The Spotted Owl Experiment- Lessons Learned?

by

I thought this newspaper story was interesting.. it summarizes the history of the major transition in the Northwest around the spotted owl. Of course, many of us were actually there. The story as depicted in the article doesn’t bear much resemblance to my experience.

The logic goes like this. Through ESA litigation, we shut down old growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. It really wasn’t about the spotted owl, it was about old growth.

From that standpoint, Babbitt said, the forest plan has been a success despite the declining owl populations. The plan represented a landmark in conservation planning, with forest managers now looking at entire ecosystems rather than just drawing lines on a map, Babbitt said.

(The second sentence about drawing lines on maps doesn’t make much sense out of context)

The story continues that even though the owl has declined, it’s still OK because the social changes weren’t really that bad for anyone. The people who wanted better wages left the local communities, and tourism provides some relatively low paying jobs.

Do others have some difficulty reconciling these two statements?:

The Northwest Forest Plan resulted in an 80 percent drop in logging in the region’s 24 million acres of federal forests. The Clinton administration hoped that about 1 million board feet could be cut annually, but that hasn’t happened in 20 years.

And :

One 1995 estimate by the Forest Service said that 400 jobs had been lost as a result of the logging restrictions.

“They were hard hit, but much of it occurred in the 1980s, before the owl,” said Annabel Kirschner , a Washington State University professor who’s studied timber industry employment. “It had nothing to do with environmental policies.”

This seems like a very strong assertion. Nothing to do with.. like 0% influence.

In some cases, those who write newspaper articles seem to want to tie things up in neat little story lines. But very few policy conflicts lend themselves to a neat story line. and there are voices that don’t seem to be heard in such articles. Here is another version of the story from 2008.

On this Labor Day, we might ask: could we have gotten protection of old growth without that extensive an impact on workers and communities? Did the costs of the desirable goal of old growth protection fall unfairly on the working class and rural communities? Could that transition have been designed so that that it was less about timber companies versus environmentalists and more about people in communities? Should it have been designed to make that transition more gradual?

What are your ideas of the lessons to be learned from this policy experiment?

Labor Day Weekend Safety Message- Hazard Trees

by

This weekend as you recreate, hunt (or as one colleague puts it, are off on a “spiritual retreat”), cut firewood or work, please remember these safety messages..
Here are safety guidelines for visitors to bark beetle country:

Plan for a Safe Visit

* Contact the ranger district office in the area you plan to visit for the most current information about recreation opportunities and closures and conditions.
* Review the Hazard Tree Guidelines that follow this list. Remember them as you park your car, sit down to rest or picnic, pitch your tent, plan your route, etc. Look up, look down, look all around. When travelling on forest roads and trails, be prepared to encounter fallen trees across the route. Riders of horses, ATVs, and motorcycles should be especially alert to these potential obstacles.
* Check the weather forecast before heading out. Winds and moist conditions increase the likelihood of trees falling.
* Make sure someone knows where you are going, when you expect to be back, and what to do if you don’t return.
* Don’t rely only on cell phones. Cell phone coverage is unreliable in many remote areas.
* When possible, travel in groups. If one member of your party gets hurt, the others can assist and get help. Solo travel is not advised.
* Dress for changing weather; conditions can change quickly no matter what time of year.
* Pack adequate food and water and personal safety equipment.
* Take a map, compass, or other items that will help you know where you are. Plan an open and safe route. Make note of openings you can retreat to if winds become strong.
* Falling trees aren’t the only hazard out there. Be prepared for storms, lightning, flash floods, altitude, ticks, mosquitoes, and wildlife encounters.

Hazard Tree Guidelines

* Remember, falling trees are always a hazard when visiting National Forest System lands.
* Be aware of your surroundings. Avoid dense patches of dead trees. Trees can fall without warning.
* Stay out of the forest during periods of high winds. If you are already in the forest when the winds kick up, head to a clearing out of reach of potential falling trees.
* Place tents and park vehicles in areas where they will not be hit if trees fall.
* When driving in remote areas, park close to a main road rather than on a spur or one-way section. If trees fall across the road, you may be trapped.

