Floods, Climate and Fires- Front Range, Sept. 2013

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BOULDER_FLOOD

The history of flooding and economic and social hardships is related, of course, to ideas of Nature and to Book Club topics. However, in the interest of topical and timely information, I thought that this piece by Roger Pielke, Jr. is relevant and worth posting outside of Book Club.

Here’s his blog post, titled “Against the 100 year flood.”

He cited his paper the Nine Fallacies of Floods (apparently peer-reviewed, for those who watch that). It’s well worth a read, and a comparison to the western wildfire situation.

No matter what the climate future holds, flood impacts on society may continue to get worse. A study conducted by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment concluded that ‘despite recent efforts, vulnerability to flood damages is likely to continue to grow’ (OTA, 1993, p. 253). The study based this conclusion on the following factors, which have very little to do with climate:
1. Populations in and adjacent to flood-prone areas, especially in coastal areas, continue to increase, putting more property and greater numbers of people at risk,
2. flood-moderating wetlands continue to be destroyed,
3. little has been done to control or contain increased runoff from upstream
development (e.g., runoff caused by paving over land),
4. many undeveloped areas have not yet been mapped (mapping has been concentrated in already-developed areas), and people are moving into such areas without adequate information concerning risk,
5. many dams and levees are beginning to deteriorate with age, leaving property owners with a false sense of security about how well they are protected,
6. some policies (e.g., provision of subsidies for building roads and bridges) tend to encourage development in flood plains.
At a minimum, when people blame climate change for damaging flood events, they direct attention away from the fact that decision makers already have the means at their disposal to significantly address the documented U.S. flood problem.

I also thought his cite of the hydrologist and climate change science communities’ discussion of stationarity was interesting. If hydrologists and climatologists disagree, how can we point to “science” as a path forward? Maybe we have to gird our loins, use our own brains and experiences, and talk to people (and their elected officials) about what they think are the best approaches to policy choices.

Here’s the link to the stationarity paper… only have the abstract due to lack of open access.

After 2½ days of discussion it became clear that the assembled community had yet to reach an agreement on whether or not to replace the assumption of stationarity with an assumption of nonstationarity or something else. Hydrologists were skeptical that data gathered to this point in the 21st Century point to any significant change in river parameters. Climatologists, on the other hand, point to climate change and the predicted shift away from current conditions to a more turbulent flood and drought filled future. Both groups are challenged to provide immediate guidance to those individuals in and outside the water community who today must commit funds and efforts on projects that will require the best estimates of future conditions. The workshop surfaced many approaches to dealing with these challenges. While there is good reason to support additional study of the death of stationarity, its implications, and new approaches, there is also a great need to provide those in the field the information they require now to plan, design, and operate today’s projects.

I have a good deal of sympathy for the hydrologists; getting dam management wrong can have more serious and life-threatening implications in either drought or flood conditions than planting trees. If we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, we need to be flexible and pay attention to what’s really happening on the land. And not so much models. Just a thought.

Marlboro signs 5-year agreement with USFS to improve air quality

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Now the USFS is looking for handouts and Coca-Cola is advertising bottled water, so this is a real win-win situation. The richest kid in town already gets to skip property taxes and blatantly ignore the very laws that gave it life, and now needs charity to manage its own resources. Fortunately, we have Tom Vilsack at the helm to steer this prodigal child and he knows just what to do — put enough spin on the situation so he gets his picture in the paper and makes it look like this is the latest thing in public forest management. wow.

This just in:

CHICAGO (AP) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Coca-Cola signed a five-year agreement Friday to restore watersheds that have been damaged or altered by development, wildfires and agriculture as part of an initiative to slow runoff and replenish groundwater on federal lands.

Such efforts are increasingly important to corporations and farmers who rely on water and to tens of millions of people whose drinking water originates in the national forest system, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said. But federal budget cuts and the wide scope of the problem have the USDA turning to partnerships with nonprofit groups and corporations for help.

“We need to look creatively at ways to leverage our resources or attract outside resources,” said Vilsack, who along with Coca-Cola Americas President Steve Cahillane will announce the partnership at the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie outside of Chicago. A wetland at the 18,000-acre site is being restored by removing old agricultural drain tiles that divert almost 14 million gallons per year into waterways — and eventually down the Mississippi River — rather than allowing it to soak back into the ground.

