I think ratings were a good experiment. I like experiments, I’m a scientist. However, the idea that people who did not feel comfortable speaking would rate the posts, did not really pan out, and it clutters the look of the blog in my view (and I think reinforces the black and whiteness of opinion, which is exactly what this blog is NOT about). So they are out. If you have a strong attachment to them, let me know and I will reconsider. [email protected].
P.S. Elections are coming and I expect a cascade of vituperative and hateful discourse. I just hope it’s not also creepily misogynist (IMHO) as last time. It won’t be contaminating this blog- so alert to commenters. ‘Nuff said.
Thanks to Matthew Koehler for sending this piece on one of our favorite topics, beetles and fire by Kulakowski and Jarvis. This is a great article to discuss, to talk about why different people might think this is or isn’t relevant to current policy issues (and which ones and why). Also bbs and fire is one of our favorite things to discuss on this blog.
Here’s the abstract with my comments in italics.
“Outbreaks of bark beetles and drought both lead to concerns about increased fire risk, but the relative importance of these two factors is the subject of much debate.
I would argue, not really in practice, only in academia. In reality, drought beetles and age of trees are hopelessly intertwined. And not to be pedantic but it’s not about risk of fires, it’s about “different fire behavior (due to dry trees) with more possible negative impacts to people and soil.”
We examined how mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks and drought have contributed to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in northwestern Colorado and adjacent areas of southern Wyoming over the past century. We used dendroecological methods to reconstruct the pre-fire history of MPB outbreaks in twenty lodgepole pine stands that had burned between 1939 and 2006 and in 20 nearby lodgepole pine stands that were otherwise similar but that had not burned. Our data represent c. 80% of all large fires that had occurred in lodgepole pine forests in this study area over the past century. We also compared Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)
and actual evapotranspiration (AET) values between fire years and non-fire years.
To me, you gotta pick a lane here. Either we are saying that current and future climate conditions are “unprecedented” and are affecting things (which I believe, whether caused by GHG’s or other factors), OR information from 1939 to 2006 can be used to make claims about what is true in nature today.
Burned stands were no more likely to have been affected by outbreak prior to fires than were nearby unburned stands. However, PDSI and AET values were both lower during fire years than during non-fire years. This work indicates that climate has been more important than outbreaks to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in this
region over the past century.
I will leave to the climate scientists if a particular drought is really “climate”- I always find that confusing. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to know that more fires occur under drought conditions, if that’s what this is saying.
Indeed, we found no detectable increase in the occurrence of high-severity fires following MPB outbreaks. Dry conditions, rather than changes in fuels associated with outbreaks,appear to be most limiting to the occurrence of severe fires in these forests.
But like I said, it’s not really about “occurrence in the past”. We can go out on the ground and see dried forests due to pine beetles or other reasons, and see that they have different fire behavior, and we can see impacts of high intensity fires with or without bark beetles. I just don’t get the link between this study and any policy issue today, and maybe the authors are not claiming that.
From the Missoulian here.. note to readers.. the U of M has allowed us to post the papers from this conference here on our blog. I am expecting to get them next week.
While the U.S. Forest Service grinds away at a new planning rule to manage its forests, the forests themselves face an entirely separate timetable of change.
“We’re approaching the no-analog future – we haven’t been here before,” Missoula attorney and law professor Jack Tuholske told the Friday session of the 34th annual Public Land Law Conference at the University of Montana. In a time when the calving of gigantic ice floes off Greenland glaciers could affect rainfall in the Rocky Mountains, we can’t rely on doing things the way we did before, he said.
That’s especially true in America’s forests. UM entomology professor Diana Six ran through recent research showing the progress of pests like mountain pine beetles, which are spreading across acres 10 times bigger than previous outbreaks.
“As things warm up, everything for the insects speeds up,” Six said. A 2-degree increase in average temperature doubles the rate bugs like the pine beetle reproduce and consume resources, she said. Similar bursts are happening in spruce, pinyon and fir forests in the United States, and many other tree species elsewhere on the planet.
“That means forest restoration may no longer be appropriate,” she said. “You can’t force something back to existing conditions when they no longer exist.”
That could pose big challenges to land managers who expect to harvest certain numbers of trees, support local communities and jobs, and depend on watersheds for drinking water.
University of California-Berkley law professor Eric Biber warned that intensive baseline monitoring of forest conditions needed to be in place before new policies had a chance of proving their effectiveness. But although the Forest Service has some of the world’s largest and best archives of forest data, even that is incomplete.
Furthermore, Biber warned that the monitors themselves must be carefully chosen and watched. For example, forestry biologists would have a good handle on the needs of tree species, but conservation biologists might know better how to serve the animals that depend on those trees.
