Science at the Bar- The Bigger Picture of Scientific Information Used in the Legal World

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science at the barThis post is a followup to Matthew’s comment here:

Finally, the notion that judges should decide legal issues surrounding the Forest Service because they are not forestry experts is in interesting one. Fact is, judges aren’t necessarily experts in divorce, murder, theft, DUI’s, bribery, etc either….but they rule on cases involving these issues all the time. What federal judges are experts in is the laws of this nation, and unfortunately, too many times, the Forest Service fails to comply with those laws

It occurs to me that many of you might not be aware of the context around the broader issues of courtroom decisions and other kinds of expertise, including scientific expertise. Within the science and technology studies literature, you may find many folks who have studied scientific issues and how they are handled in the courts. Our world is not separable from that world. Dr. Sheila Jasanoff‘s book
“Science at the Bar:Law Science and Technology in America” is considered by many to be the fundamental work in this area, and well worth a read.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t easily lay my hands on my copy of the book, but I did find a review here in the New England Journal of Medicine.

SCIENCE AT THE BAR: LAW, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY IN AMERICA
By Sheila Jasanoff. 285 pp. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University
Press, 1995. $29.95. ISBN 0-674-79302-1.
To many physicians, science in the courtroom means trouble. Science, it is claimed, deals with objective facts and theories whose validity can be judged only by those with lengthy training in scientific method. Law, in contrast, involves rules and regulations applied by judges and juries almost always lacking competence — and often demonstrating striking incompetence — in evaluating scientific evidence. Putting science at the bar is therefore an invitation to outrageous malpractice awards, to the testimony of charlatans who are taken seriously by juries, to the awarding of irrationally large damages in “toxic tort” cases in the absence of scientific evidence of toxicity, to lay interference in the conduct of medical research, and to a familiar litany of judicial errors.

But Sheila Jasanoff, in this broad-ranging and authoritative survey of the relation between law, science, and technology, presents a far more nuanced and complicated picture. Jasanoff, trained as a lawyer and subsequently the creator of Cornell’s flagship department of science and technology studies, has devoted most of her professional life to studying science in the courtroom. Her conceptual framework draws on the emerging field of science studies. In recent decades, this field has come to redefine science not simply as the discovery of the truths of nature, but also as a complex, problematic, error-prone, controversy-ridden process of “constructing” a view of the natural world that may, with luck, rhetorical skill, and time, eventually come to be accepted as mainstream, or “textbook” science.

Thus redefined, science begins to look much more like law. And the notion that the courts should simply ascertain “the established scientific view” appears, at least in many cases, similar to the search for a chimera. For as Jasanoff shows in her many examples, most of them involving biomedical matters, the courts are almost always called on in areas where empirical research is inconclusive, scientific opinion is divided, decisive epidemiologic studies have not been completed, or legislatures have not been willing to provide a framework to govern the application of — for example — new reproductive
and life-prolonging forms of technology. As she puts it, “courts, like regulatory agencies, conduct the bulk of their scientific inquiries ‘at the frontiers of scientific knowledge’ where claims are uncertain, contested and fluid, rather than against the background of largely settled ‘mainstream’ knowledge.”
….

Jasanoff concludes with suggestions for a “more reflective” alliance between law and science. She is well aware of the many egregious errors made by the courts. But in the end, she sees the relation of science and law in America as generally positive, as granting the legal system a “limited and highly
contingent ability to interrogate the scientific community,” as encouraging scientific “reflection and self criticism,” and in general, as encouraging the advance of science and ratifying the positive American view of science and technology. For any serious student of science and law in America, this is an original and essential book

Interestingly, in the search for the review, I also ran across this article by Dr. Jasanoff:
“Is science socially constructed—And can it still inform public policy?” Here is the link:

Abstract

This paper addresses, and seeks to correct, some frequent misunderstandings concerning the claim that science is socially constructed. It describes several features of scientific inquiry that have been usefully illuminated by constructivist studies of science, including the mundane or tacit skills involved in research, the social relationships in scientific laboratories, the causes of scientific controversy, and the interconnection of science and culture. Social construction, the paper argues, should be seen not as an alternative to but an enhancement of scientists’ own professional understanding of how science is done. The richer, more finely textured accounts of scientific practice that the constructivist approach provides are potentially of great relevance to public policy.

which sounds interesting, and relevant to this blog. You can read the first two pages online but it costs $40 to read the whole thing. Published in 1996. Of course, Dr. Jasanoff does not work for a public university, but still..

