I just ran across this action alert from the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center:
Sometimes the Forest Service just can’t let go of a bad idea. For years timber planners on the Salmon/Scott River District of the Klamath National Forest in California have wanted to log the native forests at the “Little Cronan” timber sale.
This is about the worst place possible for a timber sale- Currently these old-growth forests provide spotted owl habitat and riparian reserves near the Wild and Scenic eligible North Fork Salmon River. Further, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed the area as “critical” for the protection and recovery of spotted owls.
The Forest Service is proposing to build log landings and designate bulldozer skid trails in this Key Watershed for salmon recovery and even hopes to open-up “riparian reserves” for logging.
At a time when many communities are coming together to embrace restoration forestry, why return to the dark ages of riparian old-growth logging in a Key Watershed for at-risk species?
This was a while back, Secretary Ezra Taft Benson eating in his office, but I couldn’t find any more recent that were public.
This is the first Presidential election since this blog began in 2009, so it’s a good time to stop and reflect. At the end of the next couple of months, either way, we are likely to have some different people in various positions of interest. So to engage our right brains in visioning a better future, I ask you to do this visualization and write a post about it for the blog.
Imagine yourself with a private meeting with the Secretary of Agriculture. Imagine the Cage in the Whitten Building. This individual (current or new one)welcomes you, asks if you’d like some refreshment, and then has you sit down.
She/he starts out the conversation with
” (Insert your name here), I’ve heard from my staff that you have passion, knowledge about and great personal experience with our National Forests. I’ve brought you in for this discussion because I, too, care, about them deeply, and I’m interested in your perspective. I’m looking for advice. I understand that the Forest Service is only one piece of what the USDA does, but it’s a very important piece. I believe that our public lands, in one way or another, touch the soul of each American. If you were sitting in my chair, what would you do differently?
Your visioning might include these questions or others that occur to you.
What would you ask the Forest Service to do differently?
It seems like there is so much contention with Forest Service programs compared to our other programs. Do you think that there’s anything I can do about that?
If you had my job, and had to articulate a vision for the National Forests, what would it be?
I can speak for the President when I say he is ready to start mending fences and promoting new assertively bipartisan efforts. In the world of the Forest Service, what topic(s) do you think is(are) ripe for bipartisan action?
I’m confident that we can imagine and dream a better world.. and there’s lots of horsepower among our readers. I’m looking forward to seeing what we come up with.
A guest post from Felice Pace. You may have read his posts on the Range Blog of High Country News.
It does not appear that there has been discussion on this site about whether the main tool being used to implement forest restoration/fire risk reduction projects on public lands – the timber sale contract – is a good tool or even adequate for the task of forest restoration/fire risk reduction.
From my perspective (30 years of looking at timber sales), the timber sale contract is a good tool if the task is getting logs out of the woods and to the mill but a poor tool if the task is forest restoration (including fire risk reduction).
The problem is that when a timber sale is used to implement restoration – including when the timber sale is embedded within a stewardship contract – timber economics rules. Because public forests are remote and because production and transportation costs in the western US (where most US public lands are located) are high, economics dictates removing too many trees per acre and too many large (dominant) trees. This almost always frustrates the restoration objective.
For example, FS in the Klamath Mountains typically “thins” down to 40% or less canopy closure for restoration/fire risk reduction. But reducing moisture competition and opening the stands to sunlight to this extent results in accelerated sprouting of trees and brush. This in turn results in more fire danger – and a dense, highly flammable understory 8-30 years after the “treatment”.
If we really want to restore western forests we need a different, more appropriate tool. Restoration work should be funded up front and accomplished via straight up service contracts. Any commercial product which results can/should be sold separately from the log-sort yard.
Would it be possible during this new round of forest plans to try such an approach on at least one forest per region?
Felice Pace has lived in the Klamath River Basin since 1975. For 15 years, he worked for and led the Klamath Forest Alliance as Program Coordinator, Executive Director and Program Director. He remains part of the Alliance’s Core Group, and now consults with environmental and indigenous organizations on fund raising and program development. He currently resides at Klamath Glen, near the mouth of the Klamath River.
Note from Sharon: Many service contracts are out there.. some forests have mostly service contracts. I wonder if any forests have 0 timber sale contracts, I bet many districts, even in Colorado, do. I wonder if there is a table somewhere of mechanical treatment acres by service contract or timber sale contract by forest? Anyone?
