Should federal lands bear the brunt of ESA conservation obligations?

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Sage grouse are putting that question out there.  BLM and the Forest Service are amending plans to adopt strategies for federal lands that are more ‘strict’ than what states would do.  States don’t like this; do you?

A related question – how important is it to have a consistent conservation strategy across jurisdictions?

I am disappointed by the many proposed differences between BLM’s Montana’s RMPs and the Montana Sage Grouse Habitat Conservation Program,” Bullock wrote in a 12-page letter to Jamie Connell, the BLM director for the state. “The difference between the Wyoming and Montana state plans and the Montana RMPs reflect inconsistencies that simply do not make sense when serving for a consistent approach to sage grouse conservation across significant and interconnected working landscapes.” 

East Deer Lodge Project: Active Management vs. Do Nothing

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This article describes a lawsuit by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council over the East Deer Lodge Valley Landscape Restoration Management project on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in Montana. It is interesting that the project is “part of a restoration effort that began in 2006. That’s when the Forest Stewardship Program — made up of eight entities including the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks; Powell County commissioners; and Trout Unlimited — approached the Forest Service about the idea of working together to improve the banks of the Clark Fork River.”

The project area is about 40K acres, and commercial salvage and commercial thinning would occur on about 2,500 acres.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council lay out their objections in detail in the complaint. They oppose the project for a number of familiar reasons — the harvesting, threats to grizzly bears and lynx, threats to water quality, and so on. What I’d like to know is this: If these two groups were the land managers, what would they do? Nothing. An objection letter states that “We recommend that the “No Action Alternative” be selected.” The groups describe significant environmental problems that already exist — sediment in streams from roads, low-quality wildlife habitat, etc. Have the groups proposed an alternative management plan, other than “no action”?

 

Gold-Plated Fire Service

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It’s been a slow fire season for the U.S. Forest Service, which still has $0.5 billion remaining in its suppression account. With 80% of acres burned year-to-date in Alaska, where most fires are not actively worked, the Forest Service has had fewer chances to spend money than in most recent years. Only 350,000 of the nation’s 6.3 million burned acres have been located on national forests. So when things do start popping, the FS has lots of budgetary incentive to throw everything it has into the fight.

California homeowners are the beneficiaries of this profligate spending. Here are some of the services the FS is providing to those who have chosen to live deep in the woods.

Swimming Pool

Private swimming pool

Sprinklers

Customized sprinkler system

Aluminum Foil Wrap

Aluminum foil wrap

These photos are from the on-going Shasta-Trinity NF’s South Complex fire.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service bemoans the lack of dollars to manage its natural resources while Congress is scrambling to write another blank check for firefighting. Weird.

You Gotta Tell Me What I Already Know

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Screen Shot 2015-08-11 at 11.16.06 AM

The job of enforcing environmental laws rests primarily with the government. But, as regular readers know well, sometimes the government doesn’t do its job. That’s why Congress included “citizen suit” remedies in several key laws, such as the Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts. These provisions deputize citizens to enforce the law when the responsible government agency is behaving irresponsibly. Sixty days before bringing a citizen suit, the citizen has to tell the government, in writing, the how, what, when and where the law is being broken.

Yesterday, a Ninth Circuit panel lampooned the Forest Service’s defense that environmentalists hadn’t given the Forest Service sufficient written notice of its alleged lawbreaking associated with approving suction dredge mining in coho habitat. The Forest Service argued that it knew full well the details of its infractions, that environmentalists could have bolstered their written notice by asking the Forest Service for that information (e.g., through the Freedom of Information Act), and, as a result, environmentalists had not given sufficient notice to the Forest Service of its law-breaking.

Here’s the court’s scathing response: The Forest Service contends that KS Wild should have sought information from the Forest Service, either based on Forest Service public information regulations or on the Freedom of Information Act, and that KS Wild should then have provided that information, obtained from the Forest Service, to the Forest Service. The Forest Service writes in its brief, “Information about the Forest Service’s response to notices of intent to operate is readily available from the Forest Service itself.” If the relevant information is as readily available to KS Wild as the Forest Service claims it is, that same information is just as readily available to the Forest Service. And it is available to the Forest Service directly, without first having to provide it to KS Wild which would, in turn, then provide it back to the Forest Service, the original source of the information.

Three Fire Strategies- by Stephen Pyne

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little venus

Here’s a link to a post in Slate and below is an excerpt:

Resistance. Fire suppression continues to thrive because there are fires we need to stop, but the strategy has also reinvented itself from simple firefighting to an all-hazard emergency service model that effectively looks like an urban fire department in the woods. This makes sense in places defined by urban sprawl, but it’s expensive, and it has not shown it can manage fire. If the strategy retains the strengths of fire suppression, it also magnifies suppression’s weaknesses.