Rough and Ready: The Other Story

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RoughandReadyClearcutEarlier in the week the owners of the Rough and Ready Lumber mill south of Cave Junction, Oregon announced they were closing their doors for good. There was one reason cited by the owners: A lack of logging on Forest Service and BLM lands in southwestern Oregon.  Jennifer Phillippi even went so far as to describe the situation this way, “It’s like sitting in a grocery store not being able to eat while the produce rots around you.”

Well, if you wander away from the timber mill’s talking points even a little bit and talk with actual neighbors in southwestern Oregon who have witnessed Rough and Ready’s handywork over the years, you get a much different story  – a story of over-cutting, mis-management, toxic contamination and political manipulation.

Jennifer Elliott with the NBC station in Medford has the other side of the story (click here to watch the news segment):

Today, as the last saw mill in Josephine and Jackson county announces it’s plans to close, some residents are sharing the other side of the story: one they say includes political manipulation, mis-management, and contamination. For some, the news that Rough and Ready Lumber in Cave Junction is going out of business threw up a red flag.  Residents fear the threat to close is a ploy to gain access to more timber.

Residents say they’ve seen this happen before. “It’s been some years back the Rough and Ready mill was up for sale,” says South Cave Junction Neighborhood Watch member, Guenter Ambron.

“It’s just wrong,” says a neighbor of Rough and Ready, too scared to identify herself on camera for fear of retaliation. She tells us there’s more than meets in the eye in the company’s announcement to close. “I think it’s being used as a tool to push our representatives and governor into giving them O&C lands,” continues the neighbor.

She says at one point, Rough and Ready was considered a self sufficient company with private logging lands, but she says it’s their own fault they’re out of wood.”If they actually maintained their resource lands and had not clear cut and sprayed with poisons they would actually have a constant supply of timbers to harvest.”

“Now they go in and take this land and bio massed it, all of money they’ve done combined could not pay for the damages it’s done for us, ” says Orville Camp, who lives below a 60 acre area he says was clear cut and sprayed by a group he claims has ties to Rough and Ready Lumber.

“You can see it’s all dead down here,” he remarks.

He tell us that’s part of the reason the wood can’t grow back for this company as well as other timber groups with the same plight.

“They say the land is no longer sustainable for growing trees, which is kind of true.”

Plus, he says it’s destroyed his personal watershed, created a fire hazard, and contaminated his ponds.

We contacted Rough and Ready owner Jennifer Krauss Phillippi for her thoughts on these accusations. She was unavailable for comment.

“For the Phillippi’s to think they’re entitled to our public lands is wrong,” says the anonymous neighbor.

We do know Oregon’s governor is in contact with Rough and Ready owners, but we do not have any information as to the details of that communication.

EIS’s I Wouldn’t Like To Review: Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes

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diagram

Good thing AAAS didn’t take me off their email, even though I stopped my membership. Otherwise I’d miss things like this webinar on the 24th…

The focus of this webinar is on the use of Tet technology in transgenic insects, in the context of a synthetic biology approach to rational development of novel engineered phenotypes. The tet system provides a regulated switch well suited to a modular design approach. Dr Alphey will also discuss his experience of taking such engineered insects through to successful field use.

About the speaker

Dr. Luke Alphey is the Chief Scientist at Oxitec Ltd. Oxitec aims to control insect pests by use of engineered sterile males of the pest insect species (‘RIDL males’). Oxitec successfully conducted the world’s first outdoor experiments with a GM insect in the USA in 2006, and in 2010 showed that a wild mosquito population could be suppressed by this genetics-based method. Dr Alphey’s earlier career focused on basic science, using Drosophila as a model system, latterly at Oxford University where he is now a Visiting Professor. He has published extensively in the field of insect genetic engineering and contributed to the development of international regulations. Dr. Alphey and Oxitec have won a number of awards for this pioneering green technology.

For some reason, I couldn’t find the EIS for the 2006 release (of bollworms as it turns out) easily.. but did find one for Genetically Engineered Bollworm in 2008. It’s 334 pages.. and I guess it wasn’t litigated.

Meanwhile this NY Times piece says..

Authorities in the Florida Keys, which in 2009 experienced its first cases of dengue fever in decades, hope to conduct an open-air test of the modified mosquitoes as early as December, pending approval from the Agriculture Department.

