Timber Wars: Bayoneting Those on Life Support?

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Here’s a press release from Senator Mark Udall’s office:

Today, Mark Udall sent a letter urging the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to take immediate action to help three of Colorado’s largest sawmills stay afloat and keep rural jobs in the state. Udall suggested that the USFS and the USDA rework timber sale contracts with the sawmills, which are struggling financially. In addition to employing hundreds of Coloradans, the mills play a crucial role in the fight against the bark beetle and wildfire by providing the infrastructure to help clear 4 million acres of hazardous fuels and beetle-killed trees and processing them into wood products.

The downturn in the housing market and the state’s forest-management economy led to financial trouble for the mills—Intermountain Resources (Montrose), Mountain Valley Lumber (Saguache) and Delta Timber (Delta)—because their legacy timber sale rates are higher than it costs to remove the dead trees from the forest. Udall is asking the agencies to work with the sawmills to modify some of their contract terms so the mills can stay open and maintain hundreds of jobs in those regions, mitigate wildfire risks by clearing dead trees, and revitalize the timber industry.

“These mills provide hundreds of jobs in Colorado’s rural communities and are irreplaceable parts of the statewide infrastructure we need to reduce wildfire risk to communities and remove millions of hazardous beetle-kill trees adjacent to roads, powerlines, trailheads, picnic areas, and campgrounds,” Udall wrote in the letter. “I appreciate the role the market must play in timber sales, but at this juncture in Colorado we must maintain an infrastructure to safely and economically dispose of our surplus of dead timber.”

Udall raised the issue of legacy timber sales at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on wildfire management in June, saying that the clock is ticking on helping sawmills deal with beetle-killed trees in economically viable ways. Udall has been working for over a decade to help mitigate the impacts of the bark beetle epidemic in Colorado communities and forests.

The text of the letter follows:

Dear Secretary Vilsack and Chief Tidwell:

I am contacting you today to appeal for your immediate action to help preserve Colorado’s forest management infrastructure. Repeatedly over the last two years, I have been contacted by Colorado’s timber industry and other stakeholders asking for help. Our last three remaining large and medium-size sawmills are struggling financially. In fact, the largest – Intermountain Resources in Montrose, Colorado – went into receivership in June 2010. These mills provide hundreds of jobs in Colorado’s rural communities and are irreplaceable parts of the statewide infrastructure we need to reduce wildfire risk to communities and remove millions of hazardous beetle-kill trees adjacent to roads, powerlines, trailheads, picnic areas, and campgrounds.

While there are a number of reasons that the mills are faltering, including the economic recession, one significant source of financial stress is that all three mills hold legacy U.S. Forest Service (USFS) timber sales that are no longer financially viable and have become a liability. As recently as May 2011, the USFS stated that it was continuing to review its authority to reduce timber sale rates and/or mutually cancel contracts within Region 2 that have become unviable to operate. The USFS has made some contract term adjustments, but none of these adjustments have allowed for the downturn in the market for wood-based products. The agencies have repeatedly pledged to do everything possible to save these mills, but the problematic timber sales remain. I am aware that Intermountain Resources had over 50 timber sales with a variety of terms and issues. However, it is my understanding that the two smaller mills each have only one seriously problematic timber sale. There is an immediate sense of urgency because one of these mills had a periodic payment due last week, and yet has still not heard back from the USFS on its request for a mutual cancellation.

Modifying these contracts and thus helping sustain these three mills will have a direct public benefit. The USFS, other land managers, communities, and industry across the state and region are working to reduce the potential for catastrophic wildfires and restore healthy forests by clearing beetle-kill hazard trees and reducing hazardous fuels adjacent to communities. This critical mitigation work that protects people and property will become exponentially more challenging, if not impossible, if we lose our forest management infrastructure. Without these processing locations in Colorado, the distance to the next closest mill with capacity to process any meaningful volumes of timber is nearly 800 miles away in Montana.

On behalf of Colorado’s struggling timber industry, I ask that you take every action within your power to provide relief for these mills and preserve these critical local jobs. I appreciate the role the market must play in timber sales, but at this juncture in Colorado we must maintain an infrastructure to safely and economically dispose of our surplus of dead timber. It is my hope that in the years to come we can work collaboratively to restore balance to Colorado’s timber economy. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to your response.

Interestingly, here is a story from the Colorado Independent, with these quotes.

But some members of the conservation community have their doubts.