Restoration. Restoration’s ambition is to get ahead of the problem. Yet the vision has proved expensive and complicated. Federal, state, and local jurisdictions are all involved with many projects. Before controlled fire can, in fact, be controlled, there often need to be expensive pretreatments like forest thinning. Emissions from long-burning fire can linger, causing other problems. Between the financial, political, and social costs, there is little reason to believe that the country will muster the will to rehabilitate, at the rate or scale required, the tens of millions of acres believed by the Forest Service, Nature Conservancy, and the Government Accountability Office to be out of whack. Probably the best we can hope for is to shield high-value locales like exurbs and municipal watersheds.

Resilience. A new strategy from the West accepts that we are unlikely to get ahead of the problems coming at us. Instead of attempting to directly control burns, it confines and contains outbreaks. Of course there are some fires that simply bolt away from the moment of ignition, and there are some that must be attacked instantly because they threaten people or critical sites. But many fires offer opportunities to back off and burn out. These are not let-burns. Rather, fire officers concentrate their efforts at point protection where assets are most valuable. Elsewhere they will try to pick places—draw boxes—which they can hold with minimum expenses, risks, and damages. Some patches will burn more severely than we would like, and some will barely burn at all, but the rest will likely burn within a range of tolerance. Such burnouts may well be the West’s alternative to prescribed fire on the Southeastern model or to unrestrained wildfire.

Sharon’s thoughts: I agree with Pyne’s rock, paper, scissors analogy.

The idea of “whackness” though, continues to be “wacky”, IMHO, in this time of climate change. And the cost has always been too big to do everywhere (although in some circles, this has not been popular thinking). I remember a Forest Service field trip around 2007 with Fred Norbury (then Associate Deputy Chief for National Forest Systems at the Forest Service if I recall, an economist by background). We were looking at fuels treatments on the Pike part of the PSICC, and when Fred was told their per acre costs, and how often the treatments would have to be redone, you could almost see the calculations going on behind Fred’s eyeballs. Not to speak of the air quality issues, difficulty in finding a window, liability and so on. This dog (“restoring the West”) was never going to hunt, for a variety of philosophical (restore to what? why pick that?), and practical reasons, not the least of which was the price tage. I’m glad Pyne said it out loud.

Now, I would not term the third either “resilience” or “new”. People have been using that approach to fire management since way before I retired. I don’t know what it was called, or even if it had a name (fire people seem to always be making up new terminology) but people have been doing it. Using the right tool and the right strategy for the job seems like “common-sense” fire management, that reflects protecting values at risk and public and firefighter safety, while trying to spend less.

It does seem to me, however, that there are lots of situations where values about public lands can and do differ, and the wisest team of fire people are not always going to get the “right” answer in terms of what the fire will do and what the impacts will be. There is so much second-guessing in the world today, and assuming other people are screwed up, ignorant, incompetent, malevolent, and so on (especially on the internet). I don’t doubt that this “not-new” approach is needed. But I wonder whether our litigious and disagreeable society is ready for it. What do you all think?

Certainty and a Wilderness Bill are Good Things: Marc Brinkmeyer

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Thanks to a reader who sent this interview from Evergreen Magazine and noted that the whole series (on a banner across the top when you click the link) is interesting.

Here is a link and below is an excerpt:

“Certainty is a two-way street. We believe Idaho needs a wilderness bill for the same reasons that we need certainty in our raw material supply. There are still millions of roadless acres here in Idaho. Some of those acres belong in designated wilderness areas, some should be managed as back country and some should be allocated to active forest management with a goal of providing certainty for lumbermen, loggers and counties in which the largest landowner is the federal government. Our company will support wilderness legislation when the time is right.”

Marc Brinkmeyer, Chairman of the Board
Idaho Forest Group, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

Is mutually assured certainty something we all can agree on?

Career Ladders for Temps?!?! Maybe Soon!

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More interesting news for “disposable” employees!

campbell_fire1-webhttp://nffe.org/ht/display/ArticleDetails/i/105694

NFFE-Backed Temporary Employment Reform Legislation Approved by Senate Committee

There may come a time when temporary employees actually have a career ladder!

“Thousands of wildland firefighters and other dedicated seasonal workers have been stuck for too long in dead-end jobs, not because of a lack of merit on their parts, but because of flawed regulations that do not recognize their years of service,” said Mark Davis, Vice President of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) and past President of the NFFE Forest Service Council.  “Many others leave and take their years of experience with them because of blocked career paths. After years of work, I’m optimistic that we are about to fix that.”

Of course, this is most directed towards firefighters, as so many timber temps have been jettisoned or have found “other employment”. Most temps would say that there is plenty of work to do, outside of their 1039 appointments but, that issue is not being addressed. The higher-ups choose to continue to embrace the 1039 appointments, thinking that policy is “good enough for Government work”. There really is nothing stopping the Forest Service from changing their policies on 1039 appointments. Truthfully, I’d like to see the temporary appointments scaled back to 800 hours, essentially forcing the Forest Service and other Agencies to hire more 13/13 permanent positions. Yep, make it too costly and “inconvenient” for them to continue using temps to do work that is needed, each and every year. It’s up to OPM to impose more rules, to stop the abuse of the temporary hiring authority.

Recreation on public lands not so big an economic generator

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freeThanks to Ron Roizen for finding this op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Here’s a link and below is an excerpt ..