I tried to find if it was an EA or an EIS supporting this decision but ran into a broken link on the APHIS biotechnology website here. Where it says “find biotechnology environmental documents.”

Also “jobs I’m glad I don’t have” include:

Also, the sorting of male and female mosquitoes, which is done by hand, can result in up to 0.5 percent of the released insects being female, the commentary said.

Does One Size Fit All?

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oregon timber harvest

Too many years ago, I served on a timber industry committee charged, among other things, with figuring out whether it was better to advocate the calculation of “allowable sale quantities” in board or cubic feet. Board foot measure estimates how much lumber can be sawn from a log, with allowances for saw blade width (“kerf”), slabs (the left-overs after squaring off a round log), and sawing strategy. Cubic foot measure is the geometry-based volume of a log.

Ceteris paribus, the number of board feet equivalent to one cubic foot is proportional directly to log diameter. For example, a small-diameter log has a bf/cf ratio of about 4, while a large-diameter log’s ratio is about 6.

Today, almost all serious measures of timber are made in cubic feet, except for pulpwood and biomass, which are measured by weight. That’s because cubic foot measure is widely regarded as a more accurate representation of total wood volume, less subject to the vagaries of milling technology and scaling judgment.

Which measure one chooses makes a difference in how one sees the world of wood production and supply. “Everyone” knows that Oregon’s timber harvest has dropped precipitously since the early 1990s. And, so it has, measured in board feet (the blue-line curve).

But a funny thing happens when Oregon’s harvest is measured in cubic feet (the red-line curve). Not nearly so dramatic a decline. The reason is pretty simple. Oregon’s plantation forests grow a whole lot of wood, producing much more growth annually than the old forests the plantations replaced. Cubic foot measure, which is much less sensitive to tree diameter, more accurately captures that volume than does board foot measure.

“How to Respond to Criticism” by Fred Kofman

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verbal aikidoNow, I am not a particular fan of Linkedin. It seems like it’s always on the edge of virus-like behavior, and doing unwanted things. At one point I must have clicked the wrong key and it sent messages inviting everyone I knew and also that of my husband. I got so mad at them I quit and closed my accounts. However, because SAF has a group there full of interesting material for this blog, I decided to rejoin it.

I was surprised yesterday to find something timely and useful pop up from Linkedin. It could also be because the other groups I belong to are the National Council for Dialogue and Deliberation and the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, or perhaps a direct message from the Universe.

Of course, whether these two pieces are worth the loss of privacy is not exactly clear. I hope that you don’t need to be on Linked In to read these pieces.. they are by a fellow named Fred Kofman entitled “How to Respond to Criticism” parts 1 and 2. Here is the “linked in” link to part one..and below is an excerpt.

The only way to win a fight with a colleague is not to have it. Beating him will get you, at best, a defeated resentful opponent.

Here are four general strategies that reduce conflicts. They don’t guarantee you will avoid them, but minimize their probability.

Should they happen, they increase your odds of resolving them constructively. They create a positive predisposition towards collaborative relationships.

If you face an arrogant attack, they will help expose its irrationality, not only to you, but also to others who might frown upon your critic’s strong-arm tactics. If you face constructive criticism, they will help you and your critic turn the fight into a dance.

These strategies are not “nice” in the sense that they allow anybody to state whatever opinion they want. They are “clarifying” in the sense they eliminate the fog of war that prevents rational discussion. They are rules of engagement similar to the ones of the scientific method, which focus on reason and evidence. They take hostility out of the equation, allowing for a logical consideration of the different points of view.

* Speak with humility. Present your argument in safe language, as I described here. Own your opinions. Present them in first person as the conclusion of your reasoning process. This gives others the chance to present a different opinion without clashing with yours. For example, when you say, “In light of the evidence from the focus groups, I believe that the marketing campaign is ready to launch.” you make room for your counterpart to say, “I disagree. The focus groups may have liked the ads, but our retailers are not convinced.”

* Listen with respect. Pay attention to others’ arguments, as I described here, especially when you disagree with them. Reciprocity is the most powerful influence you can exert. If you genuinely try to understand their perspective, they are more likely to try to understand yours. For example, when you say, “It worries me that the retailers are not convinced, what do you suggest we do about it?” you neither discount his data nor yours. This allows both of you to examine all perspectives.