“The whole issue points out the problem of removing beetle kill — the dead lodgepole pine isn’t worth much as a potential commercial product,” Rocky Smith of Colorado Wild told the Colorado Independent. “That is why there are efforts to create a biomass industry, which might allow the use of dead lodgepole pine for heating and electric power generation. Those efforts have only had limited success.”

The ski town of Vail came up short in its bid to build a multi-megawatt biomass power plant that would use the proven process of high-heat wood gasification to cleanly generate power and heat by consuming chipped up wood products. The process is considered carbon-neutral compared to forests biodegrading naturally or being consumed in wildfires.

“We are not against a wood products industry, but we want to make sure that it is sized appropriately and would sunset when the dead material runs out or is no longer available for product use,” Smith said. “It is tempting to think that there is so much dead stuff out there, so we should try to facilitate creation of a large industry that could utilize it. But that could result in industry dictating what land could be harvested.”

Smith also pointed out that the current state of the economy has lowered the demand for wood products.

But it doesn’t actually sound like they have their doubts about what Udall is doing.. they are worried about the use of biomass leading to “too much” harvesting. So far there is no biomass industry of any size, so this is a preemptive strike. Their comments have nothing to do with helping those sawmills. Strange reporting, IMHO.

Talledega Forest Anniversary

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Some of us are not as aware as we might be of the southern national forests and their history; here’s a story from Jason Bacaj of the Anniston Star.

Seventy-five years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a swath of government landholdings spread over the Talladega Mountain chain a national forest.

It grew from an act of Congress in 1935 allowing the federal government to approach private landowners within a defined “purchase unit” area to see if they’d be interested in selling land, said Bob Pasquill, historian and archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

Living in the Great Depression, many small farmers and property owners were relocating already or able to be persuaded to sell their property to the government, Pasquill said, dismissing the idea that the government took land from people with delinquent taxes.

That’s a common misconception, he said, as is the thought that the land was clear-cut when it was declared a national forest. It was rough land and the more remote areas were nearly inaccessible, let alone suitable for large-scale logging, Pasquill said. There was a small degree of logging, though, and even turpentining, but that meant developing wagon roads to collect the pine pitch and logs — not an easy task, as anyone who has ridden a bicycle along the Skyway Motorway can appreciate.

“(The) big section of mountain called ‘Horseblock,’ one has to wonder how it got that name,” Pasquill said. “There was secondary growth across the area. It wasn’t a total wasted clear-cut.”

From the time the government began purchasing land in 1935 to create the Talladega National Forest, two crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps did the legwork involved in turning it into a national park. The men built the Skyway Motorway along the spine of the mountain chain, built dams, lodges, picnic grounds, bridges and fire towers connected by phone lines, Pasquill said.

The forest came into its own in the 1940s and 1950s, as tourist traffic increased and areas of second growth filled out. Forest Service employees carried out the department’s policy of suppressing fire throughout those years, unknowingly damaging the natural habitat and reducing the range of Alabama’s state tree, the once-ubiquitous mountain longleaf pine, Pasquill said.

In the 1970s and ‘80s the Forest Service began performing prescribed burns on a small scale, said Jonathan Stober, USFS wildlife biologist. It wasn’t until 2001 that the prescribed burn program was developed fully as an initiative to restore the historic range of mountain longleaf pines, which was a global critically imperiled habitat at that point. Covering a mere 3 percent of its historic range, mountain longleaf pine habitats remain a critically imperiled, but the Forest Service is making noticeable improvements to longleaf stands.

“We have a certain set of tools: one being an axe and one being a match. With those two tools we’re trying to restore this landscape,” Stober said. “It’ll take another 75 years to do that.”

Restoring mountain longleaf pines is a difficult task and an impossible one without understanding the role of fire in its development, said Dan Spaulding, chief curator for the Anniston Museum of Natural History. A baby longleaf pine looks like a clump of grass. Then it grows into what looks like a palm tree — no branches, just pine needles atop the stump protecting the bud of the tree which eventually shoots up through the palm, Spaulding said. It grows slowly and needs fire to survive because otherwise, that slow growth allows fast-growing, weedier plant and tree species to overtake it.

A period of about 75 years is needed for a mountain longleaf pine to reach maturity, said Rob Carter, biology professor at Jacksonville State University who did his Ph.D. dissertation on longleaf pines. The trees reach a height between 80 and 100 feet at that point, depending on the soil, he said. They can continue to live for another 125 years or more.

