Bark Beetle, Hazard Trees and Fuels- The Controversy That Isn’t?

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It seems like everyone agrees that there are many dead trees out here in the Interior West. It seems like most folks think the ones along roads and trails should be cut so they don’t fall on people (although there are more out there than we are probably capable of getting) . Most folks agree that fire breaks around communities are a good idea to give firefighters a safe place to operate, among other reasons. Many people don’t want cutting in the backcountry, but I don’t think that anyone is proposing that.

Firebreaks around communities, roads and powerlines is about all people can get funding to do, if that. If climate change causes more outbreaks and more fires, we will be lucky just to keep up with powerlines, roads and communities.

See the below article here..

Udall, Bennet want Vilsack to treat beetle kill as ‘national emergency’ in wake of wildfires By David O. Williams 10/4/10 2:28 PM
Citing last month’s wildfires near Boulder and Loveland and the ongoing Church’s Park Fire in Grand County, U.S. Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet are asking U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to treat the pine bark beetle epidemic as a national emergency.

The two Colorado Democrats in a release today said they are leading a bipartisan effort to get Vilsack to “rededicate” an additional $49 million in existing funds to help clear dead trees and perform other forest mitigation work to decrease the fire risk in the U.S. Forest Service Region 2, which includes Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska.

Last year Bennet and Udall got Vilsack to channel $40 million in existing funds into mitigation efforts in Region 2, of which $30 million is now being used to reduce fuel loads in Colorado’s White River, Medicine Bow/Routt and Arapaho/Roosevelt national forests.

In the wake of the costly Fourmile Canyon blaze west of Boulder last month, which consumed 166 homes, environmentalists and politicians – including Boulder’s mayor – pointed to climate change as a key contributor in the ongoing bark beetle epidemic that has killed more than 2 million acres of lodgepole pines in Colorado and Wyoming.

Scientists generally agree that warmer historical temperatures have contributed to the outbreak because there have not been enough prolonged cold snaps to kill beetle larvae during the winter months. But some studies suggest forests are not any more susceptible to wildfire because of the beetle kill outbreak and that resources for clearing trees too deep into the forest should be limited.

Still, firefighters generally agree that the huge fuel loads presented by massive swaths of dead forest make battling blazes in and around communities all the more problematic, and one of the greatest concerns is clearing dead trees away from the state’s hundreds of miles of power lines that criss-cross public lands.

I also thought this article was interesting and well written. Beetle-kill epidemic a boon for Wyoming’s timber industry?

Here’s some more quotes related to the “controversy.”

Beetle-killed forests are just as susceptible to fire as green forests, and there’s little proof of the widely held fear that fires in infested stands will burn so hot they’ll sterilize the soil, said Duane Short, an ecologist with the Laramie-based Biodiversity Conservation Alliance.

Logging hasn’t stopped the spread of beetles, he said, and clearing dead timber hurts the long-term health of the forest.

“If you’re familiar with the curriculum of Forest Service schools, it’s about logging, and it’s about ways to log,” Short said. “It’s not about the natural ecology of forests. And so the folks that end up in these fields, they look for reasons to log, essentially.”

Forest officials dispute Short’s assertions.

“If we sat on our hands and did nothing, I think we’ll see some down the road, especially when we get downfall, we’ll see some large fires that are stand- or species-altering fires,” said Wyoming State Forester Bill Crapser. “I also think we’ll see a less healthy forest in the interface.”

I sincerely hope Short’s comments about forestry education were taken out of context.. Anyway, what if we all agreed to take up the topic of the “fuels treatment in the backcountry” sometime later (when we are done with WUI, powerlines and roads) and just focus for the moment on moving forward on what we all agree on?

Forest Plans May be More Meaningful after Sixth Circuit Decision

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Are Forest Service Land Management Plans themselves a final decision about the location of activities such as snowmobiling and hunting, or are they merely guidance for when decisions are really made at a project level or subsequent travel management decision? 

