Language that supplements the species provisions of NFMA is included in the discussion draft of a comprehensive oil and gas bill being reviewed by the House Natural Resources Committee. The latest discussion draft of H.R. 3534, the Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act (CLEAR Act) was unveiled by chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.V) last year and discussed at a hearing on Wednesday. The proposal is getting a lot of attention and may be moving quickly because of its reforms of both onshore and offshore oil and gas management in light of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Section 228 of the draft relates specifically to Forest Service planning, and regulations that would be issued under this section are deemed to be NFMA regulations. It says that the Secretary of Agriculture or Interior in cooperation with State fish and wildlife agencies “shall plan for and manage planning areas under the Secretary’s respective jurisdiction in order to maintain sustainable populations of native species and desired non-native species within each planning area” consistent with (a) FLPMA, (b) NFMA, and (c) all other applicable laws. The definition of “sustainable populations” is similar to the 1982 planning rule viability language: “The term ‘sustainable populations’ means a population of a species that has a high likelihood of persisting well-distributed through its range within a planning area based on the best available scientific information, including information obtained through the monitoring program . . ., regarding its habitat and ecological conditions, abundance and distribution.” The Secretary would certify that each Forest Plan would comply with this provision. If there are factors affecting wildlife sustainability that are outside of the Agency’s control, the Secretary would certify that to the maximum extent practicable any project does not increase the likelihood of extirpation from the area covered by the Forest Plan.
The draft language would also require the monitoring of “focal species” to determine their population status and trend. The Forest Plan monitoring program would provide for both monitoring of habitats as well as population surveys. Focal species are defined as species whose “population status and trends are believed to provide useful information regarding the effects of management activities, or other factors, on the diversity of ecological systems to which they belong, and to validate the monitoring of habitats and ecological conditions.” This focal species concept is similar to what was used in the 2000 planning rule.
The language also requires coordination with state and local governments, other Federal agencies, and NGOs to maintain sustainable populations, develop strategies to address the impacts of climate change on species, establish linkages between habitats and discrete populations, and reintroduce extirpated species where appropriate.
Road removal in Redwood State Park (CA). Adam Switalski 2004c.
Guest Post by Bethanie Walder, Wildlands CPR. (as requested by Martin Nie)
Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, Willy Loman, Tony Soprano, and … the Forest Service? A diverse group with a common theme – tragic or fatal flaws. From ancient literature to modern times, people have written about, read about and dissected the concept of the fatal flaw. High school and college classes abound with papers about tragic heroes, fatal flaws, and what can be learned from them. While it’s been a long time since I’ve taken such a class, and my metaphorical synapses are a little rusty, it seems to me that the Forest Service may have a fatal flaw when it comes to implementing their new restoration vision: accountability.
One word may be too simplistic to describe the whole problem – which is really an issue of infrastructure-deficiency. Basically, the Forest Service has no staff, program, or office dedicated to implementing restoration at either the policy or on-the-ground levels, yet they have adopted restoration as their new vision for the 21st Century. The problem is, you can’t have a 21st Century vision without a commensurate infrastructure to enable you to implement that vision. To adapt a well known metaphor, “if all the Forest Service has is a chainsaw, then every restoration opportunity will be a tree.” The infrastructure and accountability issue is deep-seated and emblematic of how hard it is for the Forest Service to adapt to changing conditions – both politically and on-the-ground. To get a sense of whether this really is a tragic flaw, here are a few quick internet definitions of the concept (emphasis added in all definitions below):
“A tragic flaw is a literary term that refers to a personality trait of a main character that leads to his or her downfall. In other words, a character with a tragic flaw is in need of some kind of attitude adjustment.”
“The tragic hero is a longstanding literary concept, a character with a Fatal Flaw like Pride who is doomed to fail in search of their Tragic Dream despite their best efforts or good intentions.”
While many people within the agency really do have the best of intentions when it comes to restoration, I am concerned that the Forest Service, without an “attitude adjustment,” is doomed to fail.
For more than a century, the Forest Service has operated largely as a provider of natural resources like timber, oil, gas, grazing, and even recreation. But supplying timber is what the agency is most known for. They’ve created an infrastructure that enables them to do this – though environmental accountability has long been a problem. In 2009, however, US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack outlined a new vision for the Forest Service: restoration. While creative agency staff have been implementing restoration projects for years, Vilsack defined a new guiding restoration vision with an emphasis on clean water.
