Community Sourced, Shared and Supported
Here’s the post and below is an excerpt.
A new report shows an Arizona wildfire that began with a lightning strike and caused little immediate concern because of its remote location and small size quickly grew into an inferno, leading officials to rapidly order more resources in the hours before the flames killed 19 members of an elite Hotshot crew.
Let’s take a little break from controversy, here. We all love trees and have seen our share of cool stuff, out there, in the “woods”. There are two options here. You can send me ( lhfotoware (at) hotmail.com) a picture of your “interesting” tree, and I will post it below. Feel free to add a caption, and I will add that, too. Or, you can describe your tree in the comments. There is nothing to win, except for our undying respect. Also, you can rate the trees, if you want to.
This ponderosa pine was along a trail, below the rim, in Bryce Canyon National Park. This tree swoops back to the ground before going vertical again. It actually has a decent, healthy crown. The bark has a true spiral, and I really don’t know why the tree ended up like this. I did see a similar tree during my last trip to Bryce Canyon.
Thomas promptly sent me this lonely pine, standing proud and healthy.
This anonymous contribution of a cedar tree growing out of a very old stump (including a historical springboard notch) is quite interesting.
This urban Douglas-fir looks to be growing very well, with full sunlight. Thanks louploup.
Most of us know what “wolfy” trees are. They seem to use more energy in developing strong branches, rather than a straight and tall bole. I think we need to plant some of these trees into openings, where they can thrive, as future nest trees.
Thanks to Mike D. for submitting this exceptional image of larch crowns in the fall.
Now, here is an impressively-odd tree, sent in by Dr. Bob Z. That’s a burly set of trees, alright!
Bob Williams’ comment below reminded me of this piece from April, by him and Dan Botkin. I thought I had posted it before, but couldn’t find it when I searched.
Here is the link and below is an excerpt:
Forest fires in the drought-stricken West and Southwest received a lot of attention last year, and scenes of several large, destructive fires were widely shown on television. Could this happen elsewhere in the United States?
In early March, columns of smoke rose from the Pine Barrens, visible from the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas. One might think these fires are dangerous and should be suppressed, but they were intentionally lit by the Forest Fire Service of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, with more to be lit this spring.
Given the inherent dangers of fire to homes, and remembering Smokey the Bear telling us, “Only you can prevent forest fires,” lighting fires near big cities might seem like the last thing a government agency should be doing.
However, light forest fires are a necessity for the Pine Barrens, needed to sustain the natural forests and their biological diversity, and to prevent the kind of devastating, intense wildfires that can damage towns and cities.
In fact, most forests of America evolved with fires. They were originally started by random, periodic lightning strikes, but perpetuated for thousands of years by Native Americans prior to European settlement. Only in the last few centuries have people changed how fire is used in forests. The fire suppression of the recent past has created a growing fuel load and conditions that are ripe for a really large fire that will result in significant loss of life and property.
Suppression has led to high-intensity, hard-to-control wildfires that are devastating to forest ecosystems and more likely to burn through houses, towns, and cities. Modern prescribed burns in the Pine Barrens by the state Forest Fire Service reduce the fuel load. They demonstrate the way forests should be and need to be managed across our nation.
That rising smoke near the big Eastern metropolitan areas signals both a burgeoning acceptance that some change in the environment is natural, and a spreading recognition that to sustain our resources and to live successfully and symbiotically with our environment, we must accept and even promote these natural changes.
For centuries, people have lived, worked, and played in the Pinelands, all of which is part of the fabric that makes this forest so environmentally, ecologically, and economically unique. Iron has been mined out of the sandy soils. Berries, pine cones, and sphagnum moss have been harvested from the forests. The Barrens have been farmed, fished, and charcoaled for centuries. They supplied lumber for one of America’s earliest industries, ship building. New York City and Philadelphia were originally built with wood from the Pine Barrens.
After much analysis and debate, in 2005, the Pinelands Commission’s Forestry Advisory Committee stated, “Forestry, if practiced in accordance with sound management practices, can provide wood and wood products and ensure the protection of water quality and critical habitat for wildlife, as well as a way of life and culture that will otherwise soon vanish.” Surprising as it may seem, the Pine Barrens are, as they have been since the late 1600s, a place of active and valuable commercial forestry.