Banners hung from Bend highways – and on a log deck, state protesters’ view that Deschutes National Forest is removing old-growth trees in thinning project; Forest Service denies claims
This is an example of the FS getting its side of the story out there. Good on them and to KTVZ for publishing it here.
Here’s a quote from the FS side:
The EXF Thinning, Fuels Reduction and Research Project is a collaborative effort between the Deschutes National Forest and the Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service. The project site, in the Lookout Mountain Unit of the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest, is located west of La Pine and about three miles east of Crane Prairie Reservoir.
· The Lookout Mountain Unit of the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest was established in 1937 as a center for forest silviculture, management, and insect and disease research in ponderosa pine forests east of the Cascade Range. Today’s dense forests on Lookout Mountain were established primarily after two stand-replacement wildfires that occurred around 1845 and 1900. The road system was constructed in the 1960s. Over the last 35 years, vegetation research treatments have occurred on 2,534 of the 3,535 acres within the Lookout Mountain Unit.
· Planned research will improve our understanding of how management actions influence forest structure and dynamics over time, including the effects of thinning and fuels reduction treatments on forest resiliency during a period of potential climatic change.
· Planned management actions will maintain growth of trees through thinning, leave forests more resilient to drought, reduce their susceptibility to forest insects, and reduce the risk of significant loss from wildfire.
And from “concerned citizen Jeffrey Kingsley from Milton-Freewater Oregon” (8 miles s of Walla Walla Washington, 272 miles from Bend).
Going up to Lookout after logging operations started was devastating. The forest service claims to be worried about fires but let logging crews leave piles of slash two stories high along with other debris strewn throughout the area creating much more fire risk than the intact forest we saw there before. You can see huge log decks of old growth trees cut to line the pockets of industry at the expense of recreation, wildlife, and the last intact scenic ponderosa pine forests.” said Kingsley.
Hmm. Of course, they will treat the slash, also it appears to me after having a chance to discuss the project with various involved individuals, it is a research project. I’m sure that industry is happy to get it, but that’s not the point. Does Mr. Kingsley really believe that PNW scientists design their projects to benefit the timber industry? Or why else say it?
Another piece of the FS story is that civil servants must always be reasonable and civil. That seems to be a disadvantage in any competition of impugning motives and inflammatory rhetoric.
Here’s another piece, by Karen Coulter, the director of the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project, an environmental advocacy organization based in Fossil, Ore.(about 100 miles away)
The court ruling on EXF granted extraordinary deference to the agency because the timber sales are on an experimental forest and did not otherwise address our legal claims regarding the wrongful use of a unique intact block of old growth forest on public lands.
Note the response to the claims in the comments..
But it is really “wrongful” to do experiments on an experimental forest?
And what do the environmental groups in Bend think? Why are only people from far away quoted? I guess the good news might be that there aren’t any questionable projects on closer National Forests, so they have to range more widely to find projects to appeal?
This is an op-ed in the Denver Post by Dr.Patty Limerick of the Center of the American West. Note: you can order T-shirts with Gifford Pinchot’s quote here. I am posting because some of the research she cites may be just as true of positions and debates over land management. (I feel the same as she about being “civilian casualties” in a “battleground” state.)
CU psychology professor Leaf Van Boven has been doing extraordinary research challenging the popular perception that polarization is the operating mode preferred by the American citizenry, and revealing, instead, the existence of a majority of moderates.
Van Boven’s work makes a close match to the findings of CU business professor Philip M. Fernbach. People asked to “justify” their political position become more entrenched and less moderate, Fernbach reports in a New York Times essay co-authored with Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown University. But ask people to “explain how [their] policy ideas work,” and “they become more moderate in their political views.” When people “explain, not just assert” they come to recognize the limits of their knowledge and become correspondingly more flexible and tolerant.
Thus, Sloman and Fernbach argue, if we are tired of extremism, “we can start to fix it by acknowledging that we know a lot less than we think.”
In a campaign season in which advertisements, speeches, and debate performances consisted almost entirely of assertion, the idea of “explaining” comes forward as a wonderfully appealing and restorative alternative.
And..
Fellow citizens, public officials, and aspiring candidates, join me in starting this Wednesday in this manner: contemplate what Adams wrote to Jefferson on July 15, 1813, and then imagine a world in which we took to heart the example that these two old men bequeathed to us:
“You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”
We do a great deal of this on this blog, and hope that we continue to do so.
This is not the incident described below in the Bend Bulletin, but the internet is full of related photos and stories.
While researching a future post yesterday, I came across this in the Bend Bulletin
Bend Dog Attacked by Deer in Backyard.