Here’s one for employees.

Forest to Faucet Partnership

by
Photo of Harris Sherman and District Ranger Jan Cutts from Summit County Citizens Voice

Here is an excellent piece by Bob Berwyn on this effort to protect watersheds- joint effort by the Forest Service and Denver Water. It’s got climate change, bark beetle, water, landscape scale, all lands.. many of our key themes on this blog.

Denver Water and the U.S. Forest Service will join forces to treat about 38,000 acres of critical watersheds to try and prevent catastrophic damage to key streams and reservoirs, top officials announced Saturday, speaking at a press conference at the Dillon Marina, within sight of Denver Water’s largest mountain reservoir.

The precedent-setting $33 million “Forest to Faucet” partnership covers about 6,000 acres in the Blue River watershed in Summit County, including 4,700 acres already planned for treatment by the Forest Service, plus another 1,300 acres to be treated when Denver Water pitches in another $1 million starting Oct. 1. Other projects are planned around Strontia Springs, Gross, Antero, Eleven Mile Canyon and Cheeseman reservoirs.

The partnership was announced in the context of the pine beetle epidemic that’s wiped out about 3 million acres of lodgepole pine forests in the state.

Part of the Forest Service share of the funding will come from money that’s already been allocated to the Rocky Mountain region of the Forest Service, said Harris Sherman, Department of Agriculture Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment. Additionally, several national forests in Colorado competed favorably for a separate slice of forest health funds that will also specifically toward these critical watershed treatments…

“The Forest Service can’t do this alone,” said Sherman, adding that about 33 million people in 13 states depend on water that come from Colorado watersheds. “Maintaining these forests is everybody’s business. I applaud Denver Water for their long-term investment in our national forest watersheds.”

The work will focus in thinning, fuel reduction, creating fire breaks, erosion control decommissioning roads, and, eventually, reforestation. The partnership could serve as a model for similar agreements across the West and with other industries, Sherman added, singling out the ski industry and power companies with infrastructure on forested lands.

The Montana Conundrum- Guest Post by Derek Weidensee

by

All decked out but no place to go: photo of roadside hazard tree removal in bark beetle country.

And then we come to Montana, which still has a timber industry. Even though many environmentalists have stopped litigating, some groups still litigate even “healthy forest” timber sales. Why hasn’t Montana succeeded in ending litigation where the other areas have? The majority of the public in Colorado, Arizona, and Lake Tahoe tend to consider themselves “environmentalists”. The majority in Montana wouldn’t. Could it be that we have a very ironic anomaly where increased logging can only occur where the majority consider themselves to be environmentalists?

Sometimes in order to better understand a hotly debated issue such as logging we get sucked into the details. This has the unfortunate result of losing sight of the “big picture”. We get so lost in the micro, we lose sight of the macro. Big numbers by themselves don’t mean anything, only percentages can lead us to perspective.

Perhaps it would be informative to discuss how much has been logged. The following percentages come from the USFS forest inventory analysis (FIA) reports (can you find the misspelling on this web page?) and the USFS “cut and sold” reports which list harvest acreage for every national forest for every year back to 1945. The following percentages are based on “forested acreage”. No water, rock, or grass acres were used in my calculations.

The following table represents the amount of “forested acres” that were logged in the past 50 years: Lolo…………………………………..17%
Kootenai……………………………..25%
Beaverhead-Deerodge……………5%
Helena………………………………..7%
Flathead…………………………….13%
Gallatin……………………………….7%
Let’s focus on the 5% that was logged on the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest since it’s the focus of Tester’s Beaverhead Partnership collaboration. 5% sounds pretty sustainable to me. I mentioned the above numbers to two prominent Montana environmentalists. It was the first they heard of it. I think it would help us all to learn together to start from a joint basis of facts.

