Agriculture Secretary Scolds Rural Folks

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Just reading this, I’m thinking that maybe Mr. Vilsack and his Department could team up with rural folks in developing a proactive message. It seems to me that if you take/decide to keep a job as an Agriculure Secretary, you are part of the solution.

And there are more “folks” in rural America, at least out west, than farmers. Maybe we need a broader “rural America” set of policies, and move proactively beyond the idea that those policies are all located in USDA, and that the Farm Bill is the sine qua non of rural America.

It also seems to me that eating, heating, and energy to run electronics are important to urban Americans, even if they don’t/can’t afford to take their recreation in rural areas. I guess maybe we can get all that stuff from other countries (after all, we’re “competing against the world”)..but I think we’ve had some issues with that, in the past.. at least.

But maybe the Secretary’s discussion is really about politics, not policy.

WASHINGTON — Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has some harsh words about rural America: It’s “becoming less and less relevant,” he says.

A month after an election that Democrats won even as rural parts of the country voted overwhelmingly Republican, the former Democratic governor of Iowa told farm-belt leaders this past week that he’s frustrated with their internecine squabbles and says they need to be more strategic in picking their political fights.

“It’s time for us to have an adult conversation with folks in rural America,” Vilsack said in a speech at a forum sponsored by the Farm Journal. “It’s time for a different thought process here.”

He said rural America’s biggest assets — the food supply, recreational areas and energy — can be overlooked by people elsewhere as the U.S. population shifts more to cities, their suburbs and exurbs.

“Why is it that we don’t have a farm bill?” Vilsack said. “It isn’t just the differences of policy. It’s the fact that rural America with a shrinking population is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we had better recognize that and we better begin to reverse it.”

“We need a proactive message, not a reactive message,” he said. “How are you going to encourage young people to want to be involved in rural America or farming if you don’t have a proactive message? Because you are competing against the world now.”

Let it burn? Federal agencies draft national wildland fire strategy

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Thanks to Terry Seyden for this one..
Here’s a link and below is an excerpt.

I thought that this was interesting..

The national strategy suggests three big goals: Restore fire-adapted landscapes. Protect communities. Suppress fire. And it provides three tools: An unprecedented gathering of fire science data. A mapping project to visualize that information throughout the country. And a risk trade-off analysis to make sense of it all.

The data has been piling up for the past three years. The maps have progressed at the same time. The risk analysis should be ready next June.

For Ann Walker at the Western Governors Association, the strategy is a chance to make some practical decisions. “Everybody has to come to the table,” Walker said. “This is not a partisan issue. We’ve lost lives. We’ve lost homes. We’re not considering wildfire on the same scale as tornados and tsunamis and hurricanes, but we have huge ability to change that path. One key thing we need is to get to a healthy level of active federal forest management.”
One way to do that is to mix more commercial timber cutting into hazardous fuels reduction projects, Walker said. Clearing brush and burning slash doesn’t pay for itself – it must be taxpayer funded. But combining those fire safety projects with sawlog acreage in landscape-scale stewardship contracts could improve the balance sheet. “We need to do a much higher level of harvesting, and even with the current environmental protections in place we can do that,” Walker said. “There have to be viable commercial timber sales to pay for the rest of the work that needs to be done.”

Improving the market to use slash wood as biomass for airplane fuel would also help, Walker said. So would consolidating the checkerboard ownership of forests that jumbles federal agencies, state governments and private entities in a confused and inefficient management tangle.

Many of those suggestions have found a home in the draft wildfire strategy. They’re also the elements that give environmental advocates like Arlene Montgomery of Friends of the Wild Swan the most heartburn.
For example, the strategy proposes greater use of “categorical exclusions” to speed up large-scale landscape management plans. “I don’t think this rises to the level of categorical exclusion when we’re talking about big landscapes like this or threatened and endangered species protection,” said Arlene Montgomery of Friends of the Wild Swan. “Categorical exclusions were for things like painting an outhouse or cleaning a campground. This seems to go beyond that.”

