New Planning Rule : Less Litigation? More Defensible?

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Check out this EE news story.

FOREST SERVICE: Agency chief says no ‘redraft’ for planning rule (06/14/2011)

Phil Taylor, E&E reporter

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell today said he has no plans to scrap the agency’s draft planning rule for the nation’s forests and grasslands, as urged last month by a group of nearly 60 lawmakers who warned the proposal could draw unwanted lawsuits.

But he also made no indication whether the agency would follow the recommendations of conservationists who have argued the agency’s new planning proposal lacks regulatory teeth to protect and monitor wildlife and their habitats.

He said the agency is hard at work analyzing more than 300,000 comments it received in the three months since the draft was released in mid-February. The agency still expects to finalize the rule by the end of the year, he said.

“As we look through the comments, if there’s something that we missed, we’ll look to make those changes,” he said. “What I’m not OK with is the status quo. The planning rule back in 1982 was a very good rule, yet so many things have changed between 1982 and today that we need a different rule so that we’re able to move forward and restore these national forests and provide for the services that these communities need.”

Tidwell said there are no plans to “redraft” the rule, as proposed by 59 lawmakers in a letter late last month that warned of likely lawsuits from environmental groups (Greenwire, June 6).

“It’s my expectation that with the final rule, first of all, there will be less of a need for folks to litigate and that also it will be easier for us to defend,” he said. “I don’t have any indications from anything I’m aware of in the proposed rule that we need to do [a redraft].”

But the lawmakers, most of them Republicans, say the draft planning rule is overly burdensome and would bog the agency down in environmental lawsuits.

“By adding more process requirements and introducing more technical terms, you are increasing the likelihood that, like previous attempts at reform, the proposed rule will be tied up in court for years,” wrote the lawmakers, led by Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Mike Ross (D-Ark.).

Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson (R) said he was particularly concerned about a “viability” provision in the proposed rule that requires consideration of both vertebrate and invertebrate species on the agency’s 198 million acres of forests and grasslands. He was more succinct in describing the rule today at the U.S. Capitol: “It sucks.”

Simpson said he is meeting with Tidwell this afternoon at the chief’s request and expects to discuss the planning rule and the Forest Service’s 2012 budget, among other things. He was not certain what Tidwell had planned to discuss.

The planning rule seeks to revamp how the agency updates land management plans for 175 national forests and grasslands by speeding planning efforts, incorporating best available science, engaging the public and ensuring forests’ resilience to climate change, pests and other threats (E&ENews PM, Feb. 10).

The two previous administrations tried to revise the rule but ultimately had their efforts stymied in court.

Summer Safety Message: Beware of Marijuana Growers!

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As asked for by a reader, the straight scoop on safety in the woods with regard to  marijuana cultivation. Here’s a link to a video that shows some pot growing on the Mendocino.

 

Be safe in the National Forests
What to do if you encounter a marijuana cultivation site
Marijuana growers are active in the nation’s national forests and it’s important for your safety to be aware of your surroundings.
If you encounter a drug operation, back out immediately! Never engage the growers as these are extremely dangerous people. If you can identify a landmark or record a GPS coordinate, that’s very helpful. The growers may be present and may or may not know that you have found their operation. Get to a safe place and report the encounter to any uniformed member of the Forest Service or to your local law enforcement agency.

Here are some clues that you may have come across a marijuana cultivation site:
 The smell of marijuana, especially on hot days, is like a skunk.
 Hoses or drip lines located in unusual or unexpected places.
 A well-used trail where there shouldn’t be one.
 Voices coming from an unusual place.
 People standing along roads without vehicles present, or in areas where loitering appears
unusual.
 Grow sites are usually found in isolated locations, in rough steep terrain (typically between
500 to 5,500 feet elevation.)
 Camps containing cooking and sleeping areas with food, fertilizer, weapons, garbage,
rat poison, and/or dead animals.
 Small propane bottles (so that the grower avoids detection of wood smoke.)
 Individuals armed with rifles out of hunting season.
As soon as you become aware that you have come upon a cultivation site, or have encountered
any of the above situations, back out immediately! Leave the way you came in, and make as
little noise as possible.
Get to a safe place and, as soon as possible, report the encounter to any uniformed member
of the Forest Service or to your local law enforcement agency. Report as much detail about
the location and incident as you can recall.