Restoring the mountain longleaf pine’s habitat is essential to the forest’s health, Stober said. The tree provides a livable environment to a number of endangered species, such as the red-cockaded woodpecker, an “umbrella species” for the Talladega National Forest. Umbrella species, such as the woodpeckers and bobwhite quails, require a certain type of habitat that’s also conducive to the survival and viability of many other native species, Stober said. The forest is home to about 25 species that are endangered or candidates for becoming endangered, he said.

The small woodpeckers nest in the heartwood of mature mountain longleaf pines afflicted with redheart disease, a fungus that rots out the center of the tree. Open canopy without much scrub or midlevel brush is needed for the birds to scout around for food, Stober said.

The Shoal Creek Ranger District, based just outside Heflin, has gone from 1998 when there were one or two clusters — a set of four separate woodpecker nests for one pair of breeding birds — to having 16 breeding groups producing 26 fledglings this year.

“That ecosystem … is a rare, endemic community to this part of the world and is also a crossroads between Appalachia and the coastal (area),” Stober said.

Although the founding date for Talladega National Forest is given as July 17, 1936, no celebrations or events are planned today to mark the tract’s diamond anniversary — so anyone who’s ever felt inclined to hug a tree might find this the ideal day to do it.

I am a fan of longleaf pine.. for those of you who have never made the acquaintance of one, here is a photo of the grass stage.
and a link to the Longleaf Alliance website for those who want to know more about this tree and efforts to restore it.

Social Media May Spark a Rebirth in Natural History

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This may be a tiny bit off-topic but I thought this was pretty interesting.

Tapping Social Media’s Potential
To Muster a Vast Green Army
A rapidly expanding universe of citizens’ groups, researchers, and environmental organizations are making use of social media and smart phone applications to document changes in the natural world and to mobilize support for taking action.
by Caroline Fraser

Here’s the link.

My only tiny concern is that

Perhaps the most intriguing capability of social media involves something that goes deeper than data. The University of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay Game is an interactive computer simulation with the power to change minds. Beginning in 2000, it plays out over a 20-year horizon, allowing teams to take on the roles and responsibilities of oystermen, crabbers, crop and dairy farmers, real-estate developers, and policy-makers, everyone with an impact on one of the world’s most endangered watersheds. As teams make decisions based on economic and regulatory restrictions, determining how much land to cultivate or how many crabs to trap, they watch the real-time, long-term consequences of their choices playing out. Crucially, “the game is politically neutral,” says David E. Smith, professor in U. Va.’s Department of Environmental Sciences.

On Earth Day this year, teams from seven Chesapeake Bay-area universities played, each representing a major basin — York River, James River, the Eastern Shore, etc. It was a sobering experience. At the end, a College of William and Mary biology professor acknowledged that despite players’ best efforts, “the quality of the bay went down.”

The game is impressively accurate: Its recent iteration encompasses tens of thousands of data points, and IBM has selected it for the World Community Grid program, harnessing over a million volunteers’ computers to crunch numbers. Philippe Cousteau, grandson of the oceanographer, is partnering with the university to adapt it for other ecosystems, from Australia to Arizona. He foresees a day when younger students can input real data to model their backyards and lobby their parents — “Hey, mom and dad, let’s not use fertilizer on the lawn.”

Perhaps people start to believe the reality of models and don’t have the proper respect for the universe to be “queerer than we think, queerer than we can think” as Haldane said.
Also:

Meanwhile, the environment waits for a software wunderkind to find the social formula that may lure a fickle public to fall in love with the real world, not a fake one.

To me a modeled world is still a fake world..and plenty of people are in love with the real world- but we disagree on what to do about it. And that’s OK.

Full disclosure: I am a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the publisher of “Yale 360”.

Spagna on the Green Mountain Lookout: plus NTHP vs. WW

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from High Country News here.
A fire lookout in a wilderness speaks of our past
Essay – July 07, 2011 by Ana Maria Spagna

If monster mansions in Jackson, Wyo., or Sun Valley, Idaho, can boast million-dollar views, what’s a historic cabin in Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness worth? From this cabin that used to be a wildfire lookout, you can see a sea of summits, glaciers, a volcano and hidden lakes mostly surrounded by uncut forests.

Green Mountain Lookout, a historic 14-by-14-foot structure built in 1933, has gone through several stages of rehabilitation, and then, after a few missteps, a reconstruction. Now, suddenly, a group called Wilderness Watch wants to tear it down.