The new vision however, still encompasses plenty of resource extraction. The agency’s proposed Fiscal Year 2011 budget combines three major budgetary programs (timber, fisheries and wildlife, vegetation and watersheds) into one large pool to promote and hasten restoration activities on national forests. The proposed Integrated Resource Restoration Program or “IRR” (see RIPorter 15:1) would funnel nearly $700 million into a single funding bucket for “restoration.” The result is likely to be that every new timber sale will be a “restoration sale.” Again, if allyou have is a chainsaw, then every problem is most certainly a tree.
Accountability for how this funding would be spent, and whether or not it would result in real watershed restoration on-the-ground, is nowhere to be found. Similarly, the budget has no recommendations for the type of infrastructure changes (as opposed to simply changing funding mechanisms) that would enable them to implement such a program effectively and with accountability.
But this lack of accountability and capacity is not solely related to the IRR. The agency as a whole does NOT currently have the infrastructure needed to implement a robust, comprehensive, effective and viable restoration effort, yet they are asking for an enormous pot of funding to be dedicated to “restoration.” Their tragic flaw, therefore, may be their failure to create a new infrastructure to develop, promote, direct and implement their watershed restoration plans. While only the Forest Service can determine the exact infrastructure needed, we have some preliminary recommendations. For example, we think they should develop a national Watershed Restoration Program, led by a national Director of Watershed Restoration, with regional Restoration Directors, and we have proposed this to the agency. These staff should be trained in hydrology and/or aquatic/fisheries ecology, and they should be tasked with developing and implementing clear, science-based, ecoregion-specific restoration agendas for the agency that put resource needs over economic returns.
Lest this seem somewhat trivial, here’s a first-hand example of why Wildlands CPR thinks it so important for the Forest Service to create a proper structure to achieve their vision. The agency has received $180 million over the last three years to implement Legacy Roads and Trails specifically to restore and protect clean drinking water and other aquatic and fisheries resources impacted by roads. Many fisheries, hydrology, and soils staff we’ve spoken with love this initiative, and it provides an incredible opportunity to move towards Vilsack’s vision. But because of their infrastructure, Legacy Roads and Trails, a potentially brilliant watershed restoration effort, is largely run by engineers. That’s not bad in and of itself (there are some enlightened engineers working on it), but quite frankly, most engineers love roads and have been trained to construct things. Few people like to remove their creations, yet road reclamation is a key purpose of Legacy Roads and Trails.
Initially, not recognizing their tragic flaw, we pushed the agency both to implement Legacy Roads and Trails immediately based on pressing needs, and to undertake a long-overdue national analysis of their road system to determine which roads they still need, and which they can reclaim or close. Way back in 2001, the Forest Service adopted a long-term roads policy that provided guidance for identifying a smaller, more affordable, and less ecologically damaging “minimum road system” that would meet recreational and resource management needs. Their 2001 policy envisioned the reclamation of 80-120,000 miles of system roads. To date, they have largely failed to identify that minimum system, even though doing so would provide the blueprint for how to spend Legacy Roads and Trails money.
But engineers are basically in charge of Legacy Roads and Trails, and thus in charge of implementing the minimum roads system, albeit with help from recreation and watershed staff. In March I asked some of the lead engineers in DC about their plans for this minimum road system. I was dismayed, but not surprised, to learn that they only thought they would have to get rid of about 25,000 miles to achieve it. This reflects the tragic flaw. When I asked the Chief about this and how to provide the accountability needed to ensure that a truly ecologically and fiscally sustainable minimum road system is identified, he said that it wouldn’t just be the responsibility of the engineers, they would engage other departments. But how? And who has final authority? Where does the buck stop? Why isn’t there someone, a national Watershed Restoration Director for example, who is responsible for ensuring that the final decisions are appropriately balanced?
And this is only for identifying a minimum road system. What happens when you scale that up to $700 million a year or more with the proposed IRR? With no watershed restoration program, no Director of Restoration, and no accountability, it seems impossible for the agency to implement a new restoration vision effectively, or even at all. Unless, that is, they get an attitude adjustment – or as the case may be, an infrastructure adjustment.