The Partnership plan proposes to log 70,000 acres in ten years. Sounds like a lot-until you find out it’s only 2.5% of the “forested acreage”. If you projected that out 50 years, that would mean that 18% would be logged in 100 years. By that time the sapling that grew up in a clearcut done in 1960 would be ready for harvest. If 80% of the landscape for natural processes is not enough, what is?

In the five years ending in 2008, the BDNF logged an average of 500 acres/year. That’s .02% of the forested acreage. At that rate it’ll take 50 years to log 1%! In the last five years the Lolo harvested 2500 acres/year. At that rate it’ll take 50 years to log 7%. A lot of these groups had, in the past, advocated a “zero cut” on national forests. Isn’t 500 acres per year close enough to zero?

On forests that aren’t litigated, the NEPA mandated EA’s get pretty small. I compared one in Montana to one in Colorado. They were both MPB salvage timber sales. The one in Montana treated 1300 acres and ran to 200 pages, the one in Colorado treated 4,000 acres and ran to 57 pages!

Finally, the biggest cause of all should be knowing that environmentalists are good people at heart. They’re not evil. They’re good fathers and husbands. I’ve read the 1985 Lolo forest plan. There’s no doubt they planned to convert 90% of the Lolo to a tree farm by the year 2050. I’ve read USFS inventories from 1950. A third of NW Montana was old growth. There’s no doubt there’s less today. You’ve stopped old growth logging. You’ve set aside roadless. Our life ambition is to be successful at our work. You have been successful.

I also know that the pendulum of public policy in this country swings to the extremes. I’m sure the “zero cut” groups never dreamed they would have stopped all logging so easily. The USFS responded to “changing public values” in the 90’s by scaling back timber harvest. I’m sure they never dreamed it would go too far (I’ve always wanted to ask Jack Ward Thomas where he wanted it to be). Let’s hope the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle.

Note from Sharon. I tried to check Derek’s facts on the internet, but it wasn’t as easy as a person might think without going into corporate databases.

Montana has more litigation and appeals (as described in the GAO study) due to (here are a variety of hypotheses):

Venue shopping by organizations who want to win
The old timber industry built up an associated appeals and litigation industry which is continuing
People only trust that fuels treatments are needed if they aren’t sold to the timber industry.
People in Colorado just want those dead trees outta there and don’t care who takes them.
Other hypotheses?

I also tried to run down all the ongoing litigation of timber and fuels projects in Colorado. I could only find two. One deals with a lawyer/neighbor of the project; the other is a law school class project. So litigation does not seem like a serious problem here.

I also attended a speech by Secretary Vilsack and one by Governor Ritter on Friday in Fort Collins who were both very strongly for using the dead trees that we have everywhere in stacks in bark beetle country. If it is about using wood, as opposed to cutting trees, a biomass industry could start the litigation dynamic all over again. Yet those hazard trees in the photo could be used for various purposes, including to reduce fossil fuel usage. That’s why it would be good to understand the real reasons behind litigation in different areas of the country.

Finally, while trying to check on acreages, I ran across this link to a study that described 8-10 K acres of treatment on the San Juan (this study is entirely very interesting) with the goal of getting up to 20-30 K (only 10% mechanical, most prescribed burning). My colleagues assure me that there are plenty of environmental lawyers in Durango, yet they are not litigated on fuels treatment projects.

Also I see this AP report of a hazard tree removal project along roads on the Helena that is about 10K acres on the Helena over 5-7 years. Will the advent of bark beetle mortality make Montana become more like Colorado in terms of appeals and litigation?

What do you think about the Montana Conundrum? Is your state more like Montana or Colorado?

NY Times Guest Op-Ed on Wilderness Management- True or False?

by

Thursday there was this curious op-ed in the New York Times about the management of wilderness in general and the presence of trail signs in particular.