If you want to be contrary about this issue, there are plenty of arguments against fire lookouts. There’s the premise critics start with — the mistaken idea decades ago that putting out all fires was noble and necessary. Then there’s the fact that wilderness is supposed to be untrammeled, and what’s a flammable wooden and glass house on a mountaintop if not hardcore trammeling? And to be honest — as someone who worked in the woods — I don’t feel called upon to revere the various writers and poets who were paid to sit and scribble in some of these historic lookouts.

Still, Green Mountain Lookout takes my breath away. I don’t idolize the (mostly) men who spent their summers sitting inside, but I am awed by the people who built the lookouts. Often they were Civilian Conservation Corps members or local packers or trail workers, poorly paid and outfitted. Always they were hardy and courageous, skilled and earnest, and wowed — I’m guessing now — by the luck that landed them in these unspeakably lovely places.

I make this guess, in part, because I have friends who helped rebuild Green Mountain Lookout: not just the hewing and sawing and the careful salvage of shiplap siding, but the paper-pushing, the negotiating, the hoop-hopping required to make it happen. I cannot bear to toss their good labors aside.

This is not to say that everything built must stay built. The Elwha Dam is a case in point. I’ll be there cheering when it comes down. The Green Mountain Lookout may, arguably, be doing little good, but it’s also doing no harm. It’s not, for example, dooming an entire salmon run to extinction. The lookout’s only crimes are crimes against human sensibilities.

The basis for the Wilderness Watch lawsuit lies in helicopters. Helicopters are, of course, officially forbidden in wilderness, though they are used to fight fires, for rescues and occasionally for trail construction — or in this case, lookout reconstruction — once the proper hoops have been hopped. The gray area is troublesome, sure. But is the offense of hearing a helicopter so heinous it merits a lawsuit? Is it worse than the treatment of prisoners of war (or non-war)? Or the poisoning of rivers? Or the denial of climate change? Part of what galls me in this case is the sheer waste of activist energy.

But there’s more. If every human instinct has a rusty underbelly, the downside of wilderness protection is the desire to pretend we are the first humans to arrive in a pristine land. As if Lewis and Clark did not depend on the kindness of Indians. As if modern hikers do not depend on constructed roads, cleared trails, sturdy bridges. Fooling ourselves into believing we’re first seems like a kind of re-conquering, a dangerous game that allows our egos to grow big and unwieldy, the same egos that wreaked havoc in the first place.

I don’t want to play pretend. I’d rather honor the people who came before me. I’d rather share their passion for grandeur. If I’m lucky enough to spend the night in a lookout that’s meticulously maintained by volunteers or seasonal laborers, I’d rather appreciate the roof over my head as I look out at the roofless miles, and be grateful.

Wilderness is about humility. Walk a dozen miles off a road and you’re instantly at the mercy of predators and of the elements. You can be humbled by nature, and also, I’d argue, by our own humanity.

Stand at Green Mountain Lookout and look to the southwest. You can see the scars of clear-cuts and the stretch of highway that leads to shopping malls and parking lots and paved-over wetlands. Humanity is responsible for both clear-cuts and the Wilderness Act, and even for a few lines of poetry that have transcended geography and generation.

Among the best things wilderness can do is make us realize that what we do counts. Some of it is marvelous, some of it catastrophic. Fire lookouts sit smack on the divide. Tearing down Green Mountain Lookout won’t erase that.

Ana Maria Spagna is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an op ed syndicate of High Country News (hcn.org). She is a writer in Stehekin, Washington.
A commenter provided a link to the National Trust for Historic Preservation blog here.

The National Trust views the draconian remedy of removing the Green Mountain Lookout as one that would directly contradict the Forest Service’s obligations for the stewardship of historic resources under the National Historic Preservation Act. The Department of Justice, representing the Forest Service, authored an eloquent brief highlighting the stewardship responsibilities of the Forest Service for historic sites and structures in wilderness throughout the country, spanning more than 10,000 years of human history. The Forest Service made a compelling argument that the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act are not mutually exclusive, and can indeed coexist as a set of principles that govern the agency’s management and stewardship of its historic properties.

The National Trust recently weighed in to support the Forest Service with an amicus curiae brief, together with a coalition including the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, the Darrington Historical Society, and the Forest Fire Lookout Association. In a motion requesting the court’s permission to file the amicus brief, the coalition expressed the concern that Wilderness Watch’s extreme position threatens protections for a range of other historic resources that predate wilderness designation, including Native American shrines and rock shelters, graveyards, lighthouses, pioneer cabins, as well as other fire lookouts.

