The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views

On Christmas eve, one hundred years ago, John Muir’s spirit left his body and set off into the pathless wild. For those of us who love the wild world and for whom Muir is an indispensable intellectual ancestor, the way Muir and his conservation legacy have been getting beaten up recently is hard to fathom. You may have noted the way that various postmodern greens have been using Muir as a punching bag.

We believe the man and his legacy need to be celebrated on the centennial anniversary of his death, and into the future through the resurgence of a parks and wilderness movement focused on protecting the wild.

If you agree, we hope you’ll consider passing along the attached editorial, “John Muir’s Last Stand,” which touches on the present philosophical dustup in conservation.

Best wishes for a happy and WILD new year!

—Tom Butler and Eileen Crist

Tom Butler is editorial projects director of the Foundation for Deep Ecology and president of Northeast Wilderness Trust. Eileen Crist teaches in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. 

People may want to view the following press release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) in context of the so-called “Grazing Improvement Act” rider, which was attached to the $585 Billion Defense Bill.  In Montana, this public lands grazing rider was proudly touted by Sen Tester and Rep Daises, while it wasn’t publicly opposed – or even mentioned at all – by the Montana Wilderness Association, The Wilderness Society or National Wildlife Federation.

According to public lands grazing policy experts, the so-called “Grazing Improvement Act” rider now means the automatic renewal of expiring livestock grazing permits on public lands, even if these permits are causing the decline of greater sage grouse, desert tortoise or other sensitive wildlife species, or even if public lands grazing is ruining riparian areas and watersheds.

These public lands grazing permits also must be automatically renewed even before the completion of any NEPA environmental analysis or public input process. So the Cliven Bundy’s of the world – and other welfare-ranchers who pay pennies on the dollar to graze their private livestock on our public lands – won big with this part of the public lands rider package, while native wildlife like elk, deer and bighorn sheep and countless other native wildlife species all lost big time. This public lands rider alone impacts approximately 200 million acres of public lands in the Western US.

For Immediate Release: Dec 22, 2014

Contact: Kirsten Stade (202) 265-7337

BLM DUMBING DOWN REPORTS ON LIVESTOCK RANGE CONDITIONS

Complaint Demands Restoration of Data Quantifying and Qualifying Grazing Effects

Washington, DC — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has removed key data from a statutorily mandated report measuring how well vast federal rangelands are protected from damaging overgrazing, according to an administrative complaint filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The group is pressing BLM to restore data contained in previous annual reports tracking whether overgrazing or other factors are degrading the condition of 150 million acres of federal rangelands across a 13-state area covering most of the West.

The BLM’s 2013 Rangeland Inventory, Monitoring, and Evaluation (RIME) report, released on November 4, 2014, differs substantially from previous reports by removing the following data:

• The number and land area of grazing allotments meeting and failing rangeland health standards;
• Information distinguishing between failures of the standards due to livestock and other causes; and
• Whether land conditions are improving or declining or whether BLM is taking any management steps to restore degraded rangeland.

The new report is a significant departure from prior RIME reports which had been showing a disturbing trend of more and more lands failing to meet range health standards for water, vegetation, soils and the ability to support wildlife principally due to commercial livestock operations. In the last decade as more land has been assessed, estimates of damaged lands have doubled across the 20,000 BLM grazing allotments. Crippling drought in much of the Sagebrush West is undoubtedly further aggravating conditions.

“BLM is obscuring the very information Congress and the public need to gauge the success or failure of rangeland management,” said PEER Advocacy Director Kirsten Stade, calling out the new report as “RIME without reason.” “BLM cannot escape accountability by editing its books to remove all the modifiers.”

PEER today filed a complaint under the Data Quality Act which requires federal reports, especially those statistical in nature, to be complete, unbiased and of the highest accuracy and utility. The complaint demands that BLM retract the 2013 RIME report and reissue it with the full scope of data. Under its rules BLM has 60 days to comply or to reject the complaint, in which case PEER can appeal that denial.