* Choose your battle. If the disagreement is a matter of personal preferences, there is no need to agree. It is futile to argue whether chocolate “tastes” better than strawberry. It may taste better to you, and it may taste worse to him. Unless a joint decision is necessary, it is best to agree to disagree. The desire to “be right” fuels fights that serve no practical purpose.

* Choose your battlefield. Culture can be defined as “the way we do things around here”. If you live in a culture where might makes right, your humility and respect will weaken you. Bullies will always win out in bully-land. Or at least until the group is eliminated by fitter competitors. Reason always beats force in the long term. If you don´t want to go the way of the dinosaurs, evolve to a more rational niche.

Here is a link to his second piece.

And we are pretty respectful here, generally, but once in a while some folks veer off track a bit..

R: “Do you think there is a place for dangerous language? I think the dangerous language comes across a lot stronger. It’s punchier and has a bigger impact. It’s like swearing, sometimes you want to have a bigger effect and therefore a swear word might be more appropriate.”

M: “When stakes are high, I find dangerous language dangerous. It comes, as you say, a lot stronger, like a punch with a big impact. I don´t know anybody who likes to get punched. If you want to hurt people, this is a great way to do it. If you want to collaborate with them, why would you want to intimidate them with swear words?”

R: “But sometimes (sometimes) it is perfectly normal to use more colorful language. Sometimes things ARE stupid, don’t you think?”

M: “No, I don´t think things ARE stupid. I think stupidity is in the eye of the (arrogant) beholder. I do believe that it is perfectly normal to use colorful language, and that is why it is perfectly normal for people to abuse each other, destroy relationships and waste energy in fruitless arguments. I also find it is perfectly normal for companies to collapse because arrogant bullies cannot work together.”

Here is a link to the author.

Silviculture and the Northern Spotted Owl

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For those of you interested in the NSO, there’s a fine article in the new edition of the Western Forester, an SAF newsletter:

“Potential for Silviculture to Contribute to Conservation of Spotted Owls,” by Larry L. Irwin and Jake Verschuyl

Here’s the concluding chapter (spoiler alert!):

Efforts to model forest succession and likely NSO responses in dry forests under several management scenarios suggest a bleak scenario for owl habitat within the <10 yr window described by the 2011 revised recovery plan. In the short-term or at small spatial scales it is argued that forest-health type thinning would likely result in a decrease in available owl habitat even when compared to habitat lost through catastrophic wildfire during the same time period. After several decades, however, the forests treated silviculturally were considered to have more NSOs than those not treated. A majority of federal scientists now caution, despite acute short-term pressures facing NSOs, that successful management and restoration of dry forests will require a long-term, landscape or eco-regional perspective that involves active silviculture.

The entire article is worth a read. So’s the rest of the same edition.

http://www.forestry.org/northwest/westernforester/2013/

Congress: “Time Has Come” to Repair Forest Management Laws

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Here is a recent article by Alan Kovski, who’s work has been discussed here previously: https://ncfp.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/forest-service-tries-to-blend-strategies-of-forest-restoration-fire-risk-reduction/

 This article is reproduced with permission from Daily Environment Report, 73 DEN A-6 (Apr. 16, 2013). Copyright 2013 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <http://www.bna.com>

Here is where a PDF of the complete April 16, 2013 BNA Daily Report can be obtained:(whoops — forgot how to link a PDF form to these posts. Will fix ASAP, if I can).

Lawmakers Stress Time Has Come To Revamp Federal Forest Management

By Alan Kovski | April 15, 2013 09:50PM ET

(BNA) — Five Bills on Forest Management

Key Provisions: Congress is preparing for action to force the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to allow more timber cutting on federal lands.

Potential Impact: The bills could boost rural economies and reduce the risk of wildfires.

What’s Next: House Natural Resources Committee action is expected.

Members of Congress are preparing for action on bills to force the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to allow more timber cutting on federal lands to benefit people in rural areas and reduce wildfires.

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and author of one of the bills, stressed during an April 11 subcommittee hearing that the time for action has arrived. “We are going to move forward with legislation,” he said.

Above all else, lawmakers cited the poor economic conditions in many rural areas-including poverty and high unemployment-as a motivating factor. Lawmakers also said selective tree cutting would increase the health of forests by reducing the size and severity of wildfires and insect infestations.