On Tuesday, May 24, 2011, the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation announced that the Green Mountain Lookout was named to the state’s “Most Endangered Historic Properties” list. Stay tuned, as the battle to protect this unusual historic structure continues.

Forest Service Paid $6.1M in Groups’ Legal Fees Over 6 Years

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Scales of Justice by Graham Ibbeson in Middlesbrough

This EE news story, printed in the NY Times here, is notable for among other things having a link to this Journal of Forestry article.

Study: Forest Service Paid $6.1M in Groups’ Legal Fees Over 6 Years
By LAWRENCE HURLEY of Greenwire

The Forest Service paid $6.1 million in legal fees to groups that sued it over a six-year period, according to an academic study that casts new light on a politically charged issue.

At issue is the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), which requires the federal government to pay attorneys fees when it loses cases under statutes that do not specifically call for such fees to be paid by the government.

Some Republican lawmakers argue that environmental groups have taken advantage of a lack of oversight on such payments and file numerous lawsuits they know they can win on procedural grounds.

Recently introduced legislation (pdf), the “Government Litigation Savings Act,” would amend the statute. The measure’s lead sponsors are two Wyoming Republicans, Sen. John Barrasso and Rep. Cynthia Lummis (E&ENews PM, May 25).

The new report (pdf) — published in the latest issue of the Society of American Foresters’ Journal of Forestry — includes data from the Forest Service and Justice Department obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The payments cover the period 1999 to 2005.

The researchers were Michael Mortimer, an assistant professor at the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech University, and Robert Malmsheimer, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

They found that of the $6.1 million that the Forest Service reported paying, $3.2 million went to environmental groups. DOJ reported a different total, $3.5 million.

Frequent litigators included the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, the Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice.

In reaching conclusions about the findings, Mortimer and Malsheimer conceded the difficulty of making sweeping generalizations, especially due to the discrepancies in the data.

While the law could be seen as encouraging litigation, they wrote, some groups are likely to litigate, regardless of whether they can win legal fees.

“Even if EAJA were completely repealed, these organizations would likely continue to sue land management agencies,” the researchers wrote.

Some of the bigger environmental groups, they wrote, “are quite well financed and therefore not the class of plaintiffs for which the law was designed to provide access to the expensive federal litigation system.”

Although there are repeat players, they wrote, “the vast majority of parties” are only involved in one lawsuit.

Responding to the study, John Buse, legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said he disagreed with the researchers’ suggestion that EAJA is a “positive incentive” for litigation because it reduces the risk for groups filing suit.

Although “it may be true” that the law reduces risk, it does not follow that it encourages people to sue, he added.

The study also downplays the law’s role in “incentivizing agencies’ compliance with the law,” Buse said.

The Republican-backed bill (H.R. 1996 (pdf)) to reform the law would restrict reimbursements for each entity to no more than three in a calendar year and would prevent payments to any group that has a net worth of more than $7 million.

The maximum payment for each case would be $200,000.

Separately, there is language in the House appropriations bill for the Interior and U.S. EPA that would require tracking and reporting of EAJA payments.

Click here (pdf) to read the paper.

Paul Gosar on Forests, Fire and Litigation

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Congressman Paul Gosar, a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, represents Arizona’s First Congressional District.

Column: Forest policy must be proactive, sustainable
By U.S. REP PAUL GOSAR
Special to the Courier

This year, our communities have been victims of the largest forest fires in recorded history. The Wallow fire on the Apache-Sitgreaves Forest grew to over half a million acres, charring in its wake some of the most treasured parts of ponderosa pine country. In total, over a million acres of Forest Service lands, as well as another 600,000 acres of federal, state, and private lands have burned across the American Southwest.

The frequency of fires, and the magnitude of the acreage burned, has exponentially increased since 1990. It is time for us to be honest about the problem as well as the solution. We must re-evaluate our forest management policies at all levels of government because the status quo is detrimental to our safety, Arizona’s ecological health, and the local and national economy.

The current federal system continues to give funding priority to suppression. Although the need to suppress fires is never going to go away, it is clear we must shift priority toward pro-active forest restoration management. It is estimated that long-term restoration and rehabilitation generally amount to two to 30 times the reported suppression costs.