That question has been central to controversies about new Forest Service planning rules that were developed in 2005 and 2008, and relevant to the team now writing a new planning rule.  The 2005/2008 planning rules were based on the concept that plans are merely aspirational and not inherently enforceable, citing the 1998 Supreme Court Ohio Forestry decision on timber harvest projections in the Wayne Forest Plan.  The Forest Service used the Supreme Court decision in its logic for the 2005 rule, explaining that plans do not need to be accompanied by an Environmental Impact Statement, because no specific decisions are being made and because environmental documentation will be completed as timber projects are proposed.  It also led to the idea that the planning process itself could be simpler, because forest plans don’t make site-specific decisions.

A Sixth Circuit decision on Wednesday could lead to a different view of the nature of a Forest Plan.  The decision on the Huron-Manistee Forest Plan ruled against the Forest Service in favor of Kurt Jay Meister, an attorney representing himself.  The Court ruled that Forest Plans under the existing 1982 rule (under 2000 rule transition provisions) make meaningful recreation decisions.  Citing inadequacies in the analysis of the noise impacts of snowmobiling and hunting on semi-primitive recreational experiences,  the Forest Service has been given 90 days to correct the deficiencies of the Huron-Manistee Plan.

The Sixth Circuit Court noted the difference between recreational activities in a Forest Plan and timber activities mentioned in the earlier Supreme Court decision:

“But the (Supreme) Court observed that the Plan itself “does not give anyone a legal right to cut trees, nor does it abolish anyone’s legal authority to object to trees being cut.”  To the contrary, additional agency action – namely, issuance of a site-specific permit – was required before anyone could engage in the logging that the Sierra Club said would harm its interests.  Thus, the Court held, the plan had not yet “inflict[ed] significant practical harm upon the interests that the Sierra Club advance[d].  Hence the case was not ripe.  Meister’s case is different.  Unlike logging, the activities about which Meister complains – gun hunting and snowmobile use – do not require further action by the Service before they can occur.  To the contrary, they have in fact occurred ever since the Plan’s issuance, with the resultant harms that Meister now alleges.  Thus, the Plan itself has harmed him in concrete ways.  His claims are ripe.”

Regarding travel management, the Circuit said that the 1982 regulations “imposed the bulk of its obligations at the (forest) planning stage; and one such obligation, as we read the regulation, is to determine whether certain clases of areas and trails ought to be altogether off-limits to off-road vehicle use.  Meister says that one such class are trails that the Service itself admits are “in or near” semiprimitive nonmotorized areas. That claim is properly presented at the Plan level.”

Regarding hunting, the court rejected a Forest Service argument that it is solely controlled by the State.  Instead, the court said that both the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and Forest Service directives allow the Forest Service to limit hunting when it is inconsistent with direction in forest plans such as the establishment of semi-primitive non-motorized areas.

This case underscores how the 1982 planning rule is continually being interpreted by the courts.  In the development of the new planning rule, it will be important to clearly spell out what analysis will be expected in the forest planning process.  Elsewhere on this blog, there have been discussions about the importance of addressing recreation in the planning process, and how recreation isn’t being taken seriously.  However, the planning process needs to be simplified and must be more concise.  The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) does not require the planning rule to direct zoning of recreational uses in a Forest Plan.  If recreation is addressed in the new planning rule, hopefully the requirements will be clearly laid out and are achievable.

Secretary of Interior Issues Science Integrity Order

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The Secretary of Interior issued a new Science Integrity Order yesterday, which directs Department of Interior (DOI) employees, both political and career, to never suppress or alter, without new scientific or technological evidence, scientific or technological findings or conclusions.  Further, DOI employees will not be coerced to alter or censure scientific findings, and employees will be protected if they uncover and report scientific misconduct by career or political staff.

The policy is receiving generally favorable reaction, although it has not been codified into enforceable regulations.