It’s one of six projects that Coca-Cola has helped fund through a pilot program with the USDA’s U.S. Forest Service over the past two years, said Chris Savage, assistant director of the agency’s Watershed, Fisheries and Wildlife office. Others included restoring a wetland in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains that helps supply water to San Francisco and restoring the landscape along Colorado’s South Platte River that was devastated by fire a decade ago.

Under the new agreement, the company and the Forest Service will work with two nonprofit foundations — the National Forest Foundation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — to identify projects on federal lands. Corporate funding will go through the foundations, which also contribute money to the projects, officials said. There is no specific amount committed to the projects, but Vilsack said he expects “millions” will be spent.

Coca-Cola will emphasize projects that can be done fairly easily and improve resources in areas where the company withdraws water for production, said Bruce Karas, the company’s vice president of environment and sustainability for North America.

“Water stewardship is a key focus because … it’s in every product,” Karas said, adding that the company has pledged by 2020 to replenish as much water as it uses. The company has worked with universities and other organizations in the past, but partnering with the USDA could help it get the most from its investment because national forest lands often are the headwaters for important watersheds, Karas said.

The importance of restoring watersheds can’t be overstated, especially with climate change leading to weather extremes such as flooding and drought — and potentially more frequent and larger fires — at the same time manufacturers, residents and farmers increasingly compete for water, Vilsack said.

That’s particularly true in the West, he said, where wildfires have stripped the land of trees and other vegetation that once helped absorb water. The land, he said, “hardens like cement so rain runs off in a torrent” with ash, sludge and debris that makes its way into rivers and reservoirs. What’s more, the drinking water for about 60 million Americans originates in the national forest system.

“It’s about the quantity of water and availability,” he said.

Is the US Government favoring environmental activists over ranchers?

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This post is sort of a follow-up to a previous 3-part series of posts on this blog, “Cows vs. Fish,” that also featured some work (and help) from the Budd-Falen Law Offices in Wyoming. It was written in June, nearly three months ago, but has been making the rounds of email discussion groups during the past two days. You can probably pick up the bias by Budd-Falen’s description of Western Watersheds Project as a “radical environmental group,” but that has little to do with whether the contents and questions are accurate, or not. Other thoughts?

BUDD-FALEN LAW OFFICES, LLC
DATE: JUNE 25, 2013
RE: FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT ABUSE

Since 2009, Western Watersheds Project (“WWP”) has issued at least 675 Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests just to the BLM and Forest Service, related to livestock grazing on the public lands. Although I did not read all 675 requests, I did find some letters that demanded information for as many as 50 allotments in one single FOIA request. Most WWP FOIAs also wanted documents from multiple years and on multiple subjects. Many of the requests included instructions to the BLM or Forest Service offices stating that the response to WWP should be sent electronically or in a certain format. While the FOIA requires that the federal government make certain documents available, can a requester really dictate the format of the response?

Additionally, for every request, WWP argues that they should receive all information free of charge because they are:

a non-profit membership organization dedicated to protecting and conserving
the public lands and natural resources of watersheds in the American West.
WWP has over 1200 members . . . . WWP is active in seeking to protect and
improve the riparian areas, water quality, fisheries, wildlife, and other natural
resources and ecological values of western watersheds. To do so, WWP
actively participates in agency decision-making concerning BLM [Forest
Service] lands throughout the West, and the BLM’s management of livestock
grazing in Idaho, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.*

WWP is effective at increasing public awareness of environmental matters,
such as protection of the diverse and valuable sagebrush-steppe ecosystem,
through public education and outreach, participation in administrative
processes, litigation and other enforcement of federal environmental laws.

(*WWP uses this same language to justify its fee waiver requests in Montana, California, Arizona and New Mexico as well).

In contrast, if a rancher/permittee requests that very same information about his allotment requested by WWP, the BLM or the Forest Service will charge him $42.00 per hour for administrative search time and $.15 per page for each photocopy made. It seems backwards to me that a rancher is charged for “administrative search time” and photocopy costs to see what is in his own files, yet a group whose stated goal is to “get cows off the public lands ASAP” gets that exact same information for no charge at all (not even charging out-of-pocket costs).

In addition to the shear volume of FOIA requests and the mass of information requested in each of the individual requests by WWP, other issues are of note:

First, in addition to requesting information about individual allotments or groups of allotments, some of WWP FOIAs request documents and information about named individuals. Of the FOIAs I reviewed where WWP wanted information about named ranchers or other individual ranchers, not one of the ranchers was contacted by the BLM or Forest Service before their information was released to WWP.