There is roughly 80 million acres of forests across the West that are overgrown and ripe for catastrophic wildfire, according to the Landfire multiagency database. We simply cannot afford to use taxpayer dollars for 100 percent of the large-scale restoration work necessary to prevent unnatural fires like Wallow, Rodeo-Chediski, or Schultz. Empowering private industry is going to be the key to the future of forest management.

The Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4-FRI) is a proposal that will restore 2.5 million acres of ponderosa pine forests on the Apache-Sitgreaves, Coconino, Kaibab, and Tonto national forests and revitalizes the Arizona logging industry. Instead of relying on the Forest Service to pay all of the costs for restoration thinning, 4-FRI recognizes the fiscal reality and puts forth a proposal that calls for the Forest Service to partner with private industry to restore proper forest health.

This first of its kind large-scale treatment will reduce damaging wildfire impacts, as well as provide forest jobs, markets for wood products, and ecological restoration. It has garnered my support, as well as colleagues in the Arizona Congressional Delegation, Gov. Jan Brewer, leaders in the state Legislature, the affected counties and cities, and an unprecedented range of environmental groups and industry partners.

When the federal government partners with local government, stakeholder groups, and private industry, together we can create much needed jobs and a safer environment for our citizens. Landscape-scale, fiscally responsible forest restoration treatments are the only way our state and the country is going to make real progress toward proper forest health.

I am also looking at a wide variety of legislative initiatives that will improve federal law affecting natural resources management. I am reviewing environmental laws in need of reform to make the process more streamlined, efficient and fair. Compliance has become muddled and overly bureaucratic, leading to project-killing delays. The goal is not to dismantle important environmental protections, but to ensure they are working with us, not against us.

I am also looking at reforming the Equal Access to Justice Act, a law that is frequently misused to obstruct important conservation and economic development initiatives. While some lawsuits are important to ensuring our environmental laws are upheld, some groups sue federal agencies excessively, tie up the process for years, and then submit a bill to the taxpayers via EAJA.

I am a cosponsor of HR1996 the Government Litigation Savings Act, which will put a halt to these abuses by reinstating tracking and reporting requirements and instituting reforms that will reduce the taxpayer’s burden to pay for the attorney’s fees. These reforms will return the law to its original intent – to help individuals and small businesses during a once-in-a-lifetime need to battle the federal government in court.

Our forest and natural resources are a way of life in Arizona. I remain saddened by what has happened to my constituents who have been adversely affected by this fire. I think if we look forward and work collaboratively in stewardship, we can address the desperate forest maintenance crisis and other natural resources-related issues facing our state.

Here is the link to HR 1996

National Voter Attitudes Toward America’s Forests

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I ran across this report of a survey done by NASF which I thought was interesting.
Here’s the survey.

Given these factors, seven out of ten voters support maintaining or increasing efforts to protect forests and trees in their state. Among the key specific findings of the poll are the following:
• Voters continue to value the nation’s forests highly, particularly as sources of clean air and water and places for wildlife to live. The survey found most voters are personally familiar with the nation’s forests: two-thirds of voters (67%) say they live within ten miles of a forest or wooded area. Voters also report engaging in various recreational activities that may bring them to forests. These include: viewing wildlife (71% of voters say they do this “frequently” or “occasionally”), hiking on outdoor trails (48%), fishing (43%), overnight camping (38%), hunting (22%), using off-road vehicles (16%), snow-shoeing or cross-country-skiing (15%), and mountain biking (14%).

Taking all of this into account, it should be no surprise that voters value the many benefits forests provide. As shown in Figure 1, 92 percent of voters surveyed believe that helping to keep the air clean is at least a “very” important benefit of forests, including 58 percent who believe it is “extremely” important. A nearly identical 91% of voters assign similar importance to forests’ role in filtering water to keep it clean. Solid majorities of voters found other benefits of forests to be “very important” as well, including providing a place for wildlife to live (86%), providing a source of good-paying jobs (73%), supplying products like wood and paper (73%), providing a place for recreation (71%), and reducing global warming (60%).

Appreciation of the economic benefits of forests has increased sharply in recent years. Most likely due to the economic downturn, voters appear to have a more acute awareness of the good-paying type of jobs provided by forests. Only 47 percent of voters considered this to be an “extremely” or “very” important benefit of forests in a 2007 national survey, a proportion which rose to 73 percent this year. There were also gains in the proportions viewing it as important that forests supply essential products and provide a place for recreation.