Montgomery said her group was one of several suing the Forest Service for its use of a categorical exclusion to do pre-commercial thinning on 3,600 acres in the Flathead National Forest.
“They didn’t even have maps where the units were so you could find them,” Montgomery said. “If it’s categorically excluded, you wouldn’t find that ever. What if it was in lynx or bull trout habitat? If you’re doing that under the mantra of fire strategy, that’s not good policy.”

Matthew Koehler of the Wild West Institute in Missoula accused the strategy drafters of ignoring calls to put preservation ahead of harvesting. “I will say that based on the list of people who are part of the Western Community Fire Management Working Group (participants in the strategy’s public review process) there certainly aren’t very many dedicated activists from the forest protection community on the list,” Koehler said in an email. “The list, perhaps with an exception or two, seems more like a group of people who have long since attempted to increase logging of our public lands, decrease citizen oversight and have been critical of most efforts to hold the Forest Service accountable when it comes to law, regulations and science.”

A couple of thoughts

First, did Ms. Walker really jump straight from “using wood” to “airline jet fuel”. Maybe she said “an array of uses, including airline jet fuel.” A couple of presentations at SAF dealt with the idea that it is more efficient to use wood for heating than to convert it to biofuels. Still with people getting millions to study E.coli (not the pathogenic one).. as here. I’m getting the idea that using wood for heat just doesn’t have the high-tech component that research panels find appealing. Which would be a sad story for technology development in this country.

Second, CE’s exist and are part of the NEPA regulations. *Warning: below may get a little NEPA-geeky.

The quote goes ” “Categorical exclusions were for things like painting an outhouse or cleaning a campground. “. When in actuality, they are for many things. You can want this not to be the case, but then you should say “I don’t agree with CEQ that it is OK to establish a category for x or y.”

When the quote goes like the above, it sounds as if the FS is violating its NEPA procedures, which is different from a person not agreeing with the NEPA procedures as described in regulation (which had public comment).

In fact, NPS has one for herbicide application. In terms of endangered species, there are “extraordinary circumstances” in the NEPA regulations. Also there are the ESA regulations themselves.

Then she is quoted as saying ““They didn’t even have maps where the units were so you could find them,” Montgomery said. “If it’s categorically excluded, you wouldn’t find that ever.” That doesn’t make any sense as quoted. Plenty of people use CE’s and have maps of units.

Anyway, interesting comments on some of our usual subjects.

I found some public domain fire photos on the NIFC website… worth checking out..here.

Studies Conclude Forests Facing A Bleak, Dry Future: From Payson Roundup

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thinnedPines

We have discussed many studies on this blog, but I don’t remember this one.. anyone have more info on it? Here’s a link to the (article?op-ed?couldn’t tell) in the Payson Roundup.

The first study, published in Forest Ecology and Management, concluded that uncontrolled crown fires racing through thick stands of unthinned timber pose a grave danger to the northern spotted owl, an old-growth forest dependent raptor long at the center of the timber wars.

#The researchers from Oregon State University and Michigan State University concluded that after a century of suppressing fires and allowing unnaturally thick stands of timber to grow, the Forest Service has dramatically changed the impact of fire.

#Instead of frequent, low-intensity fires that cleared out deadwood and saplings, millions of acres now face the threat of intense, soil-sterilizing fires that will consume the old-growth reserves set aside for the spotted owls.

#Historically, ground fires burn through debris on the floor of old-growth forests, without climbing into the lower branches of the big trees. However, in a forest crowded with saplings, fire climbs into the tops of the big trees and spreads from treetop to treetop. As a result, fires start in the forests crowded with saplings then spread into the treetops of even old-growth patches set aside to protect endangered species like goshawks and spotted owls — which do best hunting under a closed forest canopy.