Without a new watershed restoration program, the IRR, Legacy Roads and Trails, and any other new restoration efforts are likely to be mere variations on an old theme, as the resource extraction mentality and structure of the agency butts up against their theoretical 21st Century vision. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The agency can make an attitude adjustment, they can create the necessary infrastructure and accountability, and they can implement the restoration vision that Secretary Vilsack and others have laid out. In typical tragedies, the “hero” is incapable of overcoming their flaw, and thus they fail. But this isn’t a story, it’s real life, and it doesn’t have to be a tragedy.
Words to live by for all public servants (and those in the policy business) from the late Senator Byrd.
“In the real world, exemplary personal conduct can sometimes achieve much more than any political agenda. Comity, courtesy, charitable treatment of even our political opposites, combine with a concerted effort to not just occupy our offices, but to bring honor to them, will do more to inspire our people and restore their faith in us, their leaders, than millions of dollars of 30 second spots or glitzy puff pieces concocted by spinmeisters.”
It has been 40 years since public land laws have been systematically reviewed by a land law commission, the longest period ever separating their use. Much of the gridlock in how public lands are managed can be traced back to statutory language.
Lawyers and policy-makers met at the University of Colorado Law Center in early June to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Public Land Law Review Commission’s Report “One Third of the Nation’s Land“, and to reflect on the need for a new Commission and a new report to address the challenges for public lands in the 21st century.
The 1970 report led to the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). According to Charles Wilkinson, FLPMA was a textbook example of Congress taking the long view – carefully studying the problem through a commission, and then crafting a bill which addressed those concerns. He noted that the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) was very different – it went through Congress in less than a year because of a timber cutting crisis.
The speakers at the conference generally concluded that today’s political environment makes it difficult to repeat a 1970-type commission. Congress is too polarized. We may be too impatient to repeat the process that took six years from 1964 to 1970. There may not be a political sponsor like Wayne Aspinall, the Congressman from Colorado who pushed for the formation of the Commission as part of a 1964 compromise legislative package which enabled the package of the Wilderness Act. In addition, the problems today with public land management may not be grabbing the attention of the public, more concerned with the economy and other pressing matters.
Much has changed since 1970.
Norman James, a Phoenix attorney, observed that the review commission did not anticipate that wildlife preservation would often dominate public land management after the passage of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. He gave an example of the dominant role played by management of the Mexican spotted owl in Arizona and New Mexico, which led to dramatic reductions in timber sale volumes, essentially destroying the region’s forest products industry.
Todd True, an attorney with Earthjustice, noted that the commission hinted about “fish and wildlife values”, although the idea that public lands play a critical role in fish and wildlife protection may not have been fully developed or its implications well understood in 1970.
Undersecretary of Agriculture Harris Sherman, the keynote speaker at the conference who oversees the Forest Service, explained that 110 million acres of National Forest System land are in need of restoration. Historically there has been 5 million acres a year of fire, but we could be approaching 10 million acres a year of fire. Fire is a threat to water quality. Sherman also said that there are 17 million acres across the West dying from bark beetles. In Colorado, he said that 10,000 trees a day will fall down over the next 10 years. Sherman said that he wants to emphasize an “all lands” approach, working across sister agencies, other federal agencies, state agencies, and private landowners. He wants to focus more on water, thinking about ecosystem services, and responding to climate change.
Rebecca Watson, former Department of Interior assistant secretary in charge of the BLM and MMS under the Bush administration, explained that the 1970 report was written before the shock of the 1973 Arab Embargo hit our country and underscored the depth of our dependence on imported oil. Like today, however, the report was written in the wake of a terrible offshore oil spill that came to dominate the management of the Outer Continental Shore.
BYU law school dean Jim Rasband said that the February 2010 leak of an Interior Department memorandum listing potential candidates for national monument proclamations reignited a debate about the Antiquities Act and the president’s power to proclaim monuments without notice or any form of public participation. His presentation asked if there should be an ethical dimension to the political “trophy hunting” of monument designation, or do “only losers care about process?”
Indiana law professor Rob Fischman observed that the two major issues facing public land planning are funding and climate change, two topics with little or no treatment in the 1970 Report. Climate change has undermined historic benchmarks for ecosystem management. Climate change is now the principal rationale for better federal interagency coordination. Regarding funding decisions, Fischman said that current laws are good at managing between conflicting uses, but not good at managing between competing uses.