Today, in the 21st century, not much is heard about commercial forestry and its role in our lives and our forests in the public or the media. Although the history and products of the Pine Barrens demonstrate that we are a forest-dependent species, our growing urban culture has moved further and further away from a basic understanding of the land and the forests. However, if you breathe air and drink water, you need forests.
We are all part of forest ecosystems, not intruders – even those of us who live in metropolitan areas.
This raises a couple of thoughts:
1. For some SAF work, I have been doing phone calls with folks across the country asking them about fire; seems like the southerners (and folks in New Jersey) are more accepting of prescribed burning. Is it cultural? Less likely to escape because not so dry? Better procedures for control? Better relations with state air quality folks? I bet someone has studied at least some aspects of this question.
2. While looking for a photo, I found this piece which said
In addition, scientists expect that continued wildfire suppression, and the use of only very low-temperature, cold-season controlled fires, will over time change the composition of Pine Barrens forests by favoring oaks in their competition with pines for dominance of the forest. This potential fundamental alteration of the ecosystem will be gradual and will only be visible over a period of several decades or more.
So it sounds like the dominant species will change if only prescribed fires occur, because the fire effects are different. Will that be a change that’s good? or bad? or simply is?
3. Here’s a link to the Silas Little Experimental Forest.
Here’s an op-ed by Stephen Pyne in today’s Denver Post. It’s beautifully written.
What to do about it depends on how we characterize the problem. The paradox of fire stems from its role as the great shape-shifter of natural processes. The reason is simple: Fire is not a creature or a substance or a geophysical event like a hurricane or an earthquake. It is a biochemical reaction. It synthesizes its surroundings. It takes its character from its context.
Fire integrates everything around it — sun, wind, rain, plants, terrain, roofing, fields, and everything people do, and don’t do. In this way, it indexes the state of an ecosystem. It is also our signature act as a species, the one thing we do that no other creature does. While we did not invent fire (it has been integral to Earth for more than 400 million years), we exercise a monopoly over its controlled use.
All of this makes fire universal, difficult to grasp, and tricky to wrestle into manageable shape. There is no solution to fire, because there are many kinds of fires, and they change with their context. Some fire problems do have technical fixes. We can build machines that reduce combustion to its essence and contain it.
We cannot survive without fire; we just need it in the right ways. It is certainly a problem when it burns freely through cities. But it is also a problem when it is removed from wildlands that have adapted to it, because its absence can be as ecologically significant as its presence. The point is, urban fire is not a model for wildland fire.
Our prevailing templates for describing fire are similarly misdirected. They portray the burn as a disaster and the fight against it as a war story. The battlefield allusion leads observers to reason that there must be more sophisticated technologies than shovels and rakes with which to suppress the flames. We must meet force with greater force. Such metaphors matter, because they mis-define the problem.
Here are a couple of my thoughts:
1. I don’t think the “war” is the prevailing template (let alone “our” prevailing template). I think the last 30 years or so “we’ve” (the fire/ecology/natural resource community) been fairly successful at promoting the concept that fire can have good effects and fire can have bad effects. So who is “we” in this case (the unspecific use of “we” is one of my pet peeves, as regular readers know)?.
2. I agree with Pyne’s point that “urban fire is not a model for wildland fire.” But I think we need to look more closely at his statement:
But it is also a problem when it is removed from wildlands that have adapted to it, because its absence can be as ecologically significant as its presence.
The adaptation of “ecosystems” has always been an interesting concept. For one thing, it depends on “ecosystems” being a real thing instead of a human construct. There have been two schools of thought about this.. one that mixes of plants and animals develop and change through time.. the other that there is something called an “ecosystem”, with a greater or lesser subtext of “balance” or focus on what is currently there (or there in the past) rather than the fact that individual components are always changing.
Species evolve.. that’s what you learn in courses, through the traditional forms of genetic adaptation. What is an “ecosystem” and how does it “evolve”? Through what mechanism? Now backing off from the reification to the reality, if cones open only in fire or hot weather, it does seem that the species might do better with fire (or hot weather), or certain species regenerate better with fire, that is a reality. Without intervention, you won’t get those plants back without fire.