Second, a great number of FOIAs requested the same information over and over. For example, in 2009, a FOIA would request all monitoring data “gathered or generated to date” for an allotment or large group of allotments. The exact same FOIA will then be filed in 2010 requesting all monitoring data “gathered or generated to date” about the same allotment or groups of allotments. The same FOIA will then be filed in 2011. There is no mention in any of these FOIAs that the BLM or Forest Service had already supplied a great deal of the requested information in the past–the agency simply has to relocate and copy the same information over and over again–all at the public’s expense.

Third, if these radical groups do not receive the information they want – for free – federal court litigation follows, again at the taxpayers’ expense. The vast amount of FOIA cases filed by environmental groups only included the filing of a federal district court complaint, a settlement agreement for the release of the requested information and the payment of attorneys fees. Fee payments were anywhere from $5000 to $50,000.

In May, 2013, the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for the U.S. House of Representatives, the Ranking Members of the Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee on the Judiciary for the U.S. Senate sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) strongly questioning EPA’s practice of “readily grant[ing] FOIA fee waivers for liberal environmental groups – effectively subsidizing them – while denying fee waivers and making the FOIA process difficult for states and conservative groups.” It is clear from the above research that the EPA is not the only agency who engages in such practice. Ranchers who should have the information that is kept in their files are forced to pay excessive amounts for information while radical environmental groups pay no fees for using this exact same information to file substantial numbers of administrative appeals and federal court litigation against these ranchers. With these radical groups, it is not a matter of providing fair public information; it is a matter of pushing a political agenda being subsidized by the taxpayers.

While there is no question that FOIA is an important statute to allow the public to get information from the federal government, this short essay points out the serious inequities in how the statute is implemented. Individuals are forced to pay search time and copy costs for the information gathered about them and located in their own files, while radical environmental groups can get the same documentation for free to use in litigation against the federal agency and rancher. Is that really the purpose of FOIA?

4FRI Contract Switched

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Forest Service announces transfer of forest restoration contract

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – The Forest Service announced today the nation’s largest stewardship contract to treat 300,000 acres over a 10-year period as part of the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) has been transferred from Pioneer Forest Products to Good Earth Power AZ LLC (Good Earth).

Good Earth is now contractually obligated to carry out the terms and conditions of the phase 1 4FRI stewardship contract, which involves forest restoration treatments across four National Forests in northern Arizona. The Forest Service agreed to the novation proposal submitted by Pioneer and will recognize the transfer of the contract to Good Earth as part of its larger acquisition of Pioneer’s assets.

As part of the novation process, the Forest Service determined that Good Earth is both financially and technically sound to successfully perform the terms of the existing contract, originally awarded to Pioneer in May 2012.

“As our key commitment is to people and communities, we will reinvest 50% of our profits to deliver everyday practical benefits at the local level with a focus on education and healthcare. We are very excited to get started and to make a difference,” said Good Earth’s Global CEO, Jason Rosamond.

Forest restoration treatments under the existing contract have already begun. Work is nearing completion on the first task order for the treatment of 932 acres on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests which was issued in April 2013. The Forest Service will assess the performance of Good Earth under the contract based on the accomplishment of these and future task orders. Over the lifetime of the contract, approximately 300,000 acres will be treated.

“We are committed to the success of the Four Forest Restoration Initiative and look forward to working with Good Earth to achieve the landscape-scale results we all recognize as crucial to protecting our forests and communities,” said Cal Joyner, regional forester for the Forest Service’s Southwestern Region. “Collaboration with partners and dedication to the overarching goal of restoration are the keys to success in an effort of this magnitude.”

For those unfamiliar with the term “novation” here is a link. I have an email in to find out more about the new company.

Governor Hickenlooper: What if Your Governor Had Worked in Natural Resources?

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airwatergasheader_hickenlooper

In Colorado, in the circles I run in, Governor Hickenlooper, when he disagrees with what we might call “the “environmentalist” narrative” is said to be “in the pockets of the oil and gas industry.” There have been op-eds in the Denver Post, which I couldn’t find, but I did find this.

The cozy relationship between politicians and big business has been a fact of life in America since the days of the robber barons. Today, this affiliation is especially strong between certain governors and the oil and gas industry. And, the consequences could include drastic impacts on the health and safety of their constituents. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Colorado’s Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Here’s the link to this story.

Now this is kind of good, because Hickenlooper is a D, and so we have been blessed with relief from partisanizing invective, at least for this. But the interesting thing is that no hype is too strong for some writers.