The Secretary’s Order is an expansion of a draft DOI manual policy released in August with a public comment period ending September 20.  A sticking point for critics of the draft policy was that it did not cover political appointees if they alter scientific documents.  Yesterday’s order seems to address those concerns.

The Interior action could be a template for other government agencies to adopt because the development of a government-wide policy in response to the President’s March 2009 memo has been delayed.

Dealing with Climate Change Realities: Where, Who and How Proactive?

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Pines, spruces and firs are all suffering attacks from different beetles, and aspens are dying, too, prompting officials and environmentalists to rethink management of what rises among the dead trees. Photo: White River National Forest

This piece in New West on the White River and bug kill, plus a couple of days Martin and I spend in a discussion on landscape scale restoration and collaborative groups, made me think about what Jan Burke and Sloan Shoemaker were quoted as saying in this article:

But it’s not just pine beetles. A spruce beetle epidemic is on the rise. The Douglas fir beetle is taking a toll. So is a phenomenon called sudden aspen die-off.

“I think we are in for a period where we’re going to see some pretty dramatic changes happening,” Shoemaker said, “but that doesn’t mean there’s a crisis or it’s unhealthy or there’s something wrong.”

Over time, forests change slowly, he said, but when they change, they change dramatically. That’s what’s happening now, he said, and we just happen to be around to see it.

“It’s kind of a privilege to be observing a natural laboratory that otherwise we don’t have an opportunity to observe,” Shoemaker said.

The forest may come back differently than before. If it’s warmer, that may mean more deciduous trees, like aspen or Gambel oak, Burke said.

She said she would like to see the Forest Service play a role in encouraging more of a mixture on the forest.

“I’m not saying we’ll get out there and do gardening on 2.2 million acres, but you don’t stand down and do nothing,” Burke said. “By the same token, you don’t stand up and say you’re going to do something everywhere. But somewhere in the middle, there’s a stewardship role.”

Shoemaker is skeptical.

“I think we just need to step back and see how things are going to change and respond,” he said, “but we have a hard time doing that.”

That’s a great conversation to have, but I have a couple of questions..

–Things are changing faster than forest plans could keep up with, so are forest plans passe in this time of rapid change? (formal mechanism for planning)

— When a new climate induced problem shows up, how do we know the right scale to address it? (scale for planning)

— If you had landscape scale collaborative groups, would rapid or slow changes due to climate change just be one more thing to consider in their landscape planning?

And I have to say it is easy for me to agree with both Jan and Sloan on this. Yes, someone should be thinking about what actions we might take to deal with these changed conditions, but we should be very careful about what we actually invest in to deal with changes, and carefully consider the potential payoffs and alternative uses of the funding. The reason for my hinkiness is a great respect for the ability of Nature not to do as humans (however expensive and intricate the models) predict. I am all for investments that are good under current conditions as well as a variety of unknown future conditions. That’s why I am such a fan of TU’s approach “Protect, Reconnect and Restore.” Even if we simply saved some of the funding we put into hosting meetings, seminars, conferences and reading papers on “adapting to climate change” and built that funding into actually Protecting Reconnecting and Restoring,  it’s possible that the environment would be better off in both the short and long runs. At least I think it’s worth consideration when we gauge the desirable degree of proactivity in dealing with climate change.

Sec. Vilsack’s Speech in Fort Collins

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I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Rocky Mountain Station Laboratory in Fort Collins a few weeks ago and when I heard this speech I thought it was an excellent insight on his vision and priorities. Note his beginning discussion of the importance of outdoor recreation to the US public and to rural economies. And the importance of forests to reducing greenhouse gases through the use biomass for fuel. It is very exciting for a Secretary of Agriculture to show this kind of passion for, interest in, and knowledge about our forests.

Here’s the Youtube link.

It’s Not About Science, It’s About Values

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As I was catching up from vacation, I ran across this interesting post on Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog. It appears that you can’t get the paper he refers to without a subscription (hopefully I missed something).