So I think it’s important to look at each impact or lack thereof separately. Say, sedimentation..how much do you get? What organisms is it good for? Which is it bad for, etc.?
So this reminded me of this story in the Atlantic, “SW Forests May Never Recover From Megafires.”
Much of the Los Alamos burn resembles today a lunar landscapes — vast slopes of denuded gray soil where little vegetation has come back. Hillsides, once covered with ponderosa pine and squat, drought tolerant pinon and juniper trees, now grow only clumps of cheatgrass, an invasive species, and occasional bush-like shrub oaks. Biologist Craig Allen of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has has spent years studying the Southwest forest ecosystem, says that areas like these won’t be forested again in our lifetime, and possibly they never will be. The reason that Allen and others are pessimistic is that climate change is hitting the Southwest harder and faster than most other areas in the U.S. The region has warmed on average between 2 and 5 degrees during the past century, and this trend is expected to accelerate in the years ahead.
Add to this the danger from what scientists call a possible “mega-drought.” The Southwest has always been prone to extended dry periods, like the one which archeologists believe drove the Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon in the Four Corner’s area to the wetter Rio Grande Valley in the late 13th century. But a study published last year in the journal Nature Climate says that, by 2050, the region will be even drier than in previous mega-droughts. Moreover, hot summer temperatures in the southwest will literally suck the water our of leaves and needles killing trees in unprecedented numbers. “The majority of forests in the Southwest probably cannot survive in the temperatures that are projected,” one of the study’s co-authors, Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory told Environment 360.
As a person who spent the early part of her career helping figure out how to reforest dry areas, I think it’s worthy of experimentation to try planting some species in these areas. I think we have gone way past “natural” and now simply have to consider what we want and what we can afford.
Summertime brings to mind more than wildfires…
Here’s a link… below is an excerpt.
As the 2013 Major League Baseball (MLB) season slides into the All-Star break, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the results of innovative research by the U.S. Forest Service, and funded by MLB, that will result in significantly fewer shattered baseball bats.
“This innovative research by the U.S. Forest Service will make baseball games safer for players and fans across the nation,” said Secretary Vilsack. “The U.S. Forest Products Laboratory has once again demonstrated that we can improve uses for wood products across our nation in practical ways – making advancements that can improve quality of life and grow our economy.”
Testing and analyzing thousands of shattered Major League bats, U.S. Forest Service researchers at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) developed changes in manufacturing that decreased the rate of shattered maple bats by more than 50 percent since 2008. While the popularity of maple bats is greater today than ever before, the number of shattered bats continues to decline.
“Since 2008, the U.S. Forest Service has worked with Major League Baseball to help make America’s pastime safer,” said U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell. “I’m proud that our collective ‘wood grain trust’ has made recommendations resulting in a significant drop in shattered bats, making the game safer for players as well as for fans.”
“These results would not have been possible without the outstanding work of the Forest Products Laboratory and the tireless efforts of its project coordinator, David Kretschmann,” says Daniel Halem, MLB’s Senior Vice President of Labor Relations. “Major League Baseball greatly appreciates the invaluable contributions of the Forest Products Laboratory and Mr. Kretschmann on this important issue.”
“In 2011, in response to me and several other senators, EPA delayed for three years the application of any greenhouse gas permitting requirements to facilities that use biomass, like sawmills.”
Well, today, the U.S. Court of Appeals scrapped the Senator Baucus-supported EPA delay that had given wood-burning biomass facilities a pass on compliance with federal greenhouse gas emission standards. Here’s a copy of the ruling. This is good news for those who value clear air and reducing pollution.
Here’s an article about the U.S. Court’s rejection of the EPA rule from E & E Publishing. What follows is the opening few paragraphs:
A three-judge panel scrapped a U.S. EPA rule today that had given biomass-burning facilities a pass on compliance with federal greenhouse gas emission standards.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit panel found EPA failed to justify its 2011 decision that provided a three-year exemption to its greenhouse gas rules for facilities that burn materials ranging from wood and algae to scrap tires.