Pickin’ Sides in the Evolutionary Struggle- Good Idea? Good Investment?

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From NPR, here.

Here’s my question: if we can’t afford/ don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to kill them all, why are we killing any? Intellectual curiosity? Is that a good enough reason?

Killing One Owl Species To Save Another

by Lauren Sommer

A female northern spotted owl in California. Spotted owls are losing habitat to invasive barred owls, a species originally from the eastern U.S.
Enlarge National Park Service

A female northern spotted owl in California. Spotted owls are losing habitat to invasive barred owls, a species originally from the eastern U.S.
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June 12, 2011 from KQED

Spotted owls are on the decline despite two decades of work to bring them back. So, later this month, wildlife officials are releasing a new plan to protect the owls, and it includes a controversial new approach: eliminating their cousins.

In a dense forest near Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco, National Park Service ecologist Bill Merkle plays a recording of a spotted owl in hopes of hearing from a real one.

“I think they’re just probably 50 or 60 feet up there,” he says.

Northern spotted owls became famous in the 1990s, when the federal government set aside millions of acres of forest to protect them. That stoked an epic battle between loggers and wildlife groups over their habitat. Since then, spotted owls haven’t come back. Biologists believe that’s due to an invasion of barred owls.

Barred owls take over spotted owl territory and in some cases even attack them. They have an advantage because they eat a wider variety of prey. In places like western Washington, the spotted owl population has been cut in half since the barred owl showed up.

“It’s a troubling picture for the spotted owls,” Merkle says.

Originally from the eastern U.S., barred owls invaded spotted owl territory in Washington state decades ago and, Merkle says, they’ve moved down the coast ever since.

“The barred owl is a little larger,” he says. “It’s a little more aggressive.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to deal with this by “permanent removal,” says Robin Bown, a biologist with the agency. “We’re going to look at all potential opportunities, but the most humane way to do it is to shoot them.”

Bown says the agency plans to eliminate barred owls from a few study areas to see if the spotted owls there do better. And yes, she says, shooting the barred owls will raise a few eyebrows.

“It’s a difficult concept, to say I’m going to kill one species to try to save another species,” she says. “But it’s also something that, in some cases, we need to do.”

Eric Forsman, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, says shooting owls isn’t a long-term solution.

“To try to control barred owls across a large region would be incredibly expensive, and you’d have to keep doing it forever because if you ever stopped, they would begin to come back into those areas,” he says.

That’s why, Forsman says, it’s looking pretty dismal for the spotted owl.

“I think all we can really do is try our best to provide [a] habitat for spotted owls and in the long run, we’re just going to have to let the two species work it out,” he says.

This also reminds me of a piece in New Scientist last September about BFFs (that is, Black-Footed Ferrets) that also mentions wolves Conservation and compassion by Marc Bekoff. Check it out.

Here’s a quote:

The guiding principles of compassionate conservation are: do no intentional harm; respect all life; treat all individuals with respect and dignity; and tread lightly when stepping into the lives of animals.

Forest Planning- Invitation to Artistic Collaboration

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I’ve always wondered if the feel of planning would be different if we kicked off revisions with a, say, Blank National Forest art week or weekend, with readings, visual arts, music and theater (possibly with juries and prizes provided by NGOs?) around what the forest means to people. Aspects of this art might then become touchstones in the often head and not heart-filled planning discussions. Anyway, I guess right-brain planning remains unexplored for now, although here’s a contribution from a planning practitioner who prefers privacy (how’s that for alliteration?) who feels the same longings. I wonder how many of us feel this way?

As for me, I have implemented 1982 Rule

Planned to implement the 1994 draft (remember?)