Adjunct Colorado law professor Joe Feller explained that public lands livestock grazing provides a difficult challenge to the application of any theory of, or prescription for, public land planning and management. On the mostly arid or semi-arid lands of the West, grazing’s adverse impacts are manifold and its administrative costs often exceed its economic benefit. Former Interior solicitor Bill Myers countered by mentioning the environmental ethic of Western ranchers, and the dangers of the loss of ranches adjacent to National Forests to subdivision and development.
Utah environmentalist Scott Groene concluded that federal land management agencies have not been effectively addressing recreation-related problems, including impacts of motorized recreation activities. Blue Ribbon Coalition president Greg Mumm said that motorized recreation is extremely popular, and one in five Americans 16 and older participate in some form of off-highway vehicle recreation each year. Moreover, virtually every public land user is motorized at some point – it’s more a question of if or when they park their vehicles.
Summaries of the presentations are posted here on the University of Colorado Natural Resource Law Center website.
This post is related to Foto’s comment below. Here is an interesting piece by Scott Learn in the Oregonian on twenty years of efforts to protect the Northern Spotted Owl.
But as you know, I find the topic of science and fuel treatments fascinating from a science policy wonk point of view.
So here’s a quote from that article:
Forsman and other scientists agree that the relatively dry forests on the east side and in southern Oregon could use measures such as thinning and clear-cut corridors to act as fire breaks. There’s much more debate when it comes to wetter westside forests.
If everywhere east of Eastern Oregon is dry or drier than Oregon, then are we really all in agreement? Why does it seem to be “scientifically” controversial in some places like Colorado and less “scientifically” controversial in other places (if we believe this story, the east side or Oregon and Washington? Is it due to different disciplines, different scientific tools to look at the problem, different framings of the problem, just random scientist to scientist variation, or due to real differences of the behavior of fuels or fires?
It might be interesting to ask firefighters and incident commanders, who may have experiences throughout the west, how they perceive the differences among these places.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in the development of a new Forest Service planning rule is the need to reduce the length and cost of forest planning processes. The salary costs of an interdisciplinary planning team can easily run $100,000 per month, or over $1 million per year. Planning processes can easily run five, six, seven or more years, so total salary costs can approach $10 million.
Except for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge plan in Montana, and the smaller National Forests in the east, no plan revisions have been completed in the last four years. The problem occured even with new planning rules in 2005 and 2008 which were intended to simplify the planning process. There are currently 70 forest and grassland plan revisions nationwide that are overdue.
The need for a new planning rule to reduce complexity has been discussed previously on this blog. The Notice of Intent for a new rule last December described the problems that lengthy planning processes can create for the public:
“One challenge the Agency has faced with regard to public participation is that plans can at times take 8–10 years to revise, a timeframe that is too long to sustain a true collaborative effort and use the most up-to-date science and management thinking.”
Perhaps the root of what’s going on is the “wicked problem” posed by the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), as earlier discussed on this blog and in the excellent review by George Mason University of the process for the Sierra Nevada plan amendments. The wicked problem is evident through the lack of consensus about multiple use management. Shortly after NFMA was passed, commentors saw that it was an impossible task and should be repealed. Unfortunately, NFMA isn’t going away, which led to a proposal earlier on this blog to at least limit any new regulatory requirements to the minimum required by the Act. As early as a 1990 Critique of Forest Planning, there have been calls to simplify the planning regulations. This was noted in the December NOI for a new rule:
“The Critique found that the 1982 planning rule process was very complex; had significant costs, was lengthy, and was cumbersome for public input. The recommendations in the Critique and the Agency’s experiences with planning led to the Agency issuing an advance notice of proposed rulemaking for new regulations in 1991, and two proposed rules, in 1995 and 1999. After working with a committee of scientists, the Department issued the 2000 rule to revise the 1982 regulations. The 2000 revision of the planning rule described a new framework for NFS planning; made sustainability the foundation for NFS planning and management; required the consideration of the best available science during the planning process, and set forth requirements for implementation, monitoring, evaluation, amendment, and revision of land and resource management plans. However, a review in the spring of 2001 found that the 2000 rule was costly, complex, and procedurally burdensome. The results of the review led the Department to issue a new planning rule in 2005, and a revised version again in 2008…”
Meanwhile, planners are forging ahead. There are 21 forest plan revisions continuing using the existing regulations.