And both could be vulnerable to the whims of political leaders, budget crunches and their own scientific disciplines, Biber said. He cited research on Forest Service fire policy in the early 20th century, in which the country wanted fires controlled and evidence of beneficial fire effects was overlooked.
“They didn’t want scientific information that made the political arguments more difficult,” Biber said.
***
Dan Kemmis, director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West and former Missoula mayor, suggested looking beyond the local trees to see the worldwide forest.
“It’s just not possible to think seriously or clearly about managing forests without looking at the global economy,” Kemmis said. “The imperatives of debt reduction are faced by every country in the world. And that will affect land management in severe ways.”
To adapt to that, Kemmis advised agencies like the Forest Service to collaborate more with citizens who can guide it to the most needed and effective projects. That could also help avoid future lawsuits and “analysis paralysis” in decision-making, he said.
“The Forest Service needs to reduce its nonproductive activities,” Kemmis said. “I don’t know how to do that effectively without involving citizens in the problem-solving on the forest.”
Region 1 Forester Leslie Weldon echoed that idea, saying the Forest Service was trying to build the interests of local recreationists, businesses and groups into its planning. But she also warned that the Department of Agriculture (which oversees the Forest Service) expects at least 5 percent budget cuts in each of the next two years. Prioritizing projects and monitoring efforts will become harder as the money gets tighter, she said.
“Can public land law really function as a Swiss Army knife,” with individual blades for urban sprawl, job demands, species loss, climatic change and scientific incompleteness, UM law professor Ray Cross asked at the end of the gathering. Conference speakers were split, he said, with some believing policy could handle those challenges and others arguing that political tradeoffs, budget constraints and natural change would overwhelm any paper solution.
“Do we despair?” Cross asked. “We know nature will be here long after this.”
Ross William Hamilton, The OregonianFoto sent this link in to an Oregonian article with this comment.
Nowhere is the controversy so polarized over Wilderness fires. Both Bob Zybach and I were motivated to post in the comments, seemingly squelching the folks who subscribe to the idea that wildfires are always “natural and beneficial”, despite the threats to their water supply. Also interesting is the comments from an apparent smokejumper, somewhat critical of mistakes made by fire managers. The article’s content is a bit slanted, even to my enlightened knowledge. To me, one of the conundrums is trying to find a balance between Wilderness, water quality and wildfires and firefighter safety. It seems that no matter what the Feds do in this situation, they get ample criticism. It’s unfortunate that, sometimes, firefighter safety is used as an excuse to not aggressively fight the wildfires. It’s a very fine line there.
House Natural Resource Committee Republicans have floated a “discussion draft” of a county payments bill. It would phase out the current system of payments from the Treasury to be replaced by mandatory payments from national forest gross receipts. This scheme will surely cost the Treasury much more than the current payments.
The reason is simple. In most national forests, it costs the Forest Service substantially more than a dollar to produce a dollar of revenue. The bill tries to reduce these costs by eliminating most environmental laws. But the laws aren’t the source of the problem — the high-value trees have mostly been logged. The national forests, especially in the West, are not productive places to grow timber.
The bill would also create a new legal mechanism that allows counties to sue the Secretary of Agriculture to force him to spend whatever it takes to produce the necessary receipts.
The bill would mean the end of stewardship contracting in most places. No longer would the Forest Service afford to use timber value to purchase work in the woods. The counties’ mandatory revenue payments would soak up all the timber value.
Environmental groups will also blister the bill because it repeals NFMA, NEPA and the ESA. I don’t know why (as the courts have said it “breathes discretion at every pore”), but the bill even repeals the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act. And the bill exempts national forest logging and other revenue-generating projects from any and all review in the courts.
As a “discussion draft,” it is sure to engender a lot of discussion. But it is not a serious piece of legislation that will see the President’s desk in this Congress.
Photo of oil and gas pads and roads in Colorado, not Forest Service
As you all know, I think it’s really important that the public gets a chance to understand Forest Service (public land, natural resource) issues so they can make informed choices. The problem is that institutions such as policy centers don’t really help on the day to day issues and don’t necessarily allow dialogue with the public on the web; I hope this blog helps with that.
News stories are intended to help inform the public, but by their very nature and the current structure of the news industry, I don’t think they can ever be the right place. Even if the journalist takes the time to understand the complexity, and is committed to presenting both sides fairly, there is no guarantee that that can fit into a newspaper article format. It seems like a structural problem that falls somewhere between the Extension role and a journalism role.