Participated in the evaluation of 2000

Worked on training modules for the 2005

Attempted to implement the 2005

Attempted to implement 2008

Attempting to implement 1982 – again

Anticipate implementing 2011-12 before I retire.

So I offer as a practical exercise and a bit of fun (but I don’t want this classified as “planning humor”) a real online attempt at collaboration of a different kind – an artistic collaboration if you will. But as you may garner, I believe this very concept can transfer into real forest planning collaboration, although perhaps not in rhyme or free verse.

I have for you a poem. You may or may not agree with its contents. Some stanzas are perhaps well formed, some in obvious need of refinement. Maybe some readers who have not made entry or comment will choose to participate. I hope so. Use your creative powers. If you have a replacement for a stanza, reply with the stanza number. Here goes:

The Planning Rule Poem

1. Forget “the best science’

And admit this way’s useless

To “manage” a forest

And follow a plan

When the buzz words change

More than the public can stand

2. New perspectives, no

Ecosystem management, better

EMS, AMS, CER, now ASSESS

All the same, but it’s DIFFERENT

THIS TIME and responsive

To everyone everywhere always, you bet

3. We agree we adore it

We plan to “restore” it

We want it to be

What WE want it to be

And our science is better

Than your science, you see

4. I have this idea

I may be a heretic

To blaspheme “the best science”

As relates to a forest

And employ in its stead

The best ART – there, I’ve said it

5. In the segments of planning

I completely agree

Assess, plan, monitor

One, two, three

And back ‘round again

As the case may be

To adapt, but collaboratively

6. Which is not to say

That Americans should outsource

Our need for the things

That come from the forest

Or underneath it

Of course that IS what we practice today

6. By law forests should

And must in the future

Provide goods and services

(Oh – I’ve heard that before)

With all the new jargon that only confuses

National forests are still about “multiple uses.”

7. ADMIT IT, ADMIT IT, ADMIT IT, I say

Congress has never left NFMA

Behind, so just say to the interested parties

Let’s work together to create in these woods

An artistic collaboration of goods

And services to provide for us and our children to be.

8. Sure we folks in the forest are going to leave evidence

Of our presence, our passing, our needs at this time;

As we need to use resources we know they aren’t limitless

As we play in the forest and know that it succors us

We must simply take care that we don’t take too much

Is that really so hard? Why such a big fuss?

9. Art’s a translation of human sensations

Into a thing that can be experienced

By others as substance, or form, or event

Art is creation, not explanation

Or a scientific finding of association

And a plan’s not a “fact,” it’s a human creation

10. Art moves us ways that can’t be explained

By pieces and bits of data contained

In findings of science

And forests move us in that same way

We plan to create, not to explain or reveal

We know what we like, we know what we feel

11. Having stated what should be obvious

To those who are blinded by dogmatic adherence

To any one notion of “truth” when it comes

To the realm of forest “management”

Be it “preserve it” or “use it” or even “sustain it”

Or “make it resilient” as if WE understood it

12. But “plan” we will, and we’ll to it together

And attempt to find harmony among all the elements

Harmony – a musical artistic term that also is fact

That science can explain, but the notion came first;

It’s the combination of observation and imagination

That artistic collaboration makes a scientific reality.

Zone of Agreement? – Fire and Fuels Treatments

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See this press release from Center for Biological Diversity.

Collaborative Forest Restoration Project Has Lessened Damage, Severity of Arizona’s Massive Wallow Fire

SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz.— U.S. Forest Service officials say forest restoration work implemented under the White Mountains Stewardship Contract — part of a cooperative project among conservationists, local communities and government agencies — has lessened the severity of the Wallow fire and helped firefighters save towns threatened by the flames. Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest Supervisor Chris Knopp told the Associated Press on Thursday that he credited treatments with helping to save Alpine, Nutrioso and Springerville. A district ranger from the same forest told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that restoration treatments aided firefighters’ ability to save homes in the White Mountains.