To understand why plans are expensive and time consuming, it is helpful to look at the process. There are five major cost centers in a Forest Planning process: assessments, collaboration, environmental documentation, reviews, and objection/appeals. (Often, the actual writing of a plan is a relatively small task compared to these other five.) Any one of these five cost centers can create delays in the timeline and additional costs.
The unfortunate problem with delays is that it extends the window in which a planning effort may be subject to new policies, directives, requirements, or political considerations. Thus, the process itself can spiral, and a three month delay can become a one year delay to meet a new initative. Recent examples of delays to forest plans include emerging climate change considerations, new guidance on restoration, and changes to energy policies.
The need to simplify the planning process was discussed last week at a meeting of Forest Service planners in Salt Lake City. The planners recognized that management of the five cost centers is critical. One planner said that it takes “wisdom and courage” which is not often rewarded. Is there a point where more collaboration will no longer be effective? Do we have the courage to make a decision without certain information? It requires line officer engagement, to let future Regional Office and Washington Office reviewers know what is going on before the reviews. It may require saying “no” to 11th hour changes to the plan. It requires a set timeline, notifying the public, and sticking to the timeline. It requires internal and external communication across all levels of the organization, to let people know ahead of time when they will be needed. Regional and Washington Office reviewers need to be efficient, and give Forest planners more leeway. There needs to be transparency with the public so they can see what is going on and how and when they can have input. The Forest Service Manual and Handbook can cause confusion, and must be streamlined. Instead, it’s important to follow the concepts of “organizational learning” discussed earlier on this blog.
Unfortunately, most or all of these managerial solutions have been tried in the past with mixed results. Perhaps we are expecting too much from forest planning. For instance, effective stakeholder collaboration can take years to build. It might be easier to work on partnerships on specific projects, and build collaborative capacity prior to beginning any forest planning process.
Until we recognize the true limitations of planning, it cannot become what it truly needs to be. At it’s best planning can clarify goals, set priorities, empower organizational learning, and establish relationships. But those things can’t happen if plans never get done.
National Forests and “private working lands” are prominently featured in the new U.S. Department of Agriculture five-year strategic plan released last week. The plan contains strategic objectives for National Forests to restore ecosystems and watersheds on both private and public lands. It also contains objectives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase carbon sequestration, and develop climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies for National Forests.
One of the four strategic goals for the Department of Agriculture (besides assistance to rural communities, promoting agriculture production, and nutritious food for kids) is goal #2: “Ensure our National Forests and private working lands are conserved, restored, and made more resilient to climate change, while enhancing our water resources.”
The plan calls for a collaborative “all lands” approach to bring public and private owners together across landscapes and ecosystems. “Private working lands” are defined to include farms, ranches, grasslands, private forest lands, and retired cropland. The plan is intended to coordinate National Forest System programs with other USDA programs for private lands.
Restoration of watershed and forest health is intended to be a core management objective of the National Forests and Grasslands. Objective 2.1 is to “restore and conserve the Nation’s forests, farms, ranches and grasslands.” The plan calls for a 13% increase in forest lands that are restored or enhanced each year.
Objective 2.2 calls for efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It sets an 8% increase in carbon sequestration on U.S. lands and an 8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the agricultural sector. All National Forests must have a climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy.
Objective 2.3 calls for protection and enhancement of water resources. It calls for an increase in National Forest System (NFS) watersheds at or near natural conditions from 58 million acres (30 percent of NFS lands) to 62 million acres (32 percent of NFS lands). Acres of restored wetlands would increase from 2.1 million acres per year to 2.3 million acres per year. There would be an $0.5 billion increase in flood prevention and water supply projects. Nine million acres of high impact targeted practices would be implemented to accelerate the protection of clean, abundant water resources.
Objective 2.4 calls for a reduction of the risk of catastropic wildfire and restoring fire to its appropriate place on the landscape. It sets a desired condition within the natural (historical) range of variability of vegetation characteristics, increasing the cumulative number of acres from 58.5 million to 61.5 million acres. It calls for an increase from 10,000 to 18,000 communities with reduced risk from catastropic wildfire, and an increase from 41 percent to 55 percent of acres in Wildland-Urban Interface that have been treated.
