“Don’t Let the Loud Voices Shape the Narrative”: Usual and Unusual Claims About Wildfire Mitigation Projects- Jefferson County Colorado Version

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Environmental activists Josh Schlossberg stands near recently cut trees in Elk Meadow Park in Jefferson County on Feb. 28, 2023. Schlossberg, other activists and some residents are concerned that the county’s fire mitigation strategy, which calls for thinning trees near populated areas, are harming the forest. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)

 

For some reason, there is a tendency in some outlets to talk about the Jefferson County controversy about fuel treatment in some open spaces, and pivot from there to the national debate about federal lands. it’s interesting to  see how different reporters cover it.   Apologies for this being so long, but I got very interested in the different takes on the same subject,  as well as the omnipresence in these stories of a certain Californian.

Here’s the most recent by the Denver Post:

Tagline:

Logging opponent describes “complete shock and horror” at the sight of felled trees

Evergreen resident JoAnn Hackos, who also serves as a board member with the Evergreen Audubon chapter, said Jefferson County is targeting too many mature trees.

“I’ve seen truckloads of large, old-growth trees being driven away from our neighborhood parks,” Hackos said. “There is lots of money to be made in selling big trees, but it irreparably damages the forest.”

The county, she said, is using a technique called mastication, which essentially chops up treated areas into mulch. Hackos said the practice disrupts the soil and damages roots.

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Chad Hanson, forest and fire ecologist with the John Muir Project in Big Bear Lake, Calif., said Jefferson County “is doing everything wrong.”

“Removing mature trees increases wildfire spread and severity,” he said. “When they do these logging projects under the guise of thinning, that reduces the cooling shade of the canopy. Denser forests do not burn more intensely.”

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But Germaine said it’s a misnomer to call the ponderosas that are being cut old-growth trees, a term that evokes more of an emotional response.

“Ponderosa pine trees only begin to take on old-growth characteristics between 200 to 300 years of age, and they may live to 400 to 500 years,” he said. “Some of the trees we are cutting are large, and some are approaching 125 years in age, but none are old-growth.”

And the notion that the county is making a windfall from timber sales resulting from the felling is simply untrue, Germaine said.

“We hire local small business people to do most of our forest thinning. A lot of the material is ground up and spread around on-site because it has no market value,” he said. “We hold firewood sales to provide wood to local residents, and the county does not profit from any of this.”

Jefferson County pays contractors about $3,500 an acre for thinning, Germaine said.

Steve Germaine is the Natural Resources Supervisor for Jefferson County.

Here’s another  Denver Post article.

The government faces opposition from forest lovers and environmental advocates who contend logging contractors operating with minimal oversight often mow down trees — rather than thinning — converting forests to grasslands, which the opponents argue could actually accelerate wind-driven fire. They accuse federal authorities of short-circuiting legally required environmental impact reviews. They favor “fire-wise” home safety as a smarter way to shave wildfire risks.

The argument comes down to ecological nuance and costs, which range from $500 to $7,000 an acre. It can be more feasible for loggers to cut broadly across an acre or more, rather than thinning that sometimes requires hiking on steep and hard-to-reach terrain, lugging chainsaws to remove trees selectively and optimizing spacing and species diversity.

There are two claims we usually don’t see.. that contractors don’t follow requirements and that feds short-circuit environmental reviews. It would be handy to have a quote from a person here, who could later be asked about specifics.

Fury over forest cutting intensified this summer and a grassroots Eco-Integrity Alliance deployed a billboard in central Denver urging President Biden and Colorado’s senators to “stop wasting $3 billion” for logging national forests.

Here’s the link to Eco-Integrity Alliance.  It appears to be an alliance of groups including:

Eco Advocates NW

Friends of the Clearwater

Friends of the Wild Swan

John Muir Project

Protect Our Woods

Swan View Coalition

And I suppose a billboard costs some bucks, so there must be some funding associated with these groups.