Steven George, a biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in Bend, said humans aren’t really in danger of an attack — but if there’s a reason, they can go after dogs.
“The deer don’t differentiate between whether it’s a domestic dog or coyote,” George said. “They see a dog as a predator to them. It’s something that wants to hurt them, or even kill them. And so they’re going to be fairly defensive, and they can be defensive to the point of being aggressive toward that animal.”
George said attacks like this aren’t an everyday occurrence, and happen maybe once a month. And, in in the fall, deer are less likely to be aggressive compared to the spring.
“This time of the year, it’s usually a buck that’s associated with any kind of attack, but not always,” George said. “In the spring, it’s more normal, typically, a doe or a doe with a fawn associated with it.”
George said the most important thing people can do is keep their dogs on a leash.
“Typically, 99 percent of the time, when a dog gets injured, it’s because it’s not leashed — and it takes off after the deer,” George said.
Then, serendipitously, Terry Seyden sent this article “America Gone Wild” from the Wall Street Journal. The article is by Jim Sterba and adapted from his book “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds” to be published Nov. 13.
There’s a great photo in the article.
Below are some excerpts.
This year, Princeton, N.J., has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town’s herd of 550 over the winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia, S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its drainage systems of beavers and their dams. The 2009 “miracle on the Hudson,” when US Airways LCC -0.16% flight 1549 had to make an emergency landing after its engines ingested Canada geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the $60 million A320 Airbus was a complete loss. In the U.S., the total cost of wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds $28 billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people and wildlife.
There are several paragraphs about how trees have come back to the East.
The founders of the conservation movement would have been astonished to learn that by the 2000 Census, a majority of Americans lived not in cities or on working farms but in that vast doughnut of sprawl in between. They envisioned neither sprawl nor today’s conflicts between people and wildlife. The assertion by animal protectionists that these conflicts are our fault because we encroached on wildlife habitat is only half the story. As our population multiplies and spreads, many wild creatures encroach right back—even species thought to be people-shy, such as wild turkeys and coyotes. (In Chicago alone, there are an estimated 2,000 coyotes.)
Why? Our habitat is better than theirs. We offer plenty of food, water, shelter and protection. We plant grass, trees, shrubs and gardens, put out birdseed, mulch and garbage.
Sprawl supports a lot more critters than a people-free forest does. For many species, sprawl’s biological carrying capacity—the population limit the food and habitat can sustain—is far greater than a forest’s. Its ecological carrying capacity (the point at which a species adversely affects the habitat and the other animals and plants in it) isn’t necessarily greater. The rub for many species is what’s called social carrying capacity, which is subjective. It means the point at which the damage a creature does outweighs its benefits in the public mind. And that’s where many battles in today’s wildlife wars start.
What to do? Learn to live with them? Move them? Fool them into going away? Sterilize them? Kill them? For every option and every creature there is a constituency. We have bird lovers against cat lovers; people who would save beavers from cruel traps and people who would save yards and roads from beaver flooding; Bambi saviors versus forest and garden protectors.
Wildlife biologists say that we should be managing our ecosystems for the good of all inhabitants, including people. Many people don’t want to and don’t know how. We have forsaken not only our ancestors’ destructive ways but much of their hands-on nature know-how as well. Our knowledge of nature arrives on screens, where wild animals are often packaged to act like cuddly little people that our Earth Day instincts tell us to protect. Animal rights people say killing, culling, lethal management, “human-directed mortality” or whatever euphemism you choose is inhumane and simply creates a vacuum that more critters refill. By that logic, why pull garden weeds or trap basement rats
Here is a link to my powerpoint. Note that this was my first presentation as a retiree, so I now realize could have spent more time developing templates, cartoons and photos. Jay O’Laughlin’s presentation, in particular, gave me something to strive for..
Most of this regular readers are familiar with. I’d like to discuss in particular slides 8 and 9
The FS doesn’t tell its’ own story- why not?
Need for vetting by Administration
Cultural factors about responding to criticism
“Telling our story” vs. “sounding defensive”
Why is this a problem?
It’s demoralizing for employees to hear untrue statements and not be able to respond
The public does not get to hear the whole story about their own public lands
and
What about the Media
Quote from a colleague: “After working on “project Methusaleh” I will never again believe anything I read in the paper”.
The business of journalism is falling apart around our ears and being replaced by hyper-partisanized sources of information.
Therefore someone needs to step up, if we want the public to have good information.
But not clear that anyone will fund this.