As I watch the climate debate, I’ve noticed that biomass has a bad rep in some climate circles. Sometimes it is as simple as biomass is ethanol ethanol is bad therefore biomass is bad. Sometimes it is more nuanced. Seldom is it discussed in a way that reflects differences among places and the variety of possible technologies and material to be used.
Last weekend there was an article in the NY Times on a Manomet study. In this Q&A, John Hagan and Thomas Walker go into some depth describing their findings. Here are some considerations:
The framework we developed for carbon accounting could be used for an individual power facility, a state, a country, or even the European Union (which is importing wood chips from the U.S. and other countries to meet its renewable-energy goals). In order to assess the greenhouse gas implications of using wood for energy, you have to know four things:
• The life cycle of the wood (e.g., logging debris, whole trees, trees vulnerable to catastrophic events) in the absence of the biomass energy opportunity.
• The type of energy that will be generated (heat, electricity, combined heat and electricity), because different types have different efficiencies and thus different CO2 emissions profiles.
• The type of fossil fuel being displaced (coal, oil, or natural gas), because different fuels have different emissions profiles.
• The management of the forest — management can either slow or accelerate forest growth, and therefore recovery of carbon from the atmosphere.
To further complicate the story, while our life cycle analysis looked at greenhouse gas emissions from production and transport of both biomass and fossil fuels, we couldn’t evaluate every possible environmental impact of energy production, such as broken blowout preventers 5,000 feet under water or mountaintop removals to access coal. Rarely (maybe never) does society really weigh the full array of costs and benefits of our decisions. But as the world gets more complicated, and as resources get more scarce, and as the human population climbs to nine billion (and then some), we’re going to have to become more serious about analyzing these kinds of trade-offs.
And
But our study suggests that it’s important to be specific about how you define biomass. Energy generation from harvests of live whole trees from natural forests has different life cycle implications than energy generation from wood wastes that otherwise would have released their carbon to the atmosphere relatively quickly. The choice of biomass energy generation technologies also matters. Biomass fueling thermal and combined heat and power systems typically produce greenhouse gas benefits sooner than large-scale biomass electricity generation.
Finally, we’d emphasize that there are many other considerations besides greenhouse gas emissions when making energy policy — these include energy security, air quality, forest recreation values, local economics, other environmental impacts of extracting fossil fuels (and not just greenhouse gas emissions of burning fossil fuels), and quality of place, among others. Policymakers need to weigh all these factors in making energy policy.
What we’ve done is put a much sharper point on one piece of the story — greenhouse gas emissions. Until our study came out, it was widely assumed that using wood for energy was immediately carbon- neutral. How this new insight factors into the public’s view of using wood for energy remains to be seen.
As for Manomet, our role is to inform society with science, with the hope that a better informed society will make better decisions.
Three more forest plan revision efforts now have funding and can be restarted, bringing the total to 21 plans being revised under the existing 1982 Forest Service land management planning rule procedures. These efforts had previously been stopped when the 2008 planning rule was enjoined. The announcement came at a Forest Service planners meeting last week. The additional forest planning efforts that can now be restarted include the Shoshone Forest Plan (Wyoming, Region 2); Tonto Forest Plan (Arizona, Region 3); and Sequoia Forest Plan (California, Region 5). The exact timing of restarting the processes will vary, since forest planning teams will need to be reassembled and the specifics of the planning processes will need to be planned.
Here is the current list of Forest Plan Revisions that may proceed under the 1982 rule.
Region 1: Kootenai (Montana) and Idaho-Panhandle NFs (Idaho) (one revision efforts for both forests)
Region 2: San Juan NF (Colorado), Shoshone NF (Wyoming)
Region 3: Coronado, Apache-Sitgreaves, Kaibab, Prescott, Coconino and Tonto NFs (Arizona); Cibola National Grassland (New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas)
Region 5: Lake Tahoe Basin Mgmt Unit (California/Nevada), Sequoia NF (California)
Region 6:Malheur, Umatilla and Wallowa-Whitman (Oregon – one revision effort for the three forests), Colville and Okanogan/Wenatchee NFs (Washington – one revision effort for the two plans)
Region 8: NFs in Mississippi, Uwharrie NF (North Carolina) and George Washington NFs (Virginia – 2nd round of LMP Revision)
There are 15 other forest plan revision efforts that have not been restarted, and some were shut down last year because of a lack of funding, partially due to the costs of preparing a new planning rule. (Region 1: Lolo, Bitteroot, Flathead, Clearwater, Nez Perce; Region 2: Cimarron-Comanche, Pike-San Isabel, GMUG; Region 4: Dixie and Fishlake, Manti-La Sal, Ashley, Humboldt-Toiyabe, Bridger-Teton; Region 5: Modoc; and Region 6: Fremont-Winema.)