• At least three in five voters see major threats to forests from wildfire, development, and insects and diseases. American voters recognize that the nation’s forests face a variety of significant threats. As shown in Figure 2, 73 percent of all voters consider wildfires to be a “major” threat to forests. Three in five voters believe the same about insects and diseases that harm trees (62%) and development (62%).

Three-quarters of voters want to see efforts to protect and manage forests maintained or increased. In total (as shown in Figure 3), 74 percent of voters say they are comfortable with the current level of forest management and protection, including 41 percent who say it needs to be increased.

The figures included are interesting but I couldn’t transfer them to this post.

Fire Bringing Communities Together

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Another Fine Photo by Bob Berwyn

Link here.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – As homes and cities expand closer to forests and wildlands across the American West, increasing wildfire threats have created an unlikely new phenomena – confidence in government.

Recent studies show that people in neighborhoods adjacent to public forest lands can and do trust natural resource managers to a surprising degree, in part because the risks they face are so severe.

Thousands of acres burn every year, threatening homes, lives and property, and in many groups and areas, the phrase “I’m from the government – trust me” is no longer being used as a joke or punch line.

In a survey done in seven states, researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions found that a large majority of people rated agency management of public forest lands as good or excellent.

Additionally, more than 80 percent of those surveyed – and up to 90 percent at some sites – showed support for mechanical thinning or mowing to reduce fire risks. Only such approaches as use of herbicides found lower degrees of support. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

“Declining forest health and wildfire are such serious and increasing threats that we are beginning to see partnerships forming among mill owners, logging contractors, residents and environmental groups,” said Bruce Shindler, an OSU professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. “The stakes are just too high for everyone.”

The studies found that local, personal relationships were what mattered most in coming to agreement on natural resource plans and policies, topics that have often been contentious among various interest groups in the West. Positive interactions between homeowner associations, local leaders and individual land managers make the difference, scientists say. Teachers and retirees, for example, are now organizing programs to create defensible space in their neighborhoods and learning steps that can be taken to protect their homes.

“People may still not trust big business or big government, but they trust Joe, the local Forest Service district ranger,” Shindler said. “In forest communities there’s a growing understanding that threats from wildfire are everyone’s concern. It helps get these groups past that us-versus-them mentality. And this rings true in diverse places we surveyed in Utah, Colorado, Oregon, and Arizona.”

Surveys were done in 2002 and 2008 – with the same individuals over time – analyzing the status and changes in people’s attitudes towards fire and land management policies. The greatest progress was made where local residents had become involved, Shindler said, and worked closely with government and community groups to develop enlightened management approaches that help protect property and improve forest health.

“I was at a judicial hearing a few years ago in Sisters, Ore., where a large crowd of residents spoke in support of local Forest Service policies,” Shindler said. “It was pretty incredible. It’s just not something you see all the time.”

One study of forest communities was recently published. Among its findings:

The average annual area burned in the U.S. has more than doubled from that of the 1990s, and 38 percent of all the nation’s housing units are now located in the wildland-urban interface.
Thousands of homes and structures have burned in massive fires in California, Colorado, Arizona and other areas, despite record federal expenditures on fire suppression.
Residents in forest interface areas generally agree that agency use of prescribed fire and mechanized thinning along with property owners reducing fuels around their homes offer some of the best options to reduce losses.
The USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and state management agencies all enjoyed “full” or “moderate” support by a majority of residents who trusted them to make good decisions about wildfires and fire prevention.
Citizen trust in agency managers is particularly influential in public acceptance of fire management strategies. Dedicating resources that build and maintain citizen trust will be important to long-term success.
“Nearly all participants indicated a good relationship existed between local managers and community members,” the researchers wrote in their report. “Such results may be surprising given the often contentious debate surrounding many forest management decisions in recent years.”

This study was supported by the Joint Fire Science Program of the USDA Forest Service. Other collaborators were from The Ohio State University and Northern Research Station of the USDA Forest Service.

“Fire is probably the easiest issue to build agreement around, because no one wants our homes or forests to burn up,” Shindler said. “However, this also shows the power of building relationships and trust among community members. These approaches may lead the way to resolving other natural resource conflicts.”

Out-of-Date Planning

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Last week the Colville and Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forests released their “proposed actions,” a new step in NFMA planning preceding the draft EIS and proposed forest plan.