What’s interesting about the Finley piece to me is he brought up Hanson as an advocate, not as the voice of science.

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Here’s a Westword article. Westword is one of those independent papers you usually see in newstands in coffee shops in cities.. lots of culture and marijuana ads.

First the article talks about how Jeffco Open Space decided to do the project, including the mapping by Colorado Forest Restoration Institute of CSU and a verbal description of the rationale.

As JCOS implements forest-thinning projects, it tries to cut younger trees out of areas that have more trees per acre than what it estimates would have been there without historic fire suppression.

Sound familiar.. a la East Side screens?

Not all forests fit that mold, though, including those populated by ponderosa pines, points out Chad Hanson, practicing ecologist and director of the John Muir Project, which works to improve ecological management of public forests.

“The science strongly contradicts that narrative,” he says. “This is true for forests all across the West. This is true in the Colorado Front Range. … Everywhere scientists have looked at this, we’ve found the same thing: that historical forests were much denser overall than the U.S. Forest Service, or some state agencies that are involved in logging, have told the public they were.”

An expert person on the ground says “our forests are like this’ to Chad saying “the science says that many are not”. I think the question is simply “is this true of the forest we are working int?”

Schlossberg’s (he of the Steering Committee of the Eco-Integrity Alliance- sf) concerns come not only from the lack of scientific considerations in the forest-thinning plan, but also from the age of some of the downed trees. According to Germaine, the department doesn’t remove trees that are technically considered “old growth.” Those trees provide habitat for small mammals and birds and, if they are over 150 years old, were likely around before European intervention in American forests. It’s important to eliminate younger trees to keep the forest healthy, he contends.

“We don’t get a lot of water here on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, so when those trees are too crowded, they’re competing,” Germaine says.

According to Brett Wolk, assistant director of CSU’s Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, ponderosa pine tree systems take centuries to develop, and the trees can live for 500 years.

Schlossberg still takes issue with the idea that cutting down trees that have lived for a century is the answer, especially when it comes to the ponderosa pine.

“Why is it that ponderosa pine can grow that old?” he asks. “The answer is because they’re fire-resistant trees.”

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“The notion that removing trees from the forest will curb fire has been soundly discredited,” Hanson says. “Wildfires are driven mostly by weather and climate, and therefore also by climate change. In drought years, you get the ignition, and you get hot, dry, windy conditions. Those are conditions for fires. It’s not mainly about forest density.”

In forest fires, trees like the ponderosa pine are rarely consumed; removing them doesn’t change fire intensity because they don’t contribute combustible materials. A study of California forest fires showed that even large wildfires consumed only about 2 percent of tree biomass.

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Hanson warned of emerging “sterilized landscapes” where forests once stood around cities.

The cited paper is by Harmon, Hanson and DellaSala (he who reviewed the Proforestation paper we discussed).  It’s perfectly OK to be against commercial logging.  It’s when you claim that “the science” says something and it turns out that we can find plenty of scientists who don’t agree.  To reporters: anytime someone says “the science says this,  ask them “are there any scientists who disagree with you?” and interview them.

They cannot go toe-to-toe with us on the scientific evidence,” he says. “Every time they try, they lose, so now, in desperation, they’re hitting below the belt, and they’re going personal and engaging in character assassination.”

Hanson believes that the logging industry relies on people buying into a positive narrative around cutting down trees, so it lobbies Congress to support forest-thinning management to keep that narrative alive. That lobbying trickles down to local forest management, he adds.

Or maybe other scientists  can go toe-to-toe, and have in the 10 Common Questions paper.  This is where some skepticism by the reporter might have paid off.

Here’s a link to a Colorado Sun story from last September. The Colorado Sun is a journalist-owned independent news outlet.

Again, Schlossberg

“What’s happening is we’re using the public lands as the sacrifice zones. We don’t think any of this tree cutting should be happening on public lands,” Schlossberg said. “It’s not justified scientifically or ecologically.”