There are also 33 Forest Plan revision efforts that are overdue and have never been started. 11 of these are in California, 11 more are in the Pacific Northwest, 5 are in New Mexico, and 4 are in Montana.
A new planning rule is anticipated in 2011, and many of these planning efforts may follow the new procedures.
Last week, some scientists and practitioners met to discuss the utility of fuels treatments in creating defensibly space around communities. Even on a fairly simple question (what stages of dead trees have what kinds of fire behavior?) there are a variety of approaches to think about the question.
One is practitioner observation. For example, one practitioner had spoken to suppression people in BC who said that fire can move through dead trees with needles like a “tall grass fire.” Another piece of evidence (called “the science”) was based on looking at the past, that when there were many dead trees, there was not more fire. But if we believe the climate is changing, what do studies of the past really tell us in terms of relevance to the future?
I ran across this set of photos by Derek Weidensee on observed fire behavior (granted, not entirely about dead trees). His piece is worth a read- he rounds up both some research and empirical evidence. He also has some latitudes and longitudes you can plug into Google Earth and see the changes through time for yourself. Here’s a quote I found interesting:
I’ve read dozens of USFS EIS’s and EA’s, and frankly the litigation-driven reliance on published “best available science” means the public doesn’t have a clue what the EIS authors are talking about. Nothing makes the public’s eyes glaze over faster than fuel models, fire groups, fire regime condition class, canopy bulk density, etc. etc. Local experience carries a lot of weight with the local public. And pictures are worth more to the public than the thousands of words in the fires and fuels section of an EIS. It’s unfortunate local experience doesn’t seem to carry much weight with a judge.
It made me wonder to what extent local collaboratives may come to different answers than national groups, not based on “caving to pressure” but based on empirical ways of knowing.
Last week there was a piece in New West by George Wuerthner.
Here are some quotes:
the Forest Service exploits the public’s misconceptions about wildfire and forest ecology to further its logging agenda
Research by the FS own scientists suggests that thinning any greater distance than a hundred or so feet from a home provides little additional reduction in fire risk. In other words, this timber sale will do little to safeguard Elliston from wildfire—indeed; most of the town is in no jeopardy what so ever from a direct fire front
Furthermore, if the County Commissioners were truly concerned about fire hazards, they would not permit house construction in the fire plain. Zoning is the best way to protect homes and safe lives rather than expect taxpayer to fix the problem they created by allowing home construction in inappropriate sites. Building in a fire plain is just as foolish as building in a river floodplain.
It may be desirable, in the view of some, to move everyone out of treed and (chaparraled) western landscapes. However, in my view this is not practically feasible.
And once again the “timber wars filter” is part of the story..
Instead of using the Elliston Face to counter misconceptions about wildfire and who is actually responsible for protecting property, the FS exploits the fears of misinformed citizens. One can only conclude the agency is still the handmaiden to the timber industry rather than a public servant working on behalf of all citizens of the country.
and
The Elliston sale is…is yet another example of how the Forest Service exploits the public’s misconceptions about wildfire and forest ecology to further its logging agenda.
Based on looking at press stories, fuel treatments in Southern California don’t seem to be all that controversial. I wonder if that is because in the Interior West the specter of the timber industry still lives in the imagination.
Derek said in his post
In the ongoing debate, the public and policy makers need more unbiased research and a one stop database to see for themselves what fuels treatments can do.
I think we need a central place to show the results of different ways of knowing, and have an ongoing conversation about what they each tell us about the reality of fuel treatments and fires.
Language that supplements the species provisions of NFMA is included in the discussion draft of a comprehensive oil and gas bill being reviewed by the House Natural Resources Committee. The latest discussion draft of H.R. 3534, the Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act (CLEAR Act) was unveiled by chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.V) last year and discussed at a hearing on Wednesday. The proposal is getting a lot of attention and may be moving quickly because of its reforms of both onshore and offshore oil and gas management in light of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