#John Baily, with Oregon State University, observed that the Forest Service for “many years” has “avoided almost all management on many public lands.”

#He said that the Forest Service has been “kicking the can down the road,” which makes eventual “stand replacing” fires inevitable. “Sooner or later a stand replacing fire will come that we can’t put out. Then the fires are enormous.”

#The Wallow Fire in the White Mountains in 2011 consumed more than 500 square miles of forest, including many designated critical habitat areas for Mexican spotted owls. Only thinned buffer areas saved communities like Alpine.

“West is Best” Study and Some Review

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Thanks to Steve Wilent for sending this study and raising some questions.

Now, for my own part, some of my best friends are economists and I am a fan of economics. Still, statistics can be used to tell many stories, and I have learned to read carefully any studies. What I like about economic work, compared to some biologists, is that economists tend to be more upfront about their assumptions. But we have to be careful, because like all research projects, they can be used to argue for policies that may be less desirable if openly discussed and debated.

My own first recollection of this was studies that showed it didn’t matter if the economy of, say, Forks, Washington, went in the dumper because the state as a whole would do fine, thanks to the entrepreneurs and other industries in Seattle. That’s kind of like saying, the family is healthy if some members are not sick but others are. The values, and spatial scale of analysis, often need to be openly discussed and questioned. So I intend to do that here.

Here is a link to the report:

Click to access West_Is_Best_Full_Report.pdf

One must be wary when one reads executive summaries, as we have shown here before. Here is a snippet of this report’s executive summary:

This report finds that the West’s popular national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and other public lands offer its growing high-tech and services industries a competitive advantage, which is a major reason why the western economy has outperformed the rest of the U.S. economy in key measures of growth—employment, population, and personal income—during the last four decades. In addition, as the West’s economy shifts toward a knowledge-based economy, new research shows that protected federal public lands support faster rates of job growth and are correlated with higher levels of per capita income.

General findings:
• Higher-wage services industries, such as high-tech and health care, are leading the West’s job growth and diversifying the economy.
• Entrepreneurs and talented workers are choosing to work where they can enjoy outdoor recreation and natural landscapes.
• Increasingly, chambers of commerce and economic development associations in every western state are using the region’s national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and other public lands as a tool to lure companies to relocate.
• High-wage services industries also are using the West’s national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and other public lands as a tool to recruit and retain innovative, high-performing talent.
Specific points:
• From 1970 to 2010, the West’s employment grew by 152 percent compared to 78 percent for the rest of the country.
• This western job growth was almost entirely in services industries such as health care, real estate, high-tech, and finance and insurance, which created 19.3 million net new jobs, many of them high-paying.
• Western non-metropolitan counties with more than 30 percent of the county’s land base in federal protected status such as national parks, monuments, wilderness, and other similar designations increased jobs by 345 percent over the last 40 years. By comparison, similar counties with no protected federal public lands increased employment by 83 percent.
• In 2010, per capita income in western non-metropolitan counties with 100,000 acres of protected public lands is on average $4,360 higher than per capita income in similar counties with no protected public lands.

So here are a couple of my points, if I were reviewing this document.

1. Is “the West” a meaningful entity from this standpoint? The map that they used is above. Wow. I don’t know how this can be meaningful. For example, in Colorado and Wyoming, at least, energy work has a great many jobs. How does this work if added with states like Oregon and Washington. Similarly, there may be jobs associated with timber in Oregon and Washington, but added to Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, they would be a smaller percentage. My experience with Colorado Roadless taught me that states are meaningful and very different entities. If I were going to do this study, I would break down the results by state, and by rural and metro areas within the state (maybe they did but that’s not highlighted in the executive summary).

A job in Denver is not the same thing to the state or to the “West”, as a job in Monte Vista or Delta, Colorado. Which goes back to my point about the spatial scale chosen.