“Ever since Arizona’s last mega-fire — the Rodeo-Chediski in 2002 — communities, environmentalists, local industry and forest officials have been pouring their hearts and souls into community protection and landscape-scale restoration of the degraded pine forests in the White Mountains,” said Todd Schulke of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups involved with the project. “That work began next to towns where the fire danger was high, and it looks like those years of cooperation are paying big dividends in the Wallow fire.”

After the Rodeo-Chediski fire, the Forest Service initiated the White Mountains Stewardship Contract to facilitate forest restoration in White Mountains east of that fire’s boundary in a swath of forest that includes the area being affected by Wallow. Its objective is to restore up to 150,000 acres of degraded forest over 10 years by strategically thinning small trees in overgrown ponderosa forests to safely reintroduce beneficial fires.

As of April 2010, 49,719 acres of degraded forest had been approved for treatment. Work had been completed on 35,166 of those acres, and the rest were in progress. Most of the acres are located in the wildland urban interface — lands abutting towns — and are intended to reduce fire hazards to communities including Alpine, Nutrioso, Eager and Greer that are now threatened by the Wallow fire.

The Center for Biological Diversity publicly supported the White Mountain Stewardship Contract creation in 2004. Since then the Center has actively worked with communities, the Forest Service and businesses that thin small-diameter trees to ensure the project’s success. That work included lobbying Congress for adequate funding. Because of broad agreement around the project — which resulted in forest recovery and local jobs — it has been hailed as a model for collaborative forest restoration.

“Without the success and cooperation of the stewardship contract, damage from the Wallow fire would have been much worse,” said Schulke. “Our forests need more of this kind of cooperation if we are to have any hope of restoring them.”

The Center and other organizations have been also working together to expand the success of the White Mountains Stewardship Contract to the rest of the Mogollon Rim. The 2.4-million-acre Four Forests Restoration Initiative (4FRI) seeks to restore the ponderosa pine forest from Flagstaff to New Mexico, focusing on strategic thinning of small trees on 1 million acres over the next 20 years in order to protect communities and safely restore beneficial fires to forested landscapes. 4FRI includes a plan to develop a restoration wood industry designed specifically to thin and utilize small-diameter trees in order to eliminate costs to taxpayers and rapidly expand the amount of forest work being done.

Link to Forest Service Watershed Condition Maps

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Some have told me they had trouble finding these; here’s the entire Secretary’s press release and here are the maps.

June 3, 2011– Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced the release of a new map that characterizes the health and condition of National Forest System lands in more than 15,000 watersheds across the country. The U.S. Forest Service’s Watershed Condition Classification Map is the first step in the agency’s Watershed Condition Framework, and is the agency’s first national assessment across all 193 million acres of National Forest lands. Vilsack made the announcement at a USDA event in Washington highlighting the United Nation’s International Year of Forests.

“Clean, healthy forests are vital to our efforts to protect America’s fresh water supply,” said Vilsack. “Our nation’s economic health, and the health of our citizens, depends on abundant, clean and reliable sources of freshwater. The Watershed Condition Framework and map will help provide economic and environmental benefits to residents of rural communities.”

The map establishes a baseline that will be used to establish priorities for watershed restoration and maintenance. The national Watershed Condition Framework establishes a consistent, comparable, and credible process for characterizing, prioritizing, improving, and tracking the health of watersheds on national forests and grasslands. The Framework also builds added accountability and transparency into the Integrated Resource Restoration program which is included in President Obama’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year.

The Framework uses three watershed condition classifications:

Class 1 watersheds are considered healthy.
Class 2 watersheds are relatively healthy, but may require restoration work.
Class 3 watersheds are those that are impaired, degraded or damaged.

Additional benefits to the Framework are the opportunities it provides to current and future partners in watershed restoration and maintenance. It also increases the public’s awareness of their local watershed conditions and the role they can play in improving them. The Forest Service expects that as the map gains more widespread use, it will promote the department’s “all-lands” approach to managing the nation’s forest and landscapes.