This gem from both plans (the plans appear identical — only the maps differ) illustrates that adding more process does not make plans any more timely:

While the U.S. demand for timber remains relatively high and is expected to increase in the future (USDA FS 2000), timber harvests from 1990 to 2002 in Washington have declined by 39 percent (Washington State Department of Natural Resources 2004). United States lumber markets have relied increasingly on foreign imports, such as from Canada, to help offset declining timber harvests in the state. Softwood lumber imports into the Seattle Customs District from 1992 to 2002 have increased by 11 percent (Warren 2004), while inflation adjusted wholesale prices for Douglas-fir 2x4s have dropped by 33 percent (Warren 2004).

Washington DNR has issued no fewer than five state-wide timber harvest reports since the 2004 report cited here. And Deb Warren has published five more annual statistical summaries, up through 2009, since the 2004 version.

Lo and behold, using the more up-to-date statistics shows that softwood lumber imports into the Seattle Customs District have dropped 70% since 2002 — a far different picture from the 11% increase claimed in the already out-of-date plan.

I suspect that these “proposed actions” were actually written several years ago and have been gathering dust on the shelves while the Forest Service tried to sort out its planning process. Rather than up-date these documents, the FS just slid them out the door with nary a glance.

Just one more illustration of how silly it is for the FS to bite off more planning than it can chew.

Coal Mine Methane- Colorado Voices II

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A methane drainage well

There are many compelling public lands issues not related to vegetation treatments. This is a small contribution to increasing public knowledge of some of these.

Remember Ed Quillen in his op-ed Maximum Trashing Utilization, here, described the coal mine methane issue this way…

here has been some progress on the regulatory front. Back in 2008, High Country News carried a story about methane escaping from Western coal mines. Methane is a flammable gas (it and its close chemical relative ethane are the major components of natural gas) that is given off by coal as it decomposes underground.
Since methane is flammable and sometimes explosive, mine safety requires venting it away from the working area.
Logically, this methane should be burned in a productive way. Unburned methane is more than 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as the carbon dioxide produced by combustion. Plus, there’s the energy from burning it, which could be used to heat homes or generate electricity.
But certain regulatory policies for coal mines on federal land prevented the methane from being put to public use. Essentially, the mining companies had the right to use the coal, but not the methane. For safety reasons, they have to vent it — but they couldn’t put it to work.
That’s changed recently, at least on a case-by-case basis. The Interior Department now allows the capture and sale of methane. But is it economical to do so when the methane is diffuse and the nearest pipeline might lie miles away?
“We’ve tried to look at it every way in the world. If it were economic to do, we would already be doing it. It would add to our income.” That’s what James Cooper, president of Oxbow Mining, which operates the Elk Creek Mine in western Colorado, told a Grand Junction business journal.

Cap-and-trade legislation might change the economics by paying the coal company to capture methane. It’s unlikely to be enacted in the current political climate, but again, if some subsidies are required to get MTU, there are certainly worse ways to spend public money.

Here’s Ted Zukoski from Earthjustice on flowers, coal and methane (“Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment.”).

With hot summers hitting the high country in the Rockies hard, one would wish the agencies that manage many of the mountain meadows – the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management – would be doing something about climate change.
To the contrary. BLM recently proudly approved a new coal mine expansion on Colorado’s West Slope, enabling the Elk Creek Mine to vent untreated more than 5-million-cubic-feet of methane pollution into the atmosphere every day. BLM refused to even take a hard look at alternatives to require the mine to capture the methane or reduce its climate change impact. This unnecessary methane pollution will have the warming impact of 1 million tons of carbon dioxide over a year – about the same as a small coal-fired power-plant.

Ted also makes some comments on Colorado roadless and coal, which I’ll discuss in a later post.

In my view, BLM did take a pretty good look, check it out for yourself here. But ultimately more pages of analysis are not going to change the fact that it’s not economic to do it, and that’s what the regulations are based on. The BLM regulations were designed for methane to be a gas that has economic value. If, instead, methane from coal mines were regulated as a pollutant, mines could simply be required to capture it. We don’t need cap and trade or any fancy mechanism to do this. It could be as simple as legislation to require capture of methane from coal mines on federal land.

But one thing I know is that many people could write paragraphs pages or books on the environmental impacts; virtual roomfuls of attorneys could have lengthy and expensive conversations (and have had) but that won’t solve the regulatory problem. In my opinion, joint efforts toward a surgical piece of legislation would probably be much more productive for the environment than more analysis and roomfuls of folks jawing or writing.

Ed Quillen brought up subsidies, I suggested legislation. A group of environmental lawyers are litigating (predictably). Would there be less methane in the air today if all had worked together on identifying and pushing one policy solution?