2. The authors argue in their paper that it’s not just “public lands” but “protected public lands,” that correlate with happy businesses willing to move to the state. (Maybe it would be better for the environment if people in rural areas had jobs, and fewer people moved to western metro areas causing pressure on public lands recreation and water 😉 ? Maybe it would be better for them to repopulate rust belt cities?).

So what, you might ask, are “protected public lands” to the authors of the report? Well, they refer to a letter signed by many economists (it sounds like Headwaters had a prominent role in the dissemination of this letter):

In 2011, more than 100 U.S. economists and related academics—including three Nobel Laureates—signed a letter urging the President to “create jobs and support businesses by investing in our public lands infrastructure and establishing new protected areas such as parks, wilderness, and monuments.” The letter states that federal protected public lands are essential to the West’s economic future, attracting innovative companies and workers, and contributing a vital component of the region’s competitive advantage.
—Economist Letter on Value of Public Lands

and

We urge you to create jobs and support businesses by investing in our public lands nfrastructure and establishing new protected areas such as parks, wilderness, and monuments.

Here’s a link to information about the letter.

Yet, I would bet that there is a high correlation between the existence of “parks, wilderness and monuments” and general public lands. To be able to prove that it was the “protected” ones and not the other (say roadless, WSAs, ski areas) etc., somehow you would have to do another analysis step. I would have thought perhaps that the National Parks lobbying organization had funded this report based on the fuzziness of the connection to the “protected causes good economies” conclusion, but I was assured by Mr. Rasker that it was funded by Headwaters itself, and he kindly sent me the link to where there funding comes from here.

If the paper is arguing that “protecting” contributes more to the economy than hunting, fishing, oil and gas, coal, skiing and OHV ing, then that would be useful, but you should approach it by county, in my view, not across “the West” .

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the study. What are yours?

Holiday Gifts for Tree Lovers- Just for Fun

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© 2012 Dan Goldberg

We have had many serious things on the blog this week, including the Supreme Court, so here are some fun items, thanks to Craig Rawlings of the Forest Business Network.

Here’s the link to an organization called Bad Beetle which makes the iphone case pictured above. This is the link to the IPad case, which is going on my wish list for the holidays..also uses reclaimed fire hose.

Here’s another link to “One2ten – Ten of the most unusual wooden products ever made.”

Note: I am the happy owner of two wood watches and a wood bow tie, so I don’t think the watches are as “bizarre” as the author of the article does.

Prevent legal quagmire for timber industry: Oregonian Editorial

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Yes, save lots of litigation bucks! I agree with the Oregonian Editorial Board here.
Christmas always reminds me of Dickens, and this case could otherwise grow into one reminiscent of the infamous Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. There are many other, potentially more productive, public works and employment programs we could invest in..

The Supreme Court may now punt rather than ruling on the merits in the case, Tenny says. Environmental groups will respond by challenging the EPA’s new rule in court, and the legal wrangling, once again, will go on and on.

Enter Congress. If the Supreme Court does, in fact, give the case the brush-off, Congress should act quickly on very targeted legislation introduced in both the House and Senate. The companion bills enjoy bipartisan support, including that of Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Their passage would simply provide firm legal footing for long-standing EPA policy governing logging runoff.

This legislation barely moves the needle on the controversy meter, and it would provide great relief to an important industry in Oregon and many other states. It deserves prompt passage..

The idea of surgical litigation to resolve issues that cause protracted litigation otherwise is a useful one to have in the CREATE toolkit. Speaking of transparency, here is a link to the oral arguments. And a quote suggesting the alternative to legislation is protracted litigation (thanks to Steve Wilent for finding this):

MR. FISHER [for respondents = NEDC]:

But if I might just explain to this Court, I think it will help the conversation if I explain exactly what our case looks like going forward, because we have and will maintain a claim for forward-looking relief for two reasons. One is, for the reason that was mentioned a couple of times in the beginning part of the argument, because we contend that the new rule simply violates the statute, and we have a right to bring a citizen suit for a violation of the Clean Water Act itself, which is to say the language that requires EPA to regulate –

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Is this a –

MR. FISHER: — all discharges associated with industrial activity.