Wildness and Wilderness: A Few Quotes from David Oates

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The Economist piece here begins a series of posts on the topic of “what pieces of what we do are based on a pre-climate change/non-dynamic worldview, and what must we do to develop new approaches with climate change in mind?”

The comment from Les Joslin here pointing out that Thoreau’s quote was about wildness, not wilderness, reminded me of David Oates’ book Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature. Now, all who follow this blog know that I am not a wallower in deep thinking. I tend to be more interested in facts and actions than ideas. But I recognize that ideas (and words) are important, because they form a fundamental framing of the universe. If we are unaware of that framing we can talk past each other and never, ultimately, understand each other. And those misunderstandings can lead to attribution of bad intent, and rifts among us when, instead, there could be powerful surges of joint action for ourselves and the Earth.

Here are a couple of quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussion. You can find more excerpts, as well as his other work, on Oates’ website here.

Eden is a myth that has ended up telling its tellers, speaking through them without their ability to see it or to imagine any other words, or worlds. But we cannot afford to let this storyline use us any more. It is time to bring it into consciousness, recognize it as a historical artifact, and move to other ground. For the immediate political gains we make in using the Eden-and-Apocalypse language are paid for with long-term defeat. Like Muir, we find we cannot live in Eden, and that however “saved” it is, it is somewhere else. We trudge in a flat and dusty world, separated and alienated (as all the nature writers declare) from a vital connection with the world. Eden can’t be saved unless we are, too. Our fates are intertwined. We must re-imagine what Eden means.

“But they have too often veered into the dead-end language of Paradise Lost. When the rhetoric of Lost Eden shows up,as it does in classics like Muir and Abbey and lots of recent environmental writing and politicking, it pretty much squelches the possibility for grounded choices, for practical spirituality. For knowing when to keep the tree and when to make it into something else. That’s the real work (in Gary Snyder’s phrase):smutting along in the world. Glorying along in it, growing roses from our dungheaps and dungheaps from our roses. This work takes passion, energy, humility and perhaps humor. Willingness to try, to get soiled; to compromise, learn, improve. (note from Sharon: sounds like collaborative adaptive management?)

But these traits we cannot find when we are loaded down with post-Edenic guilt and pessimism. These leave us in a state of environmental denial, too exhausted from crisis-overload to pay attention; or whipped up into Puritan absolutism, searching for purity in the form of fantasy wildernesses and defeatist politics. “Apathy and dogmatism” in the words of James D. Proctor’s searching analysis of the forest debate. Neither response works very well in the world we actually live in, which generally isn’t about purity but is ready to reward attentiveness bountifully.”

Note I think Oates may be referring to this book edited by Proctor.

The Anthropocene- From “The Economist”- Prophetic or Heretical?

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Here’s Anthopocene the essay.

We had an interesting conversation about this piece at work and what it means to the “protected area”- roadless or wilderness- question. What happens when “what you can’t do” in protected areas is to respond to climate change? What happens when “letting things alone” or “what used to be” are not our targets- what should our conceptual moorings be in a shifting world?

 It is one of those moments where a scientific realisation, like Copernicus grasping that the Earth goes round the sun, could fundamentally change people’s view of things far beyond science. It means more than rewriting some textbooks. It means thinking afresh about the relationship between people and their world and acting accordingly.

Thinking afresh is the easier bit. Too many natural scientists embrace the comforting assumption that nature can be studied, indeed should be studied, in isolation from the human world, with people as mere observers. Many environmentalists—especially those in the American tradition inspired by Henry David Thoreau—believe that “in wilderness is the preservation of the world”. But the wilderness, for good or ill, is increasingly irrelevant.