So in this case I will take a news story and try to clarify the issue according to my understanding.This one I know something about (although I am not currently working on this, just to be clear), so I thought by posting here I could help share with readers my understanding of the somewhat arcane and confusing oil and gas terminology and processes (of course readers are interested in forest planning, so arcane and confusing is familiar territory đ ). Here’s the link. I also need to clearly state that I am not saying that the proposed rule is without flaw and directly transmitted by a Higher Power. I just think it’s important to understand what the issues really are. If we, who know, don’t inform the public, who will?
Below is the story with my annotations in italics
Amid efforts to protect Colorado’s pristine forests, drilling rights makes inroads
PARACHUTE â While top environmental stewards in Washington, D.C., fine-tune a plan to protect 4.2 million acres of roadless public forests in Colorado, regional Forest Service managers are opening some of that land to oil and gas drilling.
Drilling rights for several thousand acres in the Elkhead Mountains west of Steamboat Springs and the Mamm Peak area on the Western Slope are to be auctioned in November.
Forest Service officials at the agency’s regional headquarters in Denver declined to comment. Federal Bureau of Land Management officials confirmed the lease sale.
“It’s up to the Forest Service, and we don’t want to second-guess their decisions on how they manage federal lands,” BLM spokesman Steven Hall said.
The offering of access to minerals under pristine roadless national forest land has injected new rancor into the wrangling over plans to protect last remaining roadless forests in Colorado and other Western states.
“It’s looking like the current Forest Service regional leadership gives lip service to roadless area protection,” said Mike Chiropolos, lands program director for Western Resource Advocates, “but its actions don’t match its words.”
It seems to me that somewhere in the previous paragraphs it should have been made clearer that these leases have what are called “No Surface Occupancy” stipulations which means that the gas will be accessed from outside the roadless area through directional drilling. “NSO’s”, as they are known, prohibit surface occupancy, including well pads and roads.
Now I’m not sure exactly how that could affect a roadless area’s “pristine”- ness, since neither fish, wildlife nor humans can tell whether that gas is being pumped out. If they are claiming otherwise, I and others would be very interested to know more.
The proposed lease sale also highlights a growing peril of the lengthy crafting of a plan to protect roadless forests: As decisions are delayed, incursions keep happening.
These leases are also allowed under the 2001 Rule. So frankly I can’t draw any line at all between the Colorado process (“lengthy crafting of a plan”, who else could the author mean?) and leases under roadless, even if I agreed that it’s an “incursion.”
An aerial survey of several contested areas on Friday by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership revealed dozens of roads constructed over the past decade â many leading to well pads carved out of forest.
Clearly this didn’t occur on areas with NSO stipulations, so it’s not clear to me how is this relevant to the topic.
“We want to make sure the highest-value areas are safeguarded,” said Nick Payne, Colorado field representative for the partnership, a national advocacy group.
Forest Service managers “should not be leasing parcels on roadless areas right now, until the rule is passed. Then we’ll have firm guidelines,” Payne said.
I don’t know what is meant by “firm guidelines”, nor what they are intended to do”; IMHO it would have been helpful to ask for more specificity from Payne here.
The core question many residents of western Colorado face is whether they stand to gain more in the long run from recreation industries, which require pristine forests, or mining and other extractive industries that need roads.
Interesting assertions. Does the recreation “industry” require “pristine” forests? On my vacation I noticed a lot of recreationists on roads. I see people having a great time on 14ers with mining roads, from which you can see dams, roads, towns, etc. And what exactly does “pristine” mean? If it means “untouched by human impacts,” does that include air pollution and climate change? Can human trails exist? You want to write with colorful, meaningful words.. but there is a tension between writing the readable and being careful so people understand.
And going back to the topic, since NSO’s require no roads in roadless areas, this must be an argument against oil and gas drilling at all outside of roadless areas.
Hunting outfitter Jim Bryce, making a supply run from his camp in the currently roadless Currant Creek area this week, said roads into that contested pristine habitat would ruin his business. Currant Creek provides habitat for elk and deer.
But these leases have NSOs, so there would be no roads.
Coal-mining companies that supply power plants in the eastern U.S. oppose roadless protection because they seek access to reserves.
“If they go in there and punch in coal mines and make roads, it’ll be just another area cut up by roads. This whole country is getting cut up, and it affects the wildlife and everything else,” said Bryce, 59, based in Delta, who has run his company for 31 years.
Oxbow Mining employs more than 300 miners at its Elk Creek mine nearby, and neighboring mines employ at least 700 more.
I don’t know how coal (which needs roads to vent methane but is allowed on only 20 K or so acres in the proposed rule) even entered this story which has the topic “NSO leases advertised.”
By early next year, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is expected to decide on the plan Colorado officials and regional foresters hashed out together over several years.
It offers top-tier protection to about 13 percent of the land protected under the Clinton-era roadless rule, which blocks most road-building on 4.4 million of the 14.5 million acres of national forest in Colorado.