“By law, BLM cannot seek to reduce the sum total of human knowledge,” added Stade, noting that BLM is playing statistical games to mask deteriorating range conditions, which is addressed in another part of the PEER complaint. “Last year, BLM claimed that it could not track grazing impacts due, incredibly enough, to insufficient data. This year it is trying to bury the data it claimed not to possess.”

To validate the actual state of range health, PEER has assembled a grazing website featuring an interactive map combining BLM range health data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act with high resolution satellite imagery to compare visible on-the-ground conditions versus BLM claims.

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Read the PEER Data Quality Act complaint

View the offending table in the 2012 versus 2013 RIME report

See previous RIME reports

Visit the PEER Grazing Reform website

See an example of BLM weaseling range data

Revisit BLM claim that it lacks sufficient data to track grazing impacts

Examine a recent example of a successful PEER Data Quality Act challenge 

This Dec. 21 editorial in the Missoulian, “Make collaboration work for MT,” mentions a friend of the court brief filed last week in the Ninth Circuit by a group including The Wilderness Society, plus “two former Forest Service chiefs, three Montana counties, conservation organizations, the hunting and angling communities, timber industry officials, wildlife biologists, and Montana’s Departments of Natural Resources and Conservation and Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks” and others. The brief is here. An excerpt:

“In stark contrast to timber harvest practices of the past, the Colt Summit Project represents an entirely new and different approach to forest management. The project was developed with the input of collaborative processes that bring together diverse interests to help create forest management projects that benefit multiple goals, including the recovery of lynx and other threatened species. In keeping with this approach, the specific components of the Colt Summit project – 12 including the thinning and understory slashing and burning highlighted by the Plaintiffs – were designed in consultation with state and federal biologists who are arguably the world’s foremost experts on Canada lynx. The input of these expert biologists – whose work Plaintiffs themselves rely on throughout their own brief – is more than adequate to ensure that the project will significantly harm neither lynx nor their habitat in the short run, and will benefit both in the long run.”

See also The Wilderness Society’s press release.

The Colt Summit project has been discussed in the past in numerous threads here on NCFP, such as here.

The CEQ has released a new Draft Guidance on Consideration of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Effects of Climate Change.The link goes to a press release with a link to the new document (which, unfortunately, is a static document that you can’t searched or copy-and-paste from).

CEQ press release excerpt:

As part of an ongoing effort to modernize implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act and promote effective and transparent environmental reviews, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) today released updated draft guidance for Federal agencies on how to consider greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of climate change in their NEPA analyses, as well as final guidance on conducting programmatic NEPA reviews. These measures will increase the efficiency of environmental reviews and help agencies make informed decisions that are sound investments of taxpayer dollars and good for American communities.

NEPA requires Federal agencies to consider and transparently disclose the potential effects of their actions and decisions on the environment.  In many cases, Federal actions have the potential to produce greenhouse gas emissions, and also are at risk of experiencing impacts from a changing climate. The draft guidance, which will be available for 60 days of public comment, outlines how Federal agencies should describe these potential effects when conducting NEPA reviews to allow decision makers and the public to more fully understand the environmental impacts of proposed actions.  In turn, agencies will be better able to compare alternatives, and consider measures to reduce the impacts of climate change on Federal resources and investments.

Excerpt from an E&E News article (subscription):

Steven Weissman, director of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law’s energy program, said it appears the guidance gives federal agencies a large amount of discretion and contributes to the impression that some effects of greenhouse gas emissions are acceptable.

Weissman pointed to CEQ’s guidance for agencies to focus on projects and actions that will release more than 25,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions on an annual basis. CEQ said a “quantitative analysis of greenhouse gas emissions is not recommended unless it is easily accomplished” for projects that emit anything below that amount.

That means smaller projects that emit less — but still contribute to climate change — may not get a close look, he said.