Almost 90% of the world’s plant activity, by some estimates, is to be found in ecosystems where humans play a significant role. Although farms have changed the world for millennia, the Anthropocene advent of fossil fuels, scientific breeding and, most of all, artificial nitrogen fertiliser has vastly increased agriculture’s power. The relevance of wilderness to our world has shrunk in the face of this onslaught. The sheer amount of biomass now walking around the planet in the form of humans and livestock handily outweighs that of all other large animals. The world’s ecosystems are dominated by an increasingly homogenous and limited suite of cosmopolitan crops, livestock and creatures that get on well in environments dominated by humans. Creatures less useful or adaptable get short shrift: the extinction rate is running far higher than during normal geological periods.
..
Some will want simply to put the clock back. But returning to the way things were is neither realistic nor morally tenable. A planet that could soon be supporting as many as 10 billion human beings has to work differently from the one that held 1 billion people, mostly peasants, 200 years ago. The challenge of the Anthropocene is to use human ingenuity to set things up so that the planet can accomplish its 21st-century task.

Rep. Walden et al. on the Planning Rule

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This story, with the letter, is linked here
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Walden Leads Forest Planning Rule Foes: Sees Good Chance of More Long Legal Battles

– Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said Friday he is leading a bipartisan chorus of House members in protesting the Obama administration’s national forest planning rule, saying it will lead to more litigation that will divert limited agency resources from badly needed job creation in rural communities.

On Feb. 14, the U.S. Forest Service issued its proposed “National Forest System Land Management Planning Rule.” The rule will govern the planning process for establishing management plans for the nation’s national forests and national grasslands.

This is the fourth attempt to implement a new planning rule since 2000. This proposed rule would have far reaching impacts on permitting processes and the current multiple-use standard for National Forest System lands. “This will place additional burdens on multiple use industries, including grazing, timber, recreation, and resource development,” Walden said in a news release.

Walden and Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), organized a bipartisan letter signed by 60 members to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to tell him that this new rule fails to avoid the pitfalls that have put the Forest Service in seemingly endless litigation for the last three decades. Taken together, the signers of the letter represent 77.7 percent of the nation’s 193 million acres of federal forest land.

“The proposed rule moves the agency further away from a simple, concise rule that can be understood by both agency personnel and the public and implemented with a minimum amount of contention among stakeholder groups,” the lawmakers wrote. “By adding more process requirements and introducing new technical terms, you are increasing the likelihood that like previous attempts at reform, the proposed rule will be tied up in courts for years.”

“We foresee limited federal dollars available for U.S. Forest Service operations being consumed by these processes to the detriment of the health of our federal forests and continuation of multiple uses of our federal resources,” the lawmakers wrote. “This, in turn, will reduce the number of jobs in our already distressed rural communities and further limit the amount of American wood and fiber available to aid our economic recovery.”

The lawmakers also noted in the letter that the rule will shift significant costs onto already burdened taxpayers in the form of legal fees and settlements.

On January 18, President Obama issued an executive order that requires agencies to assure that the costs of a rule are justified by the benefits achieved and that the regulations impose the least burden on society.

“We do not believe that the proposed rule complies with the President’s executive order,” the bipartisan group of lawmakers concluded.

They then asked the Forest Service chief to redraft the rule to make it “simpler and less encumbered with process,” and pointed out that it’s possible to meet the goals of the agency without bogging it down and further separating the public lands from the many taxpayers that depend on them for sustainable clean air, clean water, recreation, harvesting of fish and wildlife, grazing, and timber production.

Texas Fires and Retardant (?)

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My cousin sent me these photos of a plane using fire retardant in Texas near Palo Duro Canyon- there is no USFS land near there at all.

This is relevant to the previous post here and this quote from Andy Stahl:

He added that state firefighting agencies, like those in Florida and Texas, don’t use retardant on wildfires and there’s no significant difference. In the West, though, he said it’s often used on fires on federal lands.

“In Florida and Texas, where forest fires are ubiquitous, retardant isn’t used because the federal government isn’t paying for it because they don’t have federal national forests,” Stahl said. “This is a federal boondoggle. State firefighting agencies without the federal treasury behind them never found retardant to be cost effective, and that the benefits outweigh the costs.”

The ground observations and this quote don’t seem to fit together, can anyone help explain?