Federal courts still are scrutinizing that 2001 rule. The Colorado proposal would make exceptions for mining, logging and ski-area expansion.
I would object to the use of the term “logging” used here. That usually implies trees going to mills. I think this sentence would be more accurate and clearer if it said “20K acres for the North Fork Coal Mines, fuels treatments for 1/2 mile around communities and 8K acres for ski area expansion. This week, at least, I think fire protection for communities would resonate differently from “logging.”Also the writer’s choice to use the acres as I did, calculate them as a percentage of the total (e.g. 20K/4.2 mill=.005%) or not include acreages are all accurate in their own way but may be perceived differently (FWIW, I would have used the acres and let the reader do the math).
Environmental Protection Agencyâ officials have urged the Forest Service to ensure top-tier protection for more land.
The drilling rights that federal foresters are offering have had stipulations attached in the past, limiting surface activities. Exceptions can be made.
This sentence is not clear to me. But it would seem to be a good time to mention that the proposed Colorado Rule has specific restrictions against changing such stipulations after the lease is sold.
Energy companies also can drill horizontally so that wells adjacent to roadless forests could be used to extract gas and oil.
Some groups, such as the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, support that approach to development. Others do not.
“The impact of more energy development is going to result in more fragmentation, more isolation, of that roadless area,” said Peter Hart, staff attorney for the Wilderness Workshop in Carbondale, who noted that the Forest Service already has approved 70 wells in the Mamm Peak area, where lynx, a threatened species, have been found.
“Lynx and other wildlife are using this area as a movement corridor, and connectivity is necessary to ensure that these species can survive,” Hart said.
This is either a question of 1) not trusting the NSOs to stay in place or 2) saying that even if the drilling occurs outside roadless areas, it still impacts roadless areas. I can’t really tell which. The Mamm Peak wells were approved based on existing leases without NSO’s (as far as I know) so, again, not clear that that’s relevant.
It seems like this story is really about “some people don’t like leasing in roadless areas, even if no roads or pads are allowed in the roadless areas. They don’t think there is sufficient regulatory certainty or they think ???”. This would be an interesting story to read, to me. In fact, this is exactly the kind of question that would profit from some respectful blog discussion, IMHO. But maybe that would be too short or too specific (or wonky) to fit a newspaper article or newspaper buyers might not want to read it. What do you think?
Foto submitted this as a comment, but I think it’s worth starting another post just on the report. What Foto said was …
“Here is the best, most balanced position paper on carbon sequestration and fire ecology I could find. While I donât agree with every detail put forth in this position paper, I do see that site specificity is key to each micro-situation.
The paper seems to address all our forest issues without that annoying partisan politics so pervasive in other documents. Also, the paper doesnât seem to be one of those âstand aloneâ write-ups that ignore other forest issues to ram home preservationist talking points. All too often, preservationist position papers make impossible comparisons while ignoring or discounting likely long term scenarios affecting public safety, natural resources and local ecosystem values.”
If you’d like to learn more about the AFE, here is a link to their website. Looks like they are having an interesting conference in November (info here).
When I read the paper, I thought something along the lines of “let’s not overthink this. We need to protect structures and communities, and fires will burn so we need to deal with different ways of managing vegetation in consideration of that fact. This is difficult (and expensive!) enough without thinking that concerns over carbon are somehow going to force us to do something drastically different. There is just not enough decision space to do much differently from a practical point of view.”
In 2009, The Forest Service issued guidance for “Climate Change Considerations in Project Level NEPA Analysis”. The document states that “As with any environmental impact, GHG emissions and carbon cycling should be considered in proportion to the nature and scope of the Federal action in question and its potential to either affect emissions or be affected by climate change impacts.”
This week the State Department issued the final environmental impact statement for the controversial Keystone tar sands oil pipeline project. According to Shawn Lawrence Otto of the Huffington Post The environmental impact statement doesn’t mention the words “climate change.” This despite the fact that the project taps North America’ biggest pool of carbon.
I’m looking forward to reading Otto’s new book “Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. A gripping analysis of America’s anti-science crisis.” It ought to be more interesting than the Keystone EIS and might help me understand why that document never mentions climate change.
GILFORD, N.H. — After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.
“We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960,” Paul said. “I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.
“There’s no magic about FEMA. They’re a great contribution to deficit financing and quite frankly they don’t have a penny in the bank. We should be coordinated but coordinated voluntarily with the states,” Paul told NBC News. “A state can decide. We don’t need somebody in Washington.”
Perhaps it’s time to also do away with “Federal” forests. We could just let “The Market” decide, couldn’t we? No need for Federal managers, ‘ologists, foresters, firefighters, and certainly not planners!
