

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I wanted to wrap up the latest before my own “blogging break.”  Not a lot where the Forest Service is a party, and mostly related to the Endangered Species Act, but should be relevant and hopefully interesting.

FOREST SERVICE

New lawsuit

On September 25, Native Ecosystems Council and Alliance for the Wild Rockies filed a lawsuit in the Montana federal district court to oppose the Middleman Project on the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest.  The complaint says the project area encompasses 141,799 acres and includes 53,151 acres of tree cutting and burning, 46 miles of new temporary road construction and 90 miles of road reconstruction.  The effects of roads on grizzly bears, changes in mapping of lynx habitat and effects on elk habitat are issues raised by plaintiffs, who allege violations of NEPA and NFMA.

ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

Litigation follow-up to Center for Biological Diversity v. Bernhardt (D. D.C.)

On September 28, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service released a draft plan and EIS analyzing options to restore grizzly bears to the North Cascades in Washington. This step follows the Center for Biological Diversity’s litigation challenging the Trump administration’s 2020 termination of a previous restoration plan.  The draft plan and the lawsuit complaint are linked to this news release.  (Plaintiffs refer to the litigation as “successful,” but I haven’t found a court opinion.)

Supreme Court review denied in San Luis Obispo Coastkeeper et al. v. Santa Maria Valley Water Conservation District (9th Cir.)

On October 2, the U. S. Supreme Court denied a request from the operators of Twitchell Dam to avoid measures to protect the endangered Southern California steelhead in the Santa Maria River system.  The decision leaves in place a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the Bureau of Reclamation and the Santa Maria Valley Water Conservation District can release water from Twitchell Dam to comply with the Endangered Species Act.   Said ForestWatch executive director Jeff Kuyper, “With simple changes to the Dam’s water release schedule, we can give fish a fighting chance at reaching their historic spawning grounds in Los Padres National Forest while maintaining plentiful water supplies for our farms and communities.”   (The 9th Circuit opinion is here.)

New lawsuit:  Center for Biological Diversity v. Haaland (E.D. N.C.)

On October 4, plaintiffs challenged the Fish and Wildlife Service’s failure to respond to their 2016 petition to change the designation of the population of the 13 remaining wild red wolves as “non-essential” and restrict red wolf shootings by private landowners.  The Endangered Species Act defines an experimental (reintroduced) population as ‘essential’ if the loss of the population would significantly reduce the likelihood of the species’ survival in the wild.  Additional background is provided here.

  • Proposed ESA listings

Two species have recently been proposed for listing under ESA by the Fish and Wildlife Service, both after lawsuits initiated by the Center for Biological Diversity.

On September 29, the FWS proposed listing the northwestern and southwestern pond turtles, found throughout Washington, Oregon and California, as a threatened species.  They may be found at elevations up to 6500 feet.  The CBD news release is here and the Federal Register Notice is here.

On October 2, the FWS proposed listing the short-tailed snake as threatened.  The short-tailed snake has adapted to live primarily underground in sandy upland sandhill, scrub and hammock habitat in central and north Florida.  Silviculture is among the threats to its persistence.  This news release includes a link to the Federal Register notice.

On October 5, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Lassics lupine as endangered, and designated 512 acres of critical habitat on the Six Rivers National Forest.  It is found at high elevations only along the California-Nevada border.  Said Vicky Ryan, of the Arcata Fish and Wildlife Office, “We’re grateful for our partnership focused on Lassics lupine conservation and habitat management with Six Rivers National Forest.”  The article includes a link to the notice (and it does not mention the Center for Biological Diversity).

On September 26, President Biden vetoed two Republican-sponsored Senate joint resolutions seeking to undo Endangered Species Act protections for the northern long-eared bat and the lesser prairie-chicken, which became effective in January, 2023.  While the prairie chicken is primarily found on private, non-forested lands, the effect of up-listing the bat to endangered status could affect logging and federal lands.  (This legislative procedure is authorized by the Congressional Review Act.)

IRONIC HEADLINE OF THE MONTH:  “PRESCRIBED BURNS PLANNED FOR SMOKEY BEAR RANGER DISTRICT”