The discussion and quotes reminded me a bit of our “science of fuel treatments” discussion.

Here’s a piece:

A quote from the article Roger cites:

Individuals tend to assimilate information by fitting it to pre-existing narrative templates or schemes that invest the information with meaning. The elements of these narrative templates—the identity of the stock heroes and villains, the nature of their dramatic struggles, and the moral stakes of their engagement with one another—vary in identifiable and recurring ways across cultural groups. By crafting messages to evoke narrative templates that are culturally congenial to target audiences, risk communicators can help to assure that the content of the information they are imparting receives considered attention across diverse cultural groups . . .

And Roger’s point

Again ironically, efforts to identify or label those who are skeptical of certain expert views as “anti-science” or “deniers” are like to become self-fulfilling in the sense that they reinforce the rejection of expert views as they play directly to a narrative conditioned on cultural considerations. Consequently, breaking down, rather than reinforcing differences across cultural groups would this seem key to broader acceptance of certain scientific findings. Building bridges is harder work than tearing them down

Through the impenetrable prose of academic science-technology studies-speak, do I detect a glimmer of a practical idea about talking to the public about risk?

Recreation Groups Want Additional Meetings on the Proposed Planning Rule

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A coalition of 72 recreation groups sent a letter to the Forest Service Chief last week about recreation interests not being heard by the proposed planning rule writing team and their comments not being reflected in summary documents on the planning rule website.  The coalition of primarily hunting, fishing, and off-road vehicle interests includes such groups as the National Rifle Association, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. 

The groups explain that “we do not assert that outdoor recreation is, or should be, a dominant use of all national forest lands.  But it is important and relevant to note that the Congress specifically listed outdoor recreation first in the identified mandated management responsibilities of the Forest Service.  Also noteworthy is the fact that assessments of the economic contributions of the national forests since 1992 have consistently identified outdoor recreation as the leading national economic benefit of the forests.”

The groups disagreed with a conclusion in the Fourth Planning Rule Roundtable summary that the Forest Service does not really have much ability to intentionally influence local economies, but should focus instead on the land management business it knows.  “We strongly disagree with both contentions.  Decisions regarding use of national forests, and especially decisions regarding kinds and levels of recreational uses, clearly and dramatically shape the economic health of nearby communities.  And this impact must be reflected in Forest Service planning.  There is no option under NEPA to abrogate this responsibility.  If the expertise resident within the Forest Service is incapable of meeting this responsibility, it must be found and included.  By reducing recreation opportunities or by constraining or prohibiting new recreational uses – like the initial opposition of the agency to geocaching – without considering ways to develop and apply new management protocols, the agency compromises the viability of hundreds of communities near national forests.”

“We are greatly concerned by the lack of emphasis placed upon recreation in the documents associated with the proposed new Planning Rule and will not support a final rule that fails to correct this flaw.  We intend to deliver this assessment to the public and to those representing the public if no commitment to change is made by the agency.”

The groups are asking for a meeting with the Chief, and a formal working session with the planning rule team to include provisions in the rule that requires Forest Plans to actively search out strategies to provide for and manage diverse public recreation uses.

The Fuel Treatment Debate Continues..Four Mile Fire

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Just returned from vacation and saw this article in the Washington Post.

U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, a resident of Boulder County and a long time supporter of mitigation efforts, has called for a review into whether those efforts were effective, as well as whether firefighters had enough air support and other resources…

Forest managers have begun examining the charred forest to see how their mitigation efforts worked, including how the fire was moving and how it behaved when it hit cleared areas, said Owen.

“All we can do is reduce the risk,” Owen said. “It’s not fireproofing.”

Mitigation efforts in the area had included communities banding together to plan for catastrophic fires, even if it meant convincing neighbors to cut down some of their trees.

Flames got within a half mile of the Poorman neighborhood on the eastern end of the fire, where about 30 homeowners had cut down trees and collectively purchased a plot of land for a community park, which served as a staging area for firefighters.