“Right now, multiple counties in my district and in Western Oregon are approaching insolvency,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said in explaining legislation he and two colleagues have been circulating in draft form. “Many of these counties have real unemployment at or above 20 percent. Poverty is widespread and crippling.”

Like Hastings, DeFazio wants action soon. “The bottom line is, doing nothing is not an option,” DeFazio said.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) said his rural district with extensive national forests is losing people as they give up on finding work in the area. “We’re depopulating in eight of my counties,” he said.

Limits Proposed on Environmental Analyses

The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation discussed several bills aimed at revamping forest management practices, changes that would boost timber companies and sawmills and through them the communities.

Hastings, DeFazio, and several other members of Congress expressed particular concern about the scheduled expiration of the Secure Rural Schools program Sept. 30. Many rural school districts depend on a share of timber sale revenue for their survival.

A bill written by Hastings, the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act (number not yet assigned), would require designation of parts of national forests where revenue would be generated from sales of materials. Annual volume of such materials would be no less than 50 percent of sustained yield.

The bill would limit National Environmental Policy Act requirements by specifying no need for the study of alternatives and by limiting each analysis to 100 pages. The bill also would provide categorical exclusions for proposed actions involving less than 10,000 acres, devised in response to catastrophic events, or developed for community wildfire protection plans.

“This draft legislation is intended as a starting point,” Hastings said.

Bills Would Speed Up Action

Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.) spoke about his bill, the Healthy Forest Management and Wildfire Prevention Act (H.R. 818), which would force the Forest Service and BLM to expedite hazardous fuels reduction, which typically means a mix of tree thinning, deadwood removal, and prescribed burning. His bill would use the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 as a model.

The Self-Sufficient Community Lands Act (H.R. 1294), proposed by Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), would establish “community forest demonstration areas” in national forests and create boards of trustees to manage those areas, with a mix of federal, state, and private interests on the board.

A share of revenue would go to local schools and communities, either through the formula of the soon-to-expire Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000 (16 U.S.C. 7111), or the older formula of the Forest Service section in a 1908 law (16 U.S.C. 5000).

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) vividly described the destructive effects of wildfires in his state as he advocated for his Catastrophic Wildfire Prevention Act of 2013 (H.R. 1345). The bill would expedite Forest Service and BLM work to prevent fires through such means as tree thinning. It also would speed up and limit the scope of NEPA environmental analyses.

Honoring of 1937 Law Sought

The O&C Trust, Conservation and Jobs Act (no number assigned yet) drafted by DeFazio and fellow Oregon Reps. Greg Walden (R) and Kurt Schrader (D) would force BLM to honor a 1937 law known as the O&C Lands Act, which was written to require that BLM lands in southwestern Oregon be managed to produce timber harvests for the economic well-being of local counties. Under that law, 50 percent of timber revenue goes directly to counties.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), ranking member of the subcommittee, agreed on the need for action but expressed frustration that Democrats were excluded from the drafting of the chairman’s bill. He objected to elements in the Republican bills that would involve “skirting public opinion” and would mandate timber harvest levels.

“This is grandstanding and not legislating,” Grijalva said.

But Grijalva, too, indicated there was a need for action. “There’s a crisis in our forests,” he said, noting a growth in the size and severity of forest fires. “I’m ready to sit down with my colleagues and try to work out something that has a realistic chance of becoming law.”

Administration Opposed to Some Bills

At the April 11 hearing, Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said the Obama administration opposed the Tipton, Labrador, and Gosar bills, notably because they would shift some degree of authority to states from the federal government.

Tidwell argued that the Forest Service already has goals for expanded timber harvests, within the limits imposed by constrained budgets and the low prices that the service has been seeing for its wood.

Republicans on the subcommittee were uniform in their criticism of the administration for requesting an increase in federal funds for purchasing land when the government is so deeply in debt that it is cutting many programs. They said the administration is not effectively managing the land the government already owns.

Question of Which Public Served

Members of Congress and Tidwell circled around the question of what public was being served by the administration’s public land policies.

Tidwell said the administration was “driven by what we hear from the public.” Lawmakers emphasized the public in communities adjacent to federal lands.

“You keep saying that the public wants this,” Labrador said. “What public are you talking to?”

Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) asked Tidwell whether the Forest Service prioritizes or weights its estimates of public input to recognize that local communities have more at stake. There needs to be a weighting, Thompson said.

“There’s no weighting going on,” Tidwell said. “We don’t prioritize.”