Parts of The Corporate Recreation Industry vs. Utah Elected Officials

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We have had much discussion about “corporations” when it comes to oil and gas and timber. The situation with the Outdoor Industry Association is an another industry association lobbying, and with its own PAC. They seem to be lobbying, in this case, to get rid of the messy and seemingly interminable place-by-place public processes in land management planning for public lands. It seems to this observer that if the idea of place-based bills in Congress is bad, then the idea of unilateral “monumenting” is possibly just as or more bad. Seems to me like you should be consistent about which public process you prefer.

Here is a link to a news article.
Here is a link to the Blue Ribbon Coalition side of the story. and an excerpt below. The whole section on this by BRC is worth reading to those interested in both sides of the story. Thanks to BRC for doing a quality job on explaining their point of view.

Thanks to them for the SUWA link which says..

To protect these scenic landscapes, in March of 2011 SUWA –along with members of the Greater Canyonlands Coalition including Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Parks Conservation Association, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, and Coloradans for Utah Wilderness — made a formal request to the Secretary of the Interior requesting that Secretary Salazar bar off-road vehicle (“ORV”) use on 1,050 miles of ORV route in sensitive habitat, streams, wetlands, riparian areas, archaeological sites and other vulnerable areas until it can conduct further studies on the impacts of the activity and determine whether it is, in fact, a sustainable use. The petition would leave open 1,400 miles of ORV route within the petition area, and about 13,000 miles of routes open in the four BLM field offices surrounding Greater Canyonlands.

Unfortunately, in August 2011 the Obama administration refused to host a public discussion on protecting the Greater Canyonlands region. Even worse, it claims the management plans written by the Bush administration already provide adequate protection. These are the same Bush plans that designated more than 3,000 miles of off-road vehicle trails in proposed redrock wilderness.

It seems to me that “designating trails” is different from “off trail abuse.> This could lead to fruitful dialogue, I bet, between SUWA or OIA and BRC. Now I am not a particular aficionado of OHVs myself, but it seems to be you could get a lot more off trail abuse stopped if you collaborated with folks out there, instead of trying to kick them out. But maybe that’s me, because I figure most people are reasonable. And we want our kids in the woods, and family recreation, and I see a lot of that happening with OHV’s.

Again, I wonder what wonderful things we all could do for outdoor recreation if groups weren’t going around spending energies stabbing other recreationists in the back? If a ranger can do it on a district (as described here), why can’t someone do it at the national level?

A spokesperson for Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said the state does not want to see a reprise of the 1996 designation of a 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by President Clinton. Said Ally Isom, deputy chief of staff and spokesperson for Herbert, in a statement provided to PLN, “No one has formally approached the Governor or his office about a proposed monument in Utah. We certainly hope we don’t have another Bill Clinton approach to creating a monument. Canyonlands National Park was established by statute and any expansion ought to be rightly created by statute involving all interested parties, including Utah stakeholders.”

Utah’s Congressional Delegation was also kept in the dark regarding OIA’s proposal. They learned about it only after local media called requesting comments on OIA’s letter.

Utah’s Senator’s Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, joined with Utah’s Congressmen Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz in a letter urging President Obama not to establish a new National Monument.
“We are opposed to efforts to create national monuments within the state of Utah by presidential decree. Federal land-use decisions must be cultivated in a collaborative process that balances various stakeholder uses and priorities.”…. “We are opposed to this petition because it flies in the face of the collaborative process outlined above. Federal land-use designations affect a wide-range of stakeholders and each group should have a seat at the table.” … “Again, we strongly urge the rejection of the most recent — and all future — petitions for national monument designations by presidential decree.”

More on this tomorrow.