“These huge conflagrations aren’t as likely as the relatively small ones,” said Vera Evenson, a community leader who has lived in the mountains since 1965. She said the last major fire in the area happened in 1989. “That’s how we know mitigation works.”

Over the past three years, the county and state has spent about $800,000 on fire mitigation in the area, with thousands more spent by local fire districts and homeowners. Federal figures for the area weren’t immediately available, though Udall spokeswoman Jennifer Talhelm hopes that the review will help answer that question.

I thought it was mildly odd that the article cited a scientific study to determine acres of fuels treated.

Nationwide, the federal government treated 29 million fire-prone acres between 2001 and 2008, according to a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Hopefully, we would have a more direct and less costly method of reporting acres accomplished to Congress than funding university research on accomplishments ;).

Place-based National Forest Legislation & Agreements: Report to USFS

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photo by K.D. Swan

As our readers know, there has been a considerable amount of debate on this blog regarding place-based national forest legislation (e.g., the Tester and Wyden bills). 

A while back I put together some tables comparing various bills and formalized agreements, to see how they approach things such as NEPA, restoration, and other matters.  [Here it is, Appendix (comparison tables)]. 

Along with the National Forest Foundation, I also co-organized and hosted a symposium focused on the subject last June, with 80 people attending the event from across the country.  (here is a link with background reading).

I’ve done some further analysis since then.  The purpose of the Report is to (1) describe and analyze the recent emergence of place-based forest bills and the use of formalized agreements in the management of national forests; and (2) present alternatives to the USFS in how it can improve place-based legislation or provide alternatives to such legislation. 

 Here is my draft report in its entirety (USFS Cost Share Report).  Below are my key findings and recommendations:

 Key Findings

  • Place-based bills and agreements are a significant trend in national forest management.
  • Several place-based initiatives share a number of common characteristics and related provisions, including: (a) a frustration with the status quo, (b) the search for more certainty in forest management, (c) a focus on landscape-scale restoration and its relationship to rural communities, and (d) an emphasis on conflict resolution and the desire for more public participation in national forest management. 
  • Several place-based initiatives share similar frustrations with national forest management.  Forest planning processes, funding and budgets, organizational culture, personnel turnover, and a small-scale approach to forest restoration are commonly identified sources of dismay.
  • A defining characteristic of every place-based initiative is the search for more certainty in forest management.  The goal is pursued in numerous ways, including recommended land designations, the resolution of intractable conflicts, the use of stewardship contracting, and legislated timber supply/treatment mandates. 
  • The need for landscape-scale restoration is a commonly identified area of agreement by these initiatives.  This is most pronounced in places where historically low-severity fire regimes have turned into high-severity or mixed-severity regimes (e.g., dry-site forests of ponderosa pine).  Areas in need of restoration work are often identified and prioritized, with associated sideboards such as large-tree retention and road building prohibitions included. 
  • Several initiatives emphasize that a viable wood products industry is necessary for the attainment and financing of various restoration goals, and that industry needs a more certain supply of timber to be competitive and/or to make long-term investments. 
  • Several place-based initiatives are seeking more secure and structured forms of public participation in USFS decision making, such as through the use of memorandums-of-understanding (MOUs) and additional advisory committees. 
  • There are politically viable alternatives to place-based forest legislation, including formalized agreements (MOUs) and long-term stewardship contracts that provide interested parties greater certainty about forest management. 