A quote from Denver Mountain Parks.

The portions of Flying J that have raised the most public ire are actually controlled by Denver’s mountain park system, which cooperates with Jeffco when they have adjacent land.

“We got the short end of the stick at Flying J,” said Andy Perri, a Denver Mountain Parks program manager for forestry and natural resources. “We were dealt a very unhealthy forest on our two sections.”

Thick lodgepole stands on Denver’s portion of the property were plagued by beetles and dwarf mistletoe, which grows in the canopy and effectively places a tinderbox high in the forest. So Denver simply had to remove more, creating the shorn-land look that riled many visitors.

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“We try our best to contact neighbors, but it’s just me and two others in our program,” Perri said. Reaction ranges from extremely upset to extremely grateful, he added. “I try my best to explain the science — and we’re not here to sell timber, our wood is basically worth nothing.”

If a loud voice falls in the forest, does anyone hear? 

Hannah Brenkert-Smith watched some of the same thinning vs. perception dynamic play out during a 2,460-acre cutting program on Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest lands around Nederland. The plan included a public conflict-resolution process, which Brenkert-Smith later studied from her position in the Environment & Society Program at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Behavioral Science.

“What we found is that the people who are in opposition were actually in the minority,” Brenkert-Smith said. “They’re just really vocal and well organized, and they get a lot of attention.”

Forest managers the researchers worked with were often braced for much more overwhelming opposition that never really materialized, Brenkert-Smith said.

“So one of the things that I think is really important is not to assume what the public is going to think. And also not to let loud voices shape the narrative,” she said. “You actually have to go out and find out what people think, and not just the people who have the time and the motivation to show up at everything, and to write all the letters and to harness their social capital, but the silent majority who tends to be supportive.”

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This story gets points for including local scientists, and a social scientist.

“If we can control how fires burn, it’ll give seedlings a fighting chance”: Denver Post Op-ed by Davis, Peeler and Higuera

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This is a Denver Post op-ed from three of the (over 50) authors of the paper Steve posted (Davis et al., 2023) and we discussed, earlier here.

 

Carlos Avila Gonzalez, San Francisco Chronicle via AP, File
A burned hillside where crews are planting seedlings including Giant Sequoia in Mountain Home State Demonstration Forest outside Springville, Calif., on April 26, 2022. Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for forests to quickly regrow have far outpaced the government’s capacity to replant trees.

In the above photo, taken from the op-ed, I found a new idea.. that we need to keep living trees around as much as possible because we can’t scale up artificial regeneration otherwise (depending on assumptions about future fires).  I had never heard that, but increasing the possibility of natural regeneration seems like a good idea for a number of reasons, biological and economic. Plus there is much truth to the difficulty of scaling up.

The op-ed goes into some of the mechanics that many of us have known to be true and seem obvious (dead trees (except for serotinous cones) produce no offspring).  And shade helps surface temperatures.

Even when summers are hotter and drier after a wildfire than in the past, just having trees around that survived a fire helps new seedlings establish and grow.

Besides providing seeds, surviving trees reduce temperatures on the ground, where it matters most to seedlings. In some cases, temperatures can be 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler (2.2 to 2.8 C) around surviving trees, giving seedlings the edge needed to germinate and survive.

In our study, projections of future forests varied dramatically, depending on how many trees we assumed survived future wildfires.

Of course, in many areas before and after burning we can see that topography and soils (or lack thereof, as Larry pointed out) affects which species grow successfully.  And most (all) climate modeling doesn’t take that into account. Nevertheless, they go on to say..

Science supports the use of a number of tools, or forest treatments, that can help decrease the number of trees killed by wildfires.

Controlled burning with forest thinning or cultural burning by local Indigenous groups removes small trees and brush. That leads to fewer trees killed in subsequent fires, especially in forests that historically burned frequently. In high-elevation forests that historically experienced less frequent but more severe wildfires, planting trees after wildfires can help jump-start forest recovery.