National environmental groups in recent years have resisted the idea of showing greater concern for the economics or opinions of local communities near the forests. National land belongs to the whole nation, including environmentalists and others in cities far from the forests, they argue. 

For More Information

The forest management bills discussed during an April 11 House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing are available, along with prepared testimony and an archived hearing webcast, at http://naturalresources.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=326329

Mill Closes: “inability to secure a sufficient supply of logs from the surrounding federal forests”

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From the Grants Pass (Oregon) Daily Courier.

http://www.thedailycourier.com/articles/2013/04/17/breaking_news_free/news1.txt

Anyone know about Rough & Ready Lumber? Is the lack of logs the only factor?

Rough & Ready Lumber closes, lays off 85 workers

 

CAVE JUNCTION — Rough & Ready Lumber Company announced Wednesday the closure of its lumber mill, a major local employer that recently celebrated its 90th year in business in the Illinois Valley. The business will lay off 85 employees.

In a news release issued Wednesday afternoon, company officials said the decision is the result of the mill’s inability to secure a sufficient supply of logs from the surrounding federal forests.

“We deeply regret having to close the family lumber business that my grandparents founded in 1922,” said Jennifer Phillippi, CEO and co-owner of Rough & Ready.

Link and Jennifer Phillippi and Joe Krauss are the third-generation of family members to operate the mill. Many employees are third-generation, too. Rough & Ready is known for producing high-quality wood products that are used in doors, windows and exposed beams.

Over the years the family continued Rough & Ready’s tradition of reinvesting in the community, including a $6 million biomass cogeneration facility in 2007, Forest Stewardship Council green certification for sustainably produced wood products, and an investment in the region’s first small log mill, according to the company’s news release. Rough & Ready was poised to begin a new $2 million sawmill project in 2014.

“But, we can’t justify the cost with an inadequate, unpredictable log supply supporting only one shift,” Phillippi said. “It’s like sitting in a grocery store not being able to eat while the produce rots around you.”

 

Once a thriving wood products region, Josephine and Jackson counties in 1975 were home to 22 sawmills, according to the news release. By 2003 six remained, and for the last several years R & R has been the lone sawmill operating in Josephine County.

The company has worked closely with federal and state policy makers since the early 1990s on solutions to the stalemate over federal timber harvests, and the creative ideas and leadership coming from Gov. Kitzhaber and Oregon congressional Reps. Peter DeFazio, Greg Walden and Kurt Schrader have been encouraging, Phillippi said.

“The outlook seemed especially hopeful,” said Phillippi, “when Senator Wyden was appointed chair of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, but we are disappointed that little has changed. The status quo just isn’t enough to sustain us, even with an improving economy and our customers begging for more of what our employees are so good at making.”

Rough & Ready announced that it would provide mill employees with severance pay and assistance in finding new jobs.

State Trust Model for Federal Lands?

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An article from the Bose (Idaho) Weekly:

Timber! State Officials Give OK to Significant Lumber Harvest

Posted by on Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 9:38 AM

The Idaho Land Board, made up of Idaho’s top state officers including Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna, has approved a 2014 plan to harvest nearly 250 million board feet of timber, the largest planned harvest in decades. In contrast, Idaho’s 2002 timber plan volume was 175 million board feet.

In this week’s Boise Weekly, which hit the stands this morning, we report on Boise State Public Radio’s recent “Community Conversation” on public land management where state officials champion Idaho’s management of 3.6 million acres of endowment lands.

“About 1 million acres of that land is forested, and that generates about $50 million in income,” said Dave Groeschl, state forester and deputy director of forestry and fire at the Idaho Department of Lands, referring to the financial returns of timber sales and commercial interests that are generated for Idaho public schools.

Idaho House Speaker Scott Bedke, a cattle rancher from Oakley when he’s not wrangling lawmakers at the Statehouse, took it one step further, suggesting that Idaho’s endowment land management should serve as a role model for a Gem State takeover of federal land management.

“I think we can all agree that we do a very good job at managing the [endowment lands]. We should do the same thing, if given the chance, with federal lands,” said Bedke. “Now think about this for a moment,” he said, offering another hypothetical: “Imagine 400,000 acres set aside with proceeds dedicated to public education. Think about another 500,000 acres to help us with funding for roads. Another 500,000 acres could go for health and welfare. And we’re talking about 37 million acres of that land in Idaho.”