“Basically, they’re saying you could level over 160 acres’ worth of trees before you reach any level of significance, or burn 20 million tons of coal,” he said. “It’s all very interesting because there’s no particular number that’s magical here; this is just an effort to set a benchmark [to prevent] too much attention on projects that would have smaller effects.”

From the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin, a barred owl has replaced two spotted owls that died a few years ago.

“If you go to spotted owl habitat (in the woods) this is often what you see,” Goodell said.

In other words, it’s also barred owl habitat.

An essay from High Country News (subscription). It’s been a long time since I worked for the USFS, but some of what Marsh says I can sympathize with. Do preservationists have a role to play at the agency? Conservationists, yes, but the National Forests weren’t intended for preservation. I’d like to know whether Dan’s career was ruined for trying to do the right thing instead of “getting along.”

What I learned from 30 years with the Forest Service
Susan Marsh
Opinion Dec 17, 2014

After working for the Forest Service for 30 years, I finally had to write a book about it — especially about some of the painful lessons I learned. Here are just a few of them.

It will come as no surprise that it wasn’t easy being a woman in what was, and remains, a man’s domain. Nor was it easy being a resource professional in one of the fields of study known within the agency as a specialty. Specialists, or “ologists,” were considered narrow in focus and sadly misinformed about the relative importance of scenery or wildlife in the context of meeting targets. I was a preservationist in the midst of managers who wanted to roll up their sleeves and Do Something.

I soon learned that a bureaucracy like the Forest Service values loyalty to the “outfit” above all. One has to be a team player, and in order to play on the team it is necessary to embrace a worldview shared by one’s teammates. So I learned to hunt elk and go ice fishing, to head for whichever bar offered country music and scantily clad waitresses, and to keep my cards close to my chest.

“Never let ‘em know what you’re thinking,” one district ranger advised. While mulling the need for such a motto, I took the advice of a different ranger whose loyalties matched my own. “My first priority is to the land,” he said. “Then to the public for whose benefit we’re managing it. Finally, to the outfit.”

This got my friend in a lot of trouble. When he tried to reduce the number of cattle in a battered little watershed in Montana’s Ruby River drainage, his boss refused to support the action. Even though evidence was strong that the stream banks would benefit from having fewer hooves in one small area, reducing cattle simply wasn’t a viable option. The permittee would complain to his congressman and the governor, both personal friends.

Where most rangers would have backed off, Dan fought. The poor condition of a stream within his district caused him personal pain, and if he didn’t try to fix it, he felt he wasn’t doing his job. His boss disagreed, saying: “Your job is to get along.” The bitter lesson I learned from Dan was that you could ruin your career if you tried too hard to do the right thing.

After three decades with the Forest Service, there remains one lesson that still surprises me: I still cherish a strong sense of loyalty to the agency, however flawed it is, and to the high-minded principles on which it was founded.

My desire to defend it arises when I hear someone complain about how the local district doesn’t do one thing or another, or at least can’t do it right. If you only knew how hard it is, I want to say. I react each time I witness yet another effort to privatize the public land, to hand it off to the states, to divide it up among interests that seek only to exploit it. As humanity continues to leave its heavy footprint across the planet, the national forests and other public lands become all the more precious.

The stereotypical government worker draws a salary without having to try very hard. It is true that I have encountered my share of drones over the years, but the people who represent the Forest Service to me are like Dan: They gladly work nights and weekends, if necessary donating their annual leave at the end of the year. They care deeply for the land and want to make a contribution to the greater good.

Working for the agency is more of a vocation than a job. A wise-ass adage holds this definition of success for a conservation-minded employee: It’s not the number of projects you accomplished, but the number of bad ideas you successfully scuttled. Most of my Forest Service heroes scuttled plenty of dumb ideas.

The Forest Service is far from perfect, and I would agree with those who say it is less effective than it could be. But it gives me comfort to know how many of the people within it are driven by the loyalties once articulated by my mentor, Dan. My hat is off to them.

— Susan Marsh is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). She lives in Jackson, Wyoming, and her latest book is A Hunger for High Country.