Although forest treatments are effective, wildfires burn much more area than can be feasibly treated. Given this, fire scientists suggest letting some wildfires burn when conditions are safe and more likely to leave surviving trees on the landscape.

Expanding the use of wildfires and controlled burning as management tools is challenging, but the evidence suggests it may be one of the most effective and economical ways to reduce the number of trees killed by future wildfires.

There are clear ways to lessen the impacts of global warming and wildfires on seedlings and future forests. But in some areas, even as we work to reverse global warming, the window of opportunity is short. In these areas, forest treatments that modify wildfire or jump-start recovery will be most effective in the next few decades, setting up seedlings to better withstand near-term warming.

 

Perhaps fire ecologists views – thin when necessary, burn, sometimes plant where you need to; plus some WFU (or let me know what the current term is) are the way to go. Does anyone disagree with this?

 

A Wilderness Patrol on Horseback

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“Most of my few horseback patrols went well.”

I spent a few days each summer in the Hoover Wilderness where increasing back-country travel was increasing the risk of human-caused fires. Most of my wilderness patrols were on foot, but on rare occasions I rode a horse. In 1965, for example, I rode the rugged and scenic Green Creek drainage on a mountain-wise black mare named Coaly, talking with occasional wilderness travelers as I passed Green Lake, Nutter Lake, Gilman Lake, and the Hoover Lakes en route Summit Lake on the Toiyabe National Forest-Yosemite National Park border.

Most of my few horseback patrols went well, but I darn near wound up finishing one of them on foot.

That was the time Fire Control Officer Marion Hysell and I rode up to a little lake above Barney Lake and below Hunewill Peak to rebuild rock fireplaces and erect a sign. After finishing the work and eating lunch, we began the return trip on the two big black horses hired from the Mono Village pack station for the day’s work. About half way down to the junction with the Barney Lake trail, Marion and I met a group of hikers. They were bound for the little lake we had just left, and we dismounted to talk with them. About what, I can’t remember. What I can remember is my mount suddenly deciding to quit the country. He reared, yanked the loosely-held reins from my hands, and launched himself down the trail toward the pack station more than four miles away.

“Now you’re a hiker, too!” one of the hikers observed with thinly veiled satisfaction.

Instead of explaining my preference for shank’s mare, I excused myself with something like “Darned if I’ll walk back to Mono Village!” and lit out after the horse.

“He’ll never catch it,” one of the hikers predicted.

But there was a chance. I recalled the series of switchbacks in the trail up this steep slope, and hoped they’d work in my favor. I plunged off the trail and downslope over boulders and through thickets to head off the fugitive mount.

The first time I tumbled back onto the trail I was just too late. Down the trail to my right, the horse was hightailing into the next switchback. Back into the woods I plunged, again careering downhill as aspen branches slapped my face and mountain mahogany slowed my progress.

Within moments I was back on the trail, and this time ahead of the game. Off to my right, the horse had just turned out of the switchback and was thundering toward me, eyes wild and ears back in what looked a lot like determination. I was determined, too, and as the big black tried to evade me I grabbed its reins just below the bit, yanked down hard, and wrestled it to a kicking, snorting, dusty stop. Its reigns tight in my grasp, the horse followed me back up the trail. Would catching this runaway redeem me in Marion’s eyes? In the eyes of the hikers?

By the time I had led the recaptured mount back up the trail, to where Marion and the hikers were waiting to see if I would walk or ride home, I had managed to brush off dust and leaves and tuck in my shirt. I had also reviewed and rejected every alibi east of the Sierra. The truth of what had happened was obvious. Marion grinned. He seemed satisfied at the fact I had caught the horse. The hikers seemed impressed by the same fact.

Wishing the hikers well, we mounted up to resume our ride back to the pack station.