But Jonathan Oppenheimer, senior conservation associate with the Idaho Conservation League, vehemently disagreed.

“Look, we all want to have the best public education for our children, but selling off our public land is no way to achieve that,” he said. “These lands are the legacy of all Americans, they’re not just owned by Idaho. This is a radical idea.”

A couple of comments:No one seriously expects the federal government to turn National Forests over to states. And “selling off our public land“? Ain’t gonna happen. However, placing some USFS land into a trust to be managed in the same manner as Idaho’s endowment lands has merit. For example, in the Northwest Forest Plan area, I can see placing all Matrix lands into trusts, one for each NF, for example, where the board of directors guide the harvesting that, collectively, equals the 1 BBF annual harvest that the Northwest Forest Plan was supposed to provide for, but never has. The trusts also would oversee the management of other resources – recreation, water quality, etc. — multiple use, but with a minimum allowable (sustainable) cut. The management of LSRs and other land allocations would continue as is.

Rat Poison is the new DDT and Marijuana is the Problem: Column by Char Miller

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An illegal marijuana grow site in Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California. | Photo: USFS Region 5/Flickr/Creative Commons License
An illegal marijuana grow site in Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California. | Photo: USFS Region 5/Flickr/Creative Commons License

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt.

The fisher is of particular interest. Despite its name, the furry mammal does not live in or near the coast but instead occupies remote, closed-canopy forests, sites that are prime landscapes for illegal marijuana grows. Akin to a weasel, it pursues a wide diet ranging from fruits to small mammals to birds, and has been known to take on the most bristly of forest creatures. It is the “only animal tough and clever enough to prey regularly on porcupines,” observes the Center for Biological Diversity — “no easy feat.”

However skilled a killer it might be, the fisher is not able to discern whether its dinner is laced with rodenticide. This has led to a spike in its mortality, further diminishing its already declining population. That’s the word from scientists working for the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project, out the College of Natural Resources at UC-Berkeley; they have launched the first in-depth analysis of the threats this toxin poses to this rare species. Of the 58 fisher carcasses they autopsied, the data revealed some troubling patterns:

79 percent were exposed to one or more AR [anticoagulant rodenticides] chemical. The number of AR compounds detected per animal ranged from 1 to 4. Both first and second generation ARs were detected, with brodifacoum being most common and detected in 44 of the 46 (96%) exposed fishers, followed by bromodiolone (16 of 46; 35%), diphacinone (8 of 46; 17%), chlorophacinone (four of 46; 9%), difethialone (one of 46; 2%), and wafarin (one of 46; 2%).

The lethality of the chemicals listed is only part of the picture. Another facet is the spatial distribution of the dead Pacific fishers; their bodies were widely distributed across northwestern California and in the southern Sierra Mountains. The fact that there was no clustering of deaths by specific location “indicates that fishers are encountering these poisons in remote, natural forest regions within their home ranges.”

CBD litigated and the fisher listing proposal is due in 2014.. on the CBD website they say the problems are logging and development that caused “habitat destruction”; yet if people are finding them dead scattered around, it might indicate that the habitat is OK. And if people are already doing things that are illegal to fishers, it doesn’t seem like the threat of violating ESA will stop them. Unless you can litigate counties or the Feds to force them to do more law enforcement? But you gotta wonder if the threat of citizens in the forest being killed is not enough to get sufficient law enforcement, why fishers would apparently count more than forest visitors. Not to speak of “what is the rural equivalent of the “broken window” theory?” in terms of letting lawlessness go forth..

It makes me wonder whether some of the toughest environmental problems might not being addressed by groups that specialize in litigation, due to litigation not being the tool to solve the problem. Kind of an example of the old joke..

“Man searches diligently under lamp-post at night. Explains to passer-by that he has lost his keys. “Did you lose them under the lamp-post?” “No.” “Then why are you looking under the lamp-post?” “Because there’s no light anywhere else.”

I’m not saying litigation shouldn’t be a tool in the toolkit, but if we are to have safe and economically vibrant rural communities and sustainable forests, it will take a great deal more than that. Or as I used to say when I wored in NEPA, documenting environmental effects is necessary, but not sufficient, to meet section 101 goals, i.e.:

Federal Government, in cooperation with State and local governments, and other concerned public and private organizations, to use all practicable means and measures, including financial and technical assistance, in a manner calculated to foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.