In exempting biomass, EPA said it needed more time to study the overall impact of the industry’s carbon dioxide emissions. Industry has contended that in some instances — wood burning, for example — biomass facilities have a net neutral CO2 impact because trees absorb the heat-trapping gas before they are cut down.
Environmentalists didn’t buy EPA’s approach. The Center for Biological Diversity said the “blanket exemption” violated the agency’s greenhouse gas policies.
What follows is a quick legal analysis of what today’s U.S. Court ruling means.
As a legal matter this means that:
a) The court reaffirms its view that EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution and that those requirements are clear and mandatory
b) In order for EPA EVER to implement an exemption from clear statutory requirements, the Agency must justify that under one of the legal doctrines available to it for crafting exemptions, AND with a robust record in science (in this instance) supporting its decision
c) EPA did not have a robust record supporting the very broad exemption it created here – remember that even though it was for ‘just’ 3 years, it was for EVERY kind of biomass fuel, even though the science shows that burning most biomass fuels make climate disruption worse than burning fossil fuels per unit of energy created by the combustion of those fuels. Best line from the lead opinion is the one that says that the atmosphere can’t tell a difference between a ton of biogenic CO2 ton and a ton of fossil fuel CO2.
d) The fact that the court VACATED the rule, didn’t just remand to EPA to ‘fix’ it, shows that the court understood that there isn’t a fix available on EPA’s record – it underscores the point about the science not supporting the broad exemption EPA tried to craft here.
As far as the last question, what this means for facilities permitted during the exemption, it means they are supposed to have pollution control for their CO2 and any other air pollution they emit above the regulatory significance levels. It means that citizens can go back and demand that, as soon as the mandate issues. The court as it has in this case typically defers issuance of the mandate pending the review period.
Someone wrote and asked the question, has anything in NEPATaskForcenepareport_finaldraft122105-1 report changed? What do you think?
It seems to me that the report somewhat downplays the importance of case law compared to the statute. Here’s how it looks to me.
1. There is the statute, simple and beautiful.
2. There are the CEQ regs, which mostly lay out rules for doing documents. They’re OK. Like defining “major federal action.” CEQ (regardless of individuals there) always seems to think that things are fine,and if agency practitioners would just do things right, there would be no problems with NEPA.
3. But then there are the Courts, who make their own (dare I say sometimes arbitrary and capricious?) decisions about what the statute and regs really mean. I think many folks don’t have problems with 1 or 2, but it’s 3 that seems to drift from 1 and 2. Even though we’re not lawyers we can still have opinions about what people meant when they wrote the statute and the regulations.
Anyway…there is also 4) in part to clarify for courts what was meant, the FS wrote its own NEPA regs.
It seemed to me that the discussion in the Taskforce report was a bit as if only 1 and 2 exist.
A question about this report has to do with the idea “there aren’t that many NEPA cases.” That may be true in some narrow sense. But there are plenty of cases that throw NFMA, NEPA, and ESA into the complaint. So far I haven’t figures out how we have discussed all the different litigated projects we have here on this blog, and yet there aren’t that many NEPA cases. Maybe someone can help explain.
Another question is I was always told NEPA is a procedural statute. It reads like a procedural statute. I didn’t know it was debatable or open to anyone’s interpretation. I thought it either was or wasn’t. That seems mysterious. But it reminded me of Sally Fairfax’s critique (published in Science (???)) in 78. Look what she has to say about paperwork and EIS’s. Remarkably astute, in my view. I don’t have access to Science but somehow in my old files I found here some back and forth between her and someone who disagreed, in which she summarizes some of her arguments.
If Professor Fairfax’s arguments are still true, that’s 25 years ago.
someone asked if we could enable sharing of posts on Twitter. I think I did this, plus LinkedIn plus Facebook. When you see a post you want to share, click on its title. Then you should see the buttons to share. I hope it works..
I made up a twitter account called forestpolicypub, because I think I had to. So don’t be surprised if that shows up somewhere.. that’s NCFP’s alternate name.
P. S. I am still working on transferring the hosting so that we can expand the number of comments and add other functionality. Thanks to Eli Sagor for setting it up!