But when I first heard this idea about Hick being in the pocket of industry, I had listened to this podcast of the Frackingsense series. What I heard on the podcast was something else entirely. The understanding of the technology and the people involved, by someone who had worked in the field of natural resources. Listen and see if you can hear the same thing. The Governor starts talking about 11 minutes in..but hearing Professor Limerick introduce their work in the first 11 minutes is also interesting.

There are many parts of this podcast that echo some of our forest natural resource disputes. Ideas like “where do you get your facts?”; with some thinking that folks in the academy are better sources than the experts in state government or others working in the field. I find this fascinating, because we discover that all these years it has not been seen useful by the Science Establishment to study the health effects of fracking (which has been going on for 20 years or more). Meanwhile, the folks in the State (whom Hick mentions) have been working in the trenches (or the wellpads) with the industry experiencing the real world of regulation. It seems to be a matter of trust.. with the academics thought to be more “independent” or perhaps more “objective science.” Fortunately, it appears that NSF has asked for evidence of neutrality in this grant.

Listening to the Governor he seems to lay out the complexities (like what do you do when you have split estate and people bought the mineral rights?). He seems to be coming from the “we’re all in this together, let’s figure out a way” school. But others are more in the “let’s not do it” school, which of course is difficult, as Professor Limerick points out because Coloradans’ behavior shows we are fine with using natural resources but perhaps not fine with producing them. Which means that we export both the impacts and the jobs to somewhere else. Does this sound familiar?

Except in this case, we are not exporting them to our friendly northern neighbors as with timber. Using natural gas has benefits for our country in terms of our economy, and also avoiding “foreign entanglements.” Maybe it’s because Colorado is host to numerous military bases, we can see firsthand the impacts of these to our military people and their families. We need to do this in a safe way. There is no “us and them,” we are all in this together.

As I listen to the Governor talk. he seems to know the business and knows the people. He even has real-world examples, as in “ if our energy prices are too high, we can’t attract business”. And of course, the conundrum, businesses bring jobs- without business, people are poor; and research shows that being poor has negative health effects.

Anyway, here’s a link to the podcast. Listen and see what similarities you detect between energy production and forest controversies.

Here is a link to the other FrackingSense podcasts. And one to the Center for the American West. Note that they are still selling their Gifford Pinchot t-shirts.

What Our Forests Need: A Forum

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This is reposted from Dan Botkin’s blog of June 23. here We’re discussing the more philosophical aspects in Virtual Book Club here. But he raises other topics that we can discuss here..

Foresters and Ecologists thinking about forest practices on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, as part of a project about effects of forestry on salmon. (Photo by D. B. Botkin)
Foresters and Ecologists thinking about forest practices on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, as part of a project about effects of forestry on salmon. (Photo by D. B. Botkin)

This is a forum open to anyone who has thoughts to share about forests and forestry. I will start by expressing how I see current problems about America’s forests and forestry.

I have spent almost half a century trying to understand how forests work, and to use that understanding to solve forest related environmental problems, and to come to know what our place within forests should be, both for the best for us and best for forest ecosystems. My recent visit with Certified Forester Bob Williams in the New Jersey pine barrens reinforced by concern that today we face serious problems about our nation’s forests, and it is time to open a discussion of what needs to be done (See my post Woodsmanship and Naturecraftsmanship).

To understand— to even have a rudimentary notion— about forests as environment, and how we are and should manage and conserve them, we have to deal with three questions: Who owns and controls our forests; how do management, conservation, and the concepts on which these depend have to change, and what has happened to public attitudes, interests, and appreciation of forests.

As I see it, here are the major issues:

We have to accept that nothing in the environment is constant; everything is always changing. Our management and conservation of forests must take this into account in ways not yet dominant.
Forest ownership has changed greatly in the past 40 years, but few people know about this. Who owns forests and what their emphasis is on research and actions has changed.
Forestry research has declined.
Public interest in forests has declined. While it used to be one of the major environmental issues, today, except for wildfires and deforestation of tropical rainforests, we hear relatively little about forests and forest management.

Implications of these major Issues

Since the environment has always changed and is always changin, all life has evolved with and adapted to environmental change. Many, perhaps most, species require environmental change to persist. Another consequence of the ever-changing character of nature is that there is no single best state of nature. As long as people believed in a balance of nature, then there could only be one best state of nature, its (supposedly) constant state. In an every-changing nature, it is possible in the abstract that there might be one best state. But in reality this is not the case.