The sweeping landscapes and unparalleled vistas found on public land in Utah provide outstanding recreational experiences for both Utahns and those who visit our state. According to the Outdoor Industry Association, annual trip-related expenditures in Utah total over $12 billion, supporting an estimated 122,000 jobs and providing $3.6 billion in income. Make no mistake about it, outdoor recreation is big business in Utah.

But these numbers hide an important dichotomy: many, if not most, trip-related expenditures do not occur in the places people actually recreate.

As an example, my wife and I recently spent a week touring southeastern Utah, thoroughly enjoying our visits to Monument Valley, Hovenweep and Natural Bridges National Monuments, and the San Rafael Swell. We brought a week’s worth of food and beverage with us (purchased in northern Utah) and spent most of our nights at dispersed, no fee campsites.

Sharon’s note: From my perspective as an FS retiree, this is a reason that IMHO folks should have to pay for a dispersed camping sticker with the proceeds going to supporting management of dispersed camping recreation. $60 a year for one agency or 100 for both (FS/BLM).

Tongass roadless rule exemption: facts matter

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The Ninth Circuit has reversed the exemption of Alaska from the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.  The case highlights some limits on the role of politics in agency decision-making.

While the dissent correctly asserts that “elections have consequences,” so do facts.  While Congress may choose to ignore them, the administrative and judicial branches may not.  The Ninth Circuit en banc review found that the Forest Service failed to explain why it ignored factual findings it had made under the previous Administration.

“Thus, contrary to the contentions of both Alaska and dissenting colleagues, this is not a case in which the Department—or a new Executive—merely decided that it valued socioeconomic concerns more highly than environmental protection. Rather, the 2003 ROD rests on the express finding that the Tongass Forest Plan poses only “minor” risks to roadless values; this is a direct, and entirely unexplained, contradiction of the Department’s finding in the 2001 ROD that continued forest management under precisely the same plan was unacceptable because it posed a high risk to the “extraordinary ecological values of the Tongass.” 66 Fed. Reg. at 3254. The Tongass Exemption thus plainly “rests upon factual findings that contradict those which underlay its prior policy.” Fox, 556 U.S. at 515. The Department was required to provide a “reasoned explanation . . . for disregarding” the “facts and circumstances” that underlay its previous decision. Id. at 516; Perez, 135 S. Ct. at 1209. It did not.

“The 2003 ROD does not explain why an action that it found posed a prohibitive risk to the Tongass environment only two years before now poses merely a “minor” one. The absence of a reasoned explanation for disregarding previous factual findings violates the APA. “An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past, any more than it can ignore inconvenient facts when it writes on a blank slate.” Fox, 556 U.S. at 537 (Kennedy, J., concurring).”

An agency has some explaining to do when it changes its mind, and that is going to be problematic if the underlying facts haven’t changed.  The Forest Service should think about that when it contemplates finding (under the new planning rule) that species it had classified as sensitive because of risks to their viability do not qualify as species of conservation concern because of lack of concern for their viability.

Managing High-Profile Adventure on Public Lands

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Scott Jurek (photo from the Brooks Shoes website)
Scott Jurek (photo from the Brooks Shoes website)

While I’ve been away, the Denver Post has run a number of interesting original articles (kudos to them!) and I am very ..slowly..trying to catch up. This one is not about the Forest Service, but does talk about tensions rising over different uses, a familiar theme.

Here is the link (hint:turn your volume all the way down before you go to this link) and below is an excerpt.

Detractors come out

“Corporate events,” he wrote, “have no place in the park and are incongruous with the park’s mission of resource protection, the appreciation of nature and the respect of the experience of others in the park.”

The post spurred more than 800 comments from detractors.

Bissell’s response was in stark contrast to that of Yosemite National Park managers, who saw opportunity when Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson finished their record-setting climb of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan in January .

When the rock-climbing legends returned to the valley below El Capitan, a park-service-provided lectern stood ready before a phalanx of news cameras eager to catch the pair’s thoughts after their 19-day ascent.

“Forging a connection”

“So much of what we are doing is forging a connection between the parks and visitors so people understand why parks are here and people appreciate the environment we try to create,” Yosemite assistant superintendent Scott Gediman said.

The two parks’ reactions to internationally acknowledged athletic feats reveal divergent approaches to stewardship of public lands and highlight the increasing struggle for cash-strapped land managers dealing with inspiring, yet unpredictable, athleticism inside the country’s preserved wildlands.

“Most people are not going to do those things, but the value is that they are inspiring,” said Christian Beckwith, whose annual SHIFT Festival in Jackson, Wyo., gathers outdoor leaders to consider conservation alongside adventure and culture. “You might not be able to run the Appalachian Trail in 46 days. But you still might be able to go out for a run this evening and dig a little deeper because you are so fired up. The challenge is balancing that inspiration with the impact and long-term sustainability of our natural resources.”

When regulations for public lands were first etched into law decades ago, the rule-writers never suspected GoPro-strapped athletes would be leaping from quiet peaks with wingsuits or exploring remote backcountry on lightweight personal rafts.