Regulating the Flood-Prone Compared to the Wildfire-Prone

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new york after sandy

Given our discussions of people who build in fire prone areas, I thought it was interesting to compare to a blog post about building in flood prone areas. The post is by Stéphane Hallegatte, Senior Economist, Sustainable Development Network, Office of the Chief Economist, The World Bank, and is on Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog here.

Here’s a quote:

There are limits to what coastal defenses and land regulations can achieve. Some like the idea that we build in risky areas because of “wrong incentives”, namely flood insurance subsidies through the National Flood Insurance Program. According to them, removing these incentives would solve the problem.

“Wrong incentives” exist and play a role – this is obvious – but unfortunately they cannot explain the current trend in risk exposure alone. Flood losses are on the rise in almost all countries, including those that have no flood insurance system (5). And if insurance claims help pay for rebuilding, they cannot compensate for all the losses. Getting flooded is a tragedy, with or without insurance.

People move toward risky areas because this is where better jobs and higher incomes are. And they are there because growing sectors are in coastal areas – driven by harbors and global trade – and in cities – that are usually located next to rivers and coasts and thus in flood prone areas. Would financial sector professionals quit their high-wage jobs in Manhattan in the absence of flood insurance? Would their employers move their headquarters to the Great Plains? Would the beach club owner in New Jersey move her business two miles inside the country?

Better land regulations may be able to decrease flood exposure, but they cannot do so in a significant manner – in the absence of a large-scale buys-out and house destruction program that appears extremely unlikely (6).

Flood exposure will not disappear anytime soon, even if land regulations are improved and bad incentives are removed.

Clearly, people don’t move to the rural interior West for better jobs and higher incomes. Still, people tend to move or agglomerate places that are beautiful and/or near coasts. And whether low or high density, the more people, there is likely to be more potential insurance payout required. Not to speak of the tornado prone, or the earthquake prone.

When To Do an EIS for a Regulation?

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EIS’s for regulations can be expensive. Yet it seems like sometimes it’s useful. A concerned citizen might ask, “is there some interagency (say CEQ) guideline as when to do such an investment?” or “is it an artifact of case law and different for each kind of action by each kind of agency?” Sort of a patchwork quilt of court rulings?

My instinct based on common sense would go something like, roadless regulations might make sense to do because there is something that can be projected and analyzed (well, more or less, guessed at, what you might have done, but now won’t do). Planning regulation not so much. Yet the Forest Service spend megabucks analyzing the 2008 and 2012 planning rules. Meanwhile, the EPA “forest” roads regulation has no EIS.

It appears to me that the Planning Rule, is an outlier then. My memory is fading for some of these things, but I think the FS was required to do one as an outcome of a court case. I did find this letter under scoping comments for an EIS for the 2005 Rule, which said it was Citizens for Better Forestry et al. v. USDA.

Can you think of other examples? What would be your “common sense” approach?

270 big larch on Flathead NF saved from cone collection scheme

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Readers may recall that back in March we highlighted the Flathead National Forest’s plans to cut down 270 of the biggest, genetically best western larch trees remaining on the Montana forest in order to, get this, collect seed cones. The proposal garnered some Montana media attention and lots of comments from the public, 97% of which were opposed to killing these big larch trees for seed cones, especially when there are so many non-lethal ways to collect larch cones and seed.

On December 3, Flathead National Forest Supervisor Chip Weber sent out this letter officially cancelling the “Forest-wide Western Larch Seed Cone Collection Project.” Supervisor Weber’s letter stated:

“This project has been cancelled because our seed orchard in Bigfork produced a larch cone crop this fall that was sufficient to meet our immediate larch seed needs. This was an unexpected cone crop as the trees had previously only produced a few cones….While the seed that we collect in the Bigfork Seed Orchard must be shared with the other forests in Montana, we anticipate that with this cone collection, the Forest-wide Western Larch Seed Cone Collection Project is not necessary.”