 

Adapted from the 2018 third edition of Toiyabe Patrol, the writer’s memoir of five U.S. Forest Service summers on the Toiyabe National Forest in the 1960s.

Science Friday: Yale Forest School Scientists on “Proforestation”

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When I first heard about the concept of proforestation, it seemed like an East Coast phenomenon. I thought “So what? Some of the usual suspects wrote an op-ed in Nature and various other outletsl their usual ideological beverage with a carbon twist?” Perhaps it’s timed to be part of a media campaign hoping to affect the Mature and Old Growth initiative of Forest Service and BLM.

Since I’ve worked on letters to the Forest Service about MOG, when I ran across a letter on proforestation by a bunch of scientists from The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment I could recognize both excellent writing and a host of useful references. The themes that the authors touch on are also found in MOG. What’s particularly interesting to me about this letter is that Connecticut has no National Forests, and isn’t a dry forest/wildfire area. They don’t see forests go up in smoke, with associated carbon emissions. And they are talking about state and private land. So it’s interesting to see what they have to say.

Proforestation, on which the working group recommendations are based, is a recent political movement that aims to prevent forest management in the United States under the assumption that excluding humans from forests will serve as a climate change mitigation tool [4, 14, 15]. It also omits important aspects of forest carbon science [16]. It appears to be premised on a single opinion article published in an academic journal last year [14]. The reality is that forest carbon science is complex [17]. Excluding silviculture from Connecticut’s forests could result in them sequestering less atmospheric carbon over time, due to future losses from catastrophic disturbances (such as windstorms, invasive species, and fire) and lack of carbon benefits derived from forest products.
We lack a clear scientific answer to major questions related to forest carbon. These include:
• How do forest carbon dynamics change with forest succession, species composition, climate, and site characteristics? Disturbance events make future forest carbon dynamics, and the longevity of carbon stored in today’s forests, unpredictable [16, 18-23]. These events, which release vast amounts of forest carbon, are predicted to increase with climate change [24]. Appropriate and even optimized forest management can mitigate the risk of disturbance and reduce forest carbon lost in those events [25, 26].
• What is the lifecycle of carbon in forest soils and how does this relate to disturbance, climate, species composition, forest succession, and human activity [18, 22, 27-32]?
• Under what circumstances might unmanaged forests store more carbon than managed forests, and how do time and natural disturbances factor in to this comparison?
• How do methane emissions from forests differ between sites, species composition, and age structure [33-35]?
• What are the climate implications of multiple-use forest management which includes harvested forest products, compared to proforestation? Storage of carbon in forests and/or wood products are climate mitigation components, and wood can also serve as a fossil fuel reduction mechanism [1, 16, 36-38]. System level forest carbon accounting is complex and dynamic which highlights a need for comprehensive, and product specific, wood life cycle analyses and comparisons with non-renewable alternatives and market forces [39]. Woody biomass generated in forest management activities can bring additional climate benefits by either storing carbon in forest products [37] and/or replacing fossil-based counterparts [40].

Proforestation does not account for system level carbon dynamics related to forest products and misleads us to conclude that its adoption would be the most carbon positive of all forest policy choices. Given such questions, proforestation is an undemonstrated, unwise approach as a climate solution while active management provides a suite of approaches that can be tailored to find solutions to known and emerging threats to forest carbon storage and health. The proforestation movement misleads us to believe that people are not part of natural forests, a belief based on a dichotomy of nature and culture that has been shown to promote environmental degradation instead of conservation [41]. Indeed, for thousands of years before European colonists arrived, Indigenous peoples stewarded and actively managed Connecticut’s forests, through prescribed fire and harvesting of wood for a variety of uses. This active management by people still influences the forests we see today. The myth of a “pristine” unmanaged forest being the natural state of Connecticut’s forests is just not accurate or necessarily desirable for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, or other ecosystem services. Active forest management has been crucial through time for ensuring that our forests are healthy and resilient while meeting society’s needs.

