Does Anyone Read the Errata Sheets?

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A 46-page 2nd “errata” sheet accompanies the Forest Service’s FY 2011 budget. All but one of the corrections are of no particular consequence.

The eye-popper is almost at the end (where else?). The Forest Service proposes to increase stewardship contracting targets by six to eight-fold compared to previous years. Timber volume from stewardship contracts will increase from 413 mmbf (2010 target) to 2 billion b.f. Biomass energy fuel will increase from 376,000 to 2.6 million tons. “Acres of wildlife habitat improved” (I’ve never understood what that means) go from 8,630 to 100,000 and noxious weed-treated acres (I’ve got a better handle on that notion) sky-rocket from 1,292 to 180,000.

Somehow these Herculean feats will be pulled off by reducing stewardship contracting spending from $6.5 to $6.0 million. And with zero employees, too (huh?).

So I thought, “Maybe the errata sheet itself is one big typo?” I called the Washington Office. The helpful lady said that these numbers reflect the Chief’s commitment to the stewardship contracting program. When I pressed her on how the FY 2011 numbers compared to previous years, she said “someone from upstairs will have to get back to you tomorrow.” No one did.

The Rise (and Fall) of Tidwell’s Four Pillars

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Alternate Title: “What happens if a pillar falls in the woods and no one hears it . . . ”

Former Chief Dale Bosworth had his Four Threats: fire and fuels, invasive species, loss of open space, and unmanaged recreation. Current (but for how long?) Chief Tidwell’s signature initiative was to be his “Four Pillars”: Restore and Sustain Landscapes, Protect and Enhance Water Resources, Jobs and Sustainable Communities, and Climate Change Resiliency.

But Tidwell’s pillars have fallen before construction even began because he wasn’t paying attention to one minor detail. His boss, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack, already had “Four Pillars” — renewable energy, broadband internet access, responding to climate change and harnessing local food production.

Your Forest Service leadership hard at work.

Stay Tuned: Conflict Resolution/Litigation Topic

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Thank you to Martin, Ray, Matthew and Andy for your thoughtful posts on the use of litigation as a conflict resolution tool. What I would like to do next is to carefully read Martin’s essay, synthesize everyone’s points and reflect them back to you to make sure I understand them.

Unfortunately, this is the time of the year that my other volunteer activities reach a crescendo (so to speak) so it may be over the holiday break that this happens.

Nevertheless, I think this is a rich and robust topic for discussion. Our greatest number of hits for this blog occurs when we discuss this, so it seems like our readership feels the same way. I am looking forward to further engagement and enlightenment.

So stay tuned.

P.S.
If anyone knows where I could get a searchable electronic version of Jack Ward Thomas’s “The Journals of a Forest Service Chief”, it would be helpful- he has some great quotes on this topic which I would prefer not to have to search for and type in manually.

Students- Get Your Science Degrees!

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Here is a story about how what federal employees are paid who work in the Asheville area, entitled “The Science Brain Pays Nice Dividends” by John Boyle of the Asheville Citizen Times. The topic apparently evolved out of a discussion about the pay freeze.

But what I found most interesting was this link to a website where you can look up all federal employees’ 2009 salaries. Who knew?

Warning: The video clip ads on this site are highly annoying.

Virtual Book Club with Kellow’s Science and Policy Book

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This is an interesting and throughtful exchange in the science – policy world between the author of this book, Aynsley Kellow,  and our very own Andy Stahl. Roger Pielke has offered to host our virtual book club on his blog.

Some of us have personal experience with some of the topics.

So if you are interested, let me know and let me know ([email protected])  when you think you can get it from your library and have a chance to read it- so we can schedule a time.  Wish there were virtual white wine to sip!

Hammers, Carrots, and Olive Branches

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The Ninth Circuit En Banc

This post is in response to Sharon’s recent writing about the role of litigation in federal lands management. 

Though I sometimes disagree with Sharon’s framing of issues and assessment of things, I appreciate her willingness to tackle tough issues.  But if we are going to take on such important questions, I’d like to help define the so-called “litigation problem.”  A few years ago I tried to organize my thoughts about the topic.  Here is the result, a rather long-winded and excessive essay/commentary (Nie_regulatory_enforcement in PDF)

 Here is the abstract:

This article analyzes the role of prescriptive regulation and citizen-suit litigation (regulatory enforcement) in natural resource conservation in the U.S.A.  It first briefly explains why the judiciary is so involved in resource management and why litigation is so often used as a conservation tool.  It then summarizes the extent to which regulatory enforcement is being threatened and/or undermined by Congress, the executive branch, and other interests.  The analysis shows how regulatory enforcement often facilitates the use of less adversarial conservation strategies and that there are important synergies between them.  Regulatory interactions with collaborative conservation, land and resource acquisitions/easements, and adaptive ecosystem management are analyzed. 