First, I don’t believe much of what I see in the press without independent verification, and certainly not op-ed pages, but I wonder if it’s true about the signs in Boundary Waters or other wilderness areas.

Does anyone out there know? A brief internet search did not yield any substantiation of this claim.

The below comments are only relevant if Mr. Stroll’s assertions are correct.

Second, having seen signs in wilderness (and been always glad to see them) I wondered how my personal experience squared with the above observation (if true). I found this policy. I wonder if this is just a variation in interpretation of “minimal.”

Third, if that’s the case, then I wonder if the policy should be more consistent.. or whether there is an opportunity for the public to weigh in on the development of these policies.

Ray Ring on Judge Molloy Opinions

by


photo by Kurt Wilson of the Missoulian

see this piece in High Country News.. entitled “How Green is Judge Molloy?”. It’s related to some of the discussion topics on this blog, including the ever-popular “impact of litigation on FS actions, especially in Montana.”

Many plaintiffs engage in “venue shopping.” Environmentalists take their cases whenever possible to Molloy and a few other notable federal judges, including B. Lynn Winmill in Boise (the primary watchdog on livestock grazing) and James Redden in Portland (the salmon champion), who were also appointed by Democratic presidents.

But picking your judge doesn’t guarantee victory. Molloy — who gets a lot of environmental cases simply because of his location — still rules against environmentalists more than half the time, says one lawyer who’s often in his court. Another frequent lawsuit-filer quickly names five timber sales that Molloy approved over his objections; all five were ultimately blocked by an appeals court.

Environmentalists don’t even agree on what they want from the judge. In last year’s grizzly case, for instance, the National Wildlife Federation agreed with the government, saying that the endangered species law didn’t need to be reapplied. That group, along with other pro-hunting groups such as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, also backed the feds’ latest deal on wolves.

Molloy actually paddles his legal canoe more or less in the middle of the river. And despite complaints from some environmentalists, they still have better odds in his courtroom than in many others in the West.

More than anything, Molloy’s wolf ruling shows how environmental laws can sometimes block pragmatic and political solutions. And it underscores our basic psychology about judges: When they rule against you, they’re biased, but when they rule for you, they’re going on the facts.

Update on Planning Rule Process

by

From the Planning Rule Team:

We’ve learned a tremendous amount about what should be in a new planning
rule since the Notice of Intent (NOI) was issued last December. We
received over 26,000 written comments on the NOI, over 300 blog comments
and have had over 40 public meetings attended by over 3000 people. We’ve
worked hard to get input from Tribes through our regional and national
Tribal roundtables; from scientists through the science forum and
scientists’ continued involvement throughout the roundtables; from Forest
Service employees through various internal feedback mechanisms; and from
other federal agencies through the Federal Interagency Working Group.
We’re committed to building a proposed rule and draft environmental impact
statement (DEIS) that reflect the diverse opinions and common themes that
have emerged from the public involvement process.

We’ve now entered a new phase of the rule development process. We are
currently finalizing the proposed rule and DEIS for clearance by the
Department of Agriculture and Office of Management and Budget. We expect
the proposed rule and DEIS to be published in the Federal Register in late
December.

We are committed to keeping planning rule development open, transparent and
participatory. Please take advantage of the following opportunities to
stay engaged over the coming months:
* We will continue to send out periodic updates on this listserv.
Encourage other people who you think would be interested to join as well.
Sign-up can be accessed from the right hand column of the planning rule
homepage or by going directly to this link.

* Check back often to the planning rule website for the latest information.

* While we won’t be looking for additional blog comments on the rule
substance until the proposed rule comes out in December, the planning rule
blog will continue to host discussions on what the public engagement
process should look like when the proposed rule is released. Visit the blog
here.

* You can also follow the Forest Service on Twitter here.