Recommendations

  • Congress and the USFS should oppose forest-specific (non-wilderness) legislation until a number of fundamental and systemic concerns are addressed, including how such laws would fit into the preexisting statutory/planning framework and how they would be financed. 
  • Most of the challenges faced by the selected cases are systemic, not place-based.  Questions presented by such things as landscape-level restoration and NEPA, stewardship contracting, and funding, among others, deserve a national-level response—not a series of ad hoc remedies and site-specific exemptions. 
  • Long-term stewardship contracts can provide as much or more certainty to the timber industry than a legislated timber supply mandate.  Though imperfect, stewardship contracts are preferable to the dangerous precedent of legislating timber supply on particular national forests.  Congress and the USFS should consider a number of issues related to certainty upon the reauthorization of stewardship contracting authority. 
  • The selected place-based agreements, such as that operating on the Colville National Forest, demonstrate viable alternatives to securing greater certainty than through a legislated timber supply mandate.  The Colville framework is exemplary and deserves study for possible replication or adaptation elsewhere. 
  • Several place-based initiatives are frustrated by forest planning processes that provide little certainty and commitments by the agency.  As the USFS moves forward with its new planning regulations (to be finalized in 2011), it should consider how relevant these place-based initiatives find the zoning of national forests into basic management areas, including those areas prioritized for restoration. 
  • The best way for the agency to proceed with these place-based initiatives and their focus on restoration is to embrace a collaborative, competitive, and experimental approach.  There are at least two exemplary processes and frameworks that should be fully supported, and possibly enlarged and replicated in the future: the Montana Forests Restoration Committee and the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act.  These preexisting frameworks offer a possible substitute for place-based legislation. 

The Montana Conundrum II- Joint Fact Finding

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Matthew Koehler had a very thoughtful response to the original post here.

In continuing the dialogue, there are two main topics, what we might call developing an index of vegetation treatment intensity for each forest, and a discussion of why litigation rates are relatively high in Montana (or probably, more specifically Region 1 of the Forest Service). This first post is about developing the index.

How the need for an index originally came up was my question about why some might think we need more costly and time-consuming prospective environmental analysis, if we are simply doing less of what we used to do a lot of. In other words, we have plenty of timber sales and fuels treatment projects over the past years and should have some idea of the real environmental impacts (not projected, but observed). And conceivably, some impacts should be a function of the size of the acreage treated and proximity of those treatments.

The other opportunity that we might have from these data would be to compare forests with the same levels of activity and ask the question “do their levels of appeals and litigation differ, and if so, why?”

So I think it would be enlightening to do some joint fact- finding about what the actual treatment acres are relative to the total forested acres by forest across the country.. or at least for forests in the Rocky Mountain west.

If we could agree on some key data, I would be willing to try to extract it from the relevant databases. There seem to be three main questions:

What should we use as a baseline? It would have to be total forested acres because we are using these numbers in the context of understanding the environmental impacts. Take forest X with 1 million acres and 200 K acres of suitable timber, compared to forest y with the same total number of acres and 900 K suitable acres. If we are talking about the environmental impacts of cutting, say, 10K acres on a million acre forest, the impacts should be the same. Suitability is merely a human construct and does not tell us anything about impacts.

During the development of the 2005 Rule, Chris Iverson used to call this the Chugach/Tongass difference- you don’t need to analyze as much when you don’t do as much. The concept seems pretty straightforward. I was just trying to quantify “not doing as much” by looking at acres.

What counts as a vegetation treatment?
Here’s a possible list: prescribed burns, mastication, felling without removal (precommercial thinning might fall in here), felling with removal, felling with removal using temporary roads (commercial thinning would fall in here). As a person who has spent recent weeks reviewing a roadless EIS, I can tell you they all have different impacts. I would tend to stick to counting felling with removal and using temporary roads. Another topic is whether the treatment “counts” if the trees are dead. It seems like sedimentation effects of temporary roads would be more or less the same, but dead trees will fall anyway. Then, often, more trees die while people are planning projects. So to make counting easier, I would argue that a good estimate for our purposes (how much are our treatments impacting the land?) would be the acreage of all projects that have felling with removal, either live or dead trees.

What length of time should be analyzed? Probably the last 10 years would give us a good estimate of what we are currently doing, although some might argue for five. If we go too far back, we get to a time when the world was different. If we take too few years, we could allow unusual years to unduly influence the total.