I often have post-presentation regrets, and, in this case, one is that I didn’t mean to criticize in any way, shape or form, the current people working in public affairs in the Forest Service. My experience with them has been that they are dedicated and professional public servants who do excellent work. Unfortunately, they have not been allowed, in some cases, to do their work.
Many administrations are pretty tight with control at the beginning and then loosen up through time. This one, though, seems to have always been tightly controlled. I certainly can understand not wanting to make embarrassing mistakes. Still the natural consequences of this behavior is that the public isn’t hearing the whole story and we are paying civil servants to not quite do their job. IMHO.
In the presentation, I used an analogy of a parent with two warring siblings. If Tiffany says Emelia hit her, and the parent never asks Emelia for her side of the story, Tiffany might get more and more, shall we say, imaginative in her description of what goes on through time, knowing that Emelia would never be given her chance to speak. Emelia is counting the days til she can get out of the house, or bearing what she knows to be fundamental injustice with possibly some emotional or mental injury (or poor morale?).
It would be great if some of the media folks who read this blog could comment on my observations.
Any other comments or questions would also be appreciated. As I’ve noted before, there was a great deal of support for the blog and what it does. Thanks to you all.
And a special thanks to Martin Nie, Jim Burchfield, and the University of Montana for being willing to step out into the unknown when we started this blog.
You can generate a host of worrisome possibilities that might occur if you take action in attempting to make the world a better place, or you can step out and trust in the people and our mutual ability to adapt to unknown futures. Knowing the difference- in your mind, in your heart, and in your gut- is the wisdom of real leadership. IMHO.
Thanks to Bob Zybach for finding this from the Bloomberg BNA Daily Environment Report.
The linked article is reproduced with permission from Daily Environment Report, 203 DEN B-1 (Oct. 22, 2012). Copyright 2012 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033)
The Chief also spoke of some of these efforts at the Chief’s Breakfast at the SAF Convention.
Currently, prices for lumber are down, a consequence of depressed housing markets. Weak markets complicate efforts to plan cost-effective timber sales.
Tidwell said the lumber market problems and the shortage of profitable markets for woody debris have led the Forest Service into increased joint efforts with the forest products industry to develop biomass energy markets and cellulose product markets.
Those efforts are needed to help logging companies and sawmills survive, because they can take care of
much of the work within the concept of forest restoration, he said. ‘‘It’s just essential that we continue to have the people who can go out and do the work in the woods,’’ Tidwell said.
It’s interesting that Tidwell is quoted about people working in the woods, just as that has become a topic of interest on our blog. Maybe some funding for studies will follow?
Another note: at the SAF Convention, I heard much about “restoration”, which I think is not a particularly clear concept (other than for specific purposes, such as longleaf restoration). I have made peace with hearing this by just substituting “improving resilience” in my mind whenever I hear it.It worked for me.. although the unnecessary term “resiliency” also kept cropping up.
It may not seem as compelling to budgeteers (in Congress and at OMB), but it is clearer in the context of climate change..even to budgeteers it can’t make much sense to 1) claim that climate change is unprecedented and 2) ask for much in the way of bucks to make things on the land the same as they used to be.
Ah.. perhaps the solution to the mystery, as so often, has something to do with politics.. Here’s a link to the story, and below are excerpts.
SG Interests owns drilling leases in the Thompson Divide, a roadless area near Carbondale. It got the leases during the George W. Bush administration, when the national roadless rule was in a state of confusion over conflicting court rulings and Bush’s repeal of former President Bill Clinton’s roadless rule.
Bush didn’t exactly “repeal” it.. it was enjoined and the Dept. decided to try a different approach. If they had just rescinded it and re-ruled, that would be true..
The new Colorado Roadless Rule adds protections for the Thompson Divide, but it does not completely put the area off-limits to drilling.
Actually it does, for new leases, and leaves the legal status of the others as to be determined by courts.
Conservationists and ranchers are pressing Tipton to introduce a bill to protect the area from future drilling. So far, he has not committed to backing a bill. Instead, he has said he wants to find a compromise solution.
Pace has said he wants to buy back leases from SG and other gas companies so that drilling will not occur in the Thompson Divide.
I don’t think anyone is stopping anyone from buying back the leases.. the price of gas is very low now.. so go for it! Not so sure about using scarce tax dollars, though.. if that’s what he means. I’m not sure that this is the time for greater public expenditures, when we can’t afford the basic recreation program, as discussed elsewhere.
Salmon/Scott River District of the Klamath National Forest in California have wanted to log the native forests at the “Little Cronan” timber sale.