Terry- it took the aging brain a while to figure out that the buttons only show up when you click on the post.
I like this quote by Chris Topik in the press release here:
“We must collectively and immediately dedicate ourselves to finding a way to effectively support both essential emergency wildfire preparedness and response AND the proactive fuels reduction and forest restoration that are needed to reduce the demand for emergency expenditures in the future. Our current approach to wildland fire and forest management creates a false choice, pitting the viability of one against the other. In reality, we cannot afford to short-change either.” – Christopher Topik, Ph.D, Director, Resorting America’s Forests, The Nature Conservancy
People I know who watched it, said that there was general agreement and a relative lack of partisan demagoguery.
Here’s the site with the testimony.
Found this on the SAF LinkedIn site:
It’s always hard to excerpt one of Char’s pieces, but here goes:
That conviction was woven into the determination to take on the Mann Gulch fire of 1949. Fifteen smokejumpers parachuted near a wind-whipped inferno in the mountains above Helena, Montana, where they joined a ranger who had hiked in to battle the rapidly moving blaze. Trapped near a ridgeline, thirteen died. In its post-fire investigation, the Forest Service exonerated the fire boss’s decision to jump in the first place and his management decisions during the increasingly ferocious and unpredictable burn.
“I really think that the fire we saw when we flew over there was a typical smokejumper fire,” a survivor confirmed. “And if they didn’t jump on that fire they wouldn’t have jumped on half the fires they jumped on that year. So I don’t think it was a mistake to jump. After we got on the ground I think it was a freak of nature that caused the wind to do what it did and to pick those coals up and drop them in the canyon below us.” Because smokejumping had been invented, the agency needed to use this tool notwithstanding any such “freak of nature.”
Unfortunately, those freakish moments have piled up. Between 1949 and 2012, burnovers have killed an estimated 221 of the 769 wildland firefighters who have died on the job.
The 1950s and ’60s were especially harrowing on the California national forests. In 1953, fifteen died in a burnover on the Mendocino NF; the next year, three more were lost on the Tahoe NF and then in 1956 another eleven fell on the Cleveland NF. Ten years later, a dozen firefighters were killed on the Angeles NF, also the site of a 1968 incident in which four perished.
Following the 1994 fire season, in which 14 firefighters were killed in the South Canyon fire on Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the Forest Service and other federal and state agencies embraced a more rigorous safety-first strategy, hoping to limit the number of fatalities.
This year’s tragedy in Arizona suggests that we may not have fully absorbed this painful, century-long history. The problem does not appear to be one of policy but of memory. We don’t seem to know how to recall this deadly past, to keep it front and center, so as to abide by the rules and regulations already in place.
The public moreover must deliberately integrate these deaths into our ongoing education about fire’s essential place in the landscape, whether grassland, chaparral, or alpine. They must also be a required discussion item before every zoning commission or city council vote to permit yet another subdivision in the wildland-urban interface. For make no mistake, we are undeniably complicit in this mounting toll — we sent these firefighters out to do the work that led to their demise even as we have contributed to the increased frequency and intensity of the fires they have battled on our behalf. They die where we live.
To insure that their numbers do not grow, perhaps this time we’ll remember what happened during the Big Blowup and in Griffith Park, at Mann Gulch, South Canyon, and now Yarnell Hill. Perhaps this time we won’t forget what we have always known.
Here are some of my reflections on Char’s piece:
1) From Storm King to now was 19 years; you could argue that, given the kind of work that these folks are doing, and the judgements that need to be made, the track record is actually darn impressive.
2) There is a difference between “not living there in the woods” and “not using certain potentially dangerous tactics when fighting fires around houses in the woods.” I’m not a suppression expert, but they seem to have a variety of tactics. That’s what Kathy Voth questioned in the piece here that The Optimist posted.
3) Even if we stopped any more building, there are plenty of built places left to potentially burn- including Southern California.
4) Flooding of rivers has been a part of the landscape for millennia as well, but we don’t “educate people about the essential role of flooding in the landscape.” In fact, where I grew up, within the KCET listening area, La Ballona Creek was concrete lined for flood control (people are working to restore it, which I think is a good thing).