 

That is more boring than I remember, so here are a few comments made in the essay that might be of relevance to our readers:

Regulatory enforcement often facilitates the use of other, less adversarial, conservation strategies and shows that there are important synergies between them.  In many cases, a sort of “co-evolution” is apparent, with regulation and litigation playing an important role in the development and leveraging of other strategies. 

The most important lesson is that conservation tools are interconnected in significant ways, and when regulatory enforcement is weakened, so too are a host of less adversarial approaches to environmental protection.  Any political juxtaposition of regulatory and “non-regulatory” policy approaches should be viewed most skeptically.        

While the use of litigation by conservationists has been widely criticized and publicized, we should also recognize its widespread use by other interests.  Industry, commodity, and user-groups have initiated litigation over the 2001 roadless rule, snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, forest planning regulations, motorized access to multiple use lands, and dozens of other high-profile cases.  For further evidence, consider the wise use movement’s legal arm, the Mountain States Legal Foundation (www.mountainstateslegal.org ), which publicizes a “litigation of the month” section on its webpage.  The private property rights-based takings movement provides another example, as this political agenda has been purposefully advanced via constitutional litigation. 

The “policy story” of environmental obstructionism is being told by numerous actors, with the remedy being as simple as the narrative: to either remove, weaken, and/or undermine environmental regulations.

And a few comments regarding the role of litigation vis-a-vis more collaborative approaches: 

The following analysis shows that while some exaggerate its virtues, the more serious studies of collaboration show why it is better to view it as supplementary to regulatory enforcement, and is not an adequate replacement.  I take it a step further and argue that the weakening of regulatory enforcement will potentially undermine the usefulness and spread of collaboration in the future. 

For all of the benefits collaboration can produce, it is imperative we view the tool in its appropriate context.  In many respects, the hammer of environmental laws, and the groups willing to enforce them, have created the conditions necessary for collaboration to emerge as a viable governing strategy.  Citizen suits can trigger negotiations that wouldn’t otherwise get started.  And would an interest be at the table if not for some particular regulation leveling the playing field? 

The Articles goes on to explore the role of litigation in leveraging other strategies like land acquisition and adaptive ecosystem management. 

And so I’ll end with this idea, as articulated by Judge Skelly Wright in the NEPA-empowering Calvert Cliffs decision, the judicial role is to ensure that the promise of legislation becomes reality:

Our duty, in short, is to see that important legislative purposes, heralded in the halls of Congress, are not lost or misdirected in the vast hallways of the federal bureaucracy.

“Grassroots” Environmental Groups and the Role of the Public

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I’d like to start a discussion based on some ideas in Doug Bevington’s 2009 book, “The Rebirth of Environmentalism: Grassroots Activism from the Spotted Owl to the Polar Bear.” If others don’t think his statements are an accurate depiction of how things currently are, nor of history, I think that would also be of interest.

In this book, Bevington contrasts national environmental organizations and their “insider” strategies with what Bevington calls “grassroots biodiversity groups” and their “outsider” strategies. Let me quote from the book p 36.

“As grassroots activists started doing litigation to protect forests and endangered species, they created new organizations as vehicles for the lawsuits. The new groups were initially very small with few members other than the activists directly involved in the group’s work. The activists described their new organizations as “grassroots” to distinguish themselves from the nationals. In the context of other social movements, the term is often associated with mass participation, but this was not the case for most grassroots biodiversity groups. They found that a small handful of determined activists could achieve significant environmental protection through litigation without having to engage in a broad mobilization of the public.”

And why did they not need public support? Because they were funded by foundations.
“The influx of new environmental grantmakers brought in increased opportunities for funding alternative approaches within the environmental movement (p. 37)…” and ” in my interviews with grassroots biodiversity activists a few of the newer environmental grantmakers were frequently mentioned as providing crucial early support for their groups.”

Note: the actual definition of grass roots from Merriam Webster is 1: the very foundation or source
2: the basic level of society or of an organization especially as viewed in relation to higher or more centralized positions of power.

In that sense,  the use of the term “grass roots” by Bevington  is comparing them to national environmental groups and not necessarily to local environmental or other groups. It would probably be better to use another term for these groups, but it is convenient to use this term to discuss his book.

The most direct interpretation of their strategy appears to be that public support can be bypassed if funding is available to pursue one’s goals through litigation. And it might appear to local people impacted by these lawsuits that non-local philanthropists and activists may ultimately determine policies through closed-door settlements of litigation. Which may be part of what is behind the desire to limit “appeals and litigation”- to favor open processes where local people and governments can weigh in on policies that directly affect them.

When seen through the lens of social justice, it appears that choosing litigation as a strategy may favor national interests, and those wealthy enough to be philanthropists, at the expense of the local interests and the working class. At least this lens needs to be carefully considered, in my opinion.

One way to increase trust with local people and governments would be to make transparent the source of funding for these groups, and specifically, from whom each grant is received. Then those who disagree with the legal proceedings of a group could deal directly with the granting foundation. Another way would be to open all settlement discussions to the public. It seems that if transparency is thought to be a good thing for government, it should be equally a good thing for other ways of developing public policy.