Our approach to conservation and management of forests must also accept a humility: We can affect, but only partially control, Earth’s environment. As Buckminster Fuller put it, our problem is that we live on a planet that didn’t come with an instruction manual. Globally, our environment is a set of very complex systems, none in a steady-state, each affecting the others, and which we are only beginning to understand.

People have altered the environment for at least 10,000 years, probably much longer. What people used to consider virgin nature never-touched by people is turning out in surprisingly many cases to have been greatly affected by people.

Consequences of changes in forest land ownership: Until the 1980s, most large-scale private forests were owned by 15 major timber corporations, and forest research was expanding. Today, none of the major timber corporations owns any significant forest land. They sold their forests. The major large private owners are REITs and TIMOs. One cannot overestimate the importance of this change. But oddly, almost nobody knows about it. Almost nobody talks about it.

Lack of basic data and monitoring. In this information age, this time of data-mining, massive ability to gather data, forest research is declining and some of the most basic and information data are not being gathered.

Consequences of changes in public and media attention to forests and forestry. Today, much less media and public attention is on forests than in 1980s. During much of the twentieth century, most aspects of forest use were the subjects of lively discussions, including the importance of old-growth, the role of forests in affecting salmon habitat, the certification of forest practices as sustainable, whether timber corporations and the U.S. Forest Service were managing forests properly, what were the ecological and biodiversity roles of stages in forests succession other than old growth.

Today we hear about forests as possible carbon sinks and players in climate change, and we get alarmed about forests when there are major wild fires. Much of public and media attention about forests is reduced to very simple statements, such as “stop tropical rainforest deforestation.” Agreeing with this statement may make us feel good as environmentally-concerned people. This is a convenient sympathy, because tropical rainforest deforestation is a problem far from our shores, about which we can do little and actually do less. In short, when we even bother to think about forests today, it is in a feel good but do little sense.

Where do we go from here? That’s the question. There are many professional foresters and forest scientists, and I’m sure many have thoughts about what we need to do. This is a forum to allow that discussion.

Check out the comments as well…you’ll see people we hear from often, like Derek, and some we seldom hear from (e.g. Jim Coufal). What ideas do you think are important, and worthy of bringing to this blog for discussion?

The Scoop on Subscribing To This Blog

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You’ll notice that there are 300 subscribers moved over, which were more subscribers than we had before. Right now I’m chalking that up to “strange things that happen.”

Here’s what the WordPress folks said about subscribing/following:

If you had email subscribers at your old site, they will continue to receive email notifications of your new posts, so there’s no change there.

However, for followers of your site, they will only see new post notifications in the WordPress.com Reader, unless they subscribe to receive email updates on your new site.

For additional information on how visitors can interact with content through WordPress.com, please see the following support documents:

Following Blogs

http://en.support.wordpress.com/subscriptions-and-newsletters/

I think the bottom line is that if you want to receive emails and are not, you need to use the email subscription widget on the new blog site (in the right hand column).

If you that doesn’t work, let me know.

Fire Borrowing.. The Beat Goes On With House Approps

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Excerpt from an E&E story here (subscription needed).

House CR provides $600M to restore USDA wildfire shortfall

The House Appropriations Committee yesterday proposed a bill that would restore $600 million to Forest Service programs whose funding was siphoned last month to help pay for wildfire suppression.

The continuing resolution, which would extend government funding through mid-December, would also allow flexibility for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to maintain satellite programs that provide data for weather warnings and forecasts of severe weather events.

The bill would keep government programs funded at post-sequestration levels and is free of riders or policy changes, said Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.). However, riders contained in currently enacted appropriations legislation would carry forward, he said.

“Our country desperately needs a long-term budget solution that ends the draconian cuts put into place by sequestration and that provides for a responsible, sustainable and attainable federal budget,” Rogers said in a statement. “It is my hope that this stopgap legislation will provide time for all sides to come together to reach this essential goal.”

The overall bill would fund the government at $986.3 billion, slightly below current, post-sequestration levels.

The proposal comes about a month after Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell ordered his agency to halt spending on restoration programs, employee travel, hiring and overtime in order to scrounge up additional funds to fight wildfires (E&ENews PM Aug. 21).

That move angered lawmakers, conservation groups and timber interests, which warned it would delay important forest restoration activities that reduce the risk — and cost — of future catastrophic wildfires.