We will seek formal comment on the proposed rule and DEIS, and will hold
additional public meetings when the proposed rule and DEIS are published in
December.

Thank you again for your involvement in the rule development process. Your
continued participation in the process will be critical to its success.

Three Former Chiefs support Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act

by

See this story on the three former FS chiefs supporting the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act.

“It’s sort of a special place. A wide variety of people have been working together for a long time and I think they’ve done an outstanding job,” (former Chief Dale) Bosworth said Tuesday. “But if they never see any outcome, they have to question of why they spent so much time together pounding something out.”

But despite its “uniqueness”, it seems like people could feel this way about many areas (this is a quote from a Save the Front factsheet):

Why is a Conservation Management Area needed? The 2007 Travel Plan is a good Forest Service commitment but will only be in place for 10 or 15 years. However, after that a future Forest Service supervisor or Washington, D.C. political appointee could make changes that would hurt the integrity of the land or limit local uses. For example, maybe a future Forest Supervisor will think it is a great idea to open new routes at the expense of stock travel and hiking. Reasonable side-boards on the Forest Service and the BLM will protect access for future generations of hikers, horseback riders, and mountain bike users in the same areas the forest plan allows today.

This quote reminded me of a quote from Mark Rey about the roadless issue in Martin Nie’s interview with him here

So when we came in, we looked at that history and we concluded that the crux of the problem with this issue is that it’s—on the one hand—an intensely political debate because it’s a basic resource allocation question over resources that people feel very strongly about. On the other hand, it’s a very technical debate because you’re trying to decide the fate of individual areas, putting boundaries around them that are based upon site specific data and so therefore you have to be able to amass and work with a substantial database to make good decisions.

In the case of trying to do a nationwide rule, you know you can get all the political closure you want to finally end the debate. You can have the president of the United States stand on the side of a ridge in southern Virginia and announce the outcome, but as the courts have told us, it’s hard to do justice to all the technical detail that is required to make the decision sound from the standpoint of a reviewing judge.

On the other hand, if you deal with this on a forest-by-forest basis, you can—by virtue of the fact that you have a lot less data to deal with—deal with it more intelligently.

The problem is that you can’t really get political closure to the decision because the decision is going to be made by a GS-14 or a GS-15 career civil servant and everybody knows that you can take the debate on up the food chain to see if you can get a better result. So you don’t get any real closure to the issue, both because of where it’s made and also because you don’t engage national interests to the same degree that you do in a national debate.

So we thought if we tried to find a middle road or a third path by working on a state-by-state basis, we could, on the one hand, reduce the size of the decision down to a manageable level, and on the other hand engage for the purposes of bringing better political closure to this, the one person who’s arguably elected to represent all the citizens of the state and that’s the governor, and that in a partnership with the governor we could get the right balance.

Have “lines on maps” and “what you can do on the ground effectively” decisions that have moved beyond being able to reach closure through the forest planning process? and beyond local civil servants?

Ski Area Development NEPA- Two or Three Layer Process?

by

Here’s a story from the Aspen Daily News about a recent case on a specific ski area development, a ski trail on Burnt Mountain East at Snowmass Ski Area.

In discussing forest planning, we talk about doing NEPA at a more conceptual level, and then at a project level (oil and gas leasing decision, travel management, fuel treatments, etc.). Here is some of the same conversation around two layers of ski area NEPA- which leaves, including forest plans, actually a three- layer analysis. Could this decision process be designed better?

Respect the Rivers

by

(photo by Julie Sutor, Summit Daily)

Here’s a link to a great story about the Dillon Ranger District helping people learn to protect streams by changing their behavior. Given our previous discussions this week about the use of litigation as a tactic, one response would be to litigate to force the FS to prohibit dispersed camping. But that would punish the good campers, and chances are the bad would continue to do it illegally, and there will probably never be enough staffing to patrol for dispersed campers. Just a possible example of how 20th century solutions may not fit 21st century problems.