What the proforestation movement gets right is that poor land management can decimate the biodiversity and ecosystem services of forests. Just as sound management has conserved our contemporary forest after a period of destructive agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, we now need to rely on ongoing management to steward these forests through multiple threats, including more frequent and intense weather events such as droughts and storms, and losses due to invasive pathogens. These increasing threats reflect the fact that Connecticut’s forests are human influenced, they have been for millennia and this is even more true today due to climate and other environmental changes. Keeping forests healthy and growing under conditions of multiplying and intensifying threats will require the ongoing human intervention that management offers. Management allows us to maintain growing forests, and growing forests sequester carbon.

Silviculture enables us to facilitate successional trajectories that will make forests more resilient to ongoing and emerging threats from global change, while supporting rural livelihoods and sustaining biodiversity. The science of silviculture in Connecticut is not about cutting primary forests, planting monocultures, or other such extractive practices which deliver only short-term gain. Outdated caricatures of forestry professionals are detrimental and threaten the resiliency of our state’s forests. Silviculture is about sustaining healthy forestlands, which involves anticipating and responding to disturbances that threaten long-term forest health, through science- and practice-informed strategies.

There are also broader issues at play here relating to sustainable rural economies and environmental justice and responsibility. For example, ‘preservation’ of a wealthy society’s resources leads to greater exploitation of forest resources in places where less regulation and scientific knowledge exist to ensure sustainable management. This concept has been described as the illusion of preservation [42]. We are loath to be drawn into the nuances of these arguments, but suffice to say that meeting energy and wood demands must involve globally-coordinated initiatives with consideration to the differences between biogenic carbon emissions and fossilized carbon emissions [17, 37, 43, 44]. In Connecticut, we have restored our state forestland through management which can continue to maintain – and even enhance – the carbon, other environmental, and rural community benefits of our forestlands. Exporting demands for forest products to regions without our rich scientific and practitioner expertise is damaging to both our state and the planet. Connecticut needs to support the DEEP Forestry Division by providing them with enough resources to fully, and appropriately, steward our State forestlands.

We end by stating that we are ProForests, ProBiodiversity, ProClimate and ProRuralCommunities. In Connecticut, that necessitates being ProManagement.

Attached is the letter with the references and the names of the signatories. My bold on the first sentence.

Logs on Trains from Oregon to Wyoming: The E&E News Story , Subsidies and Bugs

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I couldn’t find a photo of today’s version, at least Bend is near Gilchrist.

 

This E&E News story is good, but sadly it’s behind a paywall. I’m going to excerpt a few paragraphs.

Moore told E&E News last week he’s not sure how long the timber transport pilot project will last but that his main goal is to keep mills open in places like the Black Hills, where his agency’s own policies to limit timber harvests on the 1.2-million-acre Black Hills National Forest have been blamed for squeezing local mills. The local timber industry and lawmakers who represent the region are watching every move. The Biden administration is funding the program through the 2021 infrastructure law, with an initial goal of moving around 3 million board feet by March. The arrangement is connected to a $50 million forest stewardship partnership with the National Wild Turkey Federation.

If the pilot project succeeds, it might show one way the Forest Service can step up forest thinning in places like California and Oregon. In those states, milling capacity has shrunk but forest managers say thick vegetation and dead trees will invite more and bigger wildfires as climate change worsens.

If the experiment stumbles, Moore may hand the same troubles to his successors without a clear solution, and communities reliant on forest products will continue to face the threat of mill closures as they have in the Black Hills, where Neiman Enterprises — a partner in the project — has said it can’t sustain its mills without a more dependable supply of wood.

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“We’re not saying this is the best solution, but it’s the one we’ve come up with for right now,” Moore said in a brief interview at the National Association of Counties’ winter legislative conference.
“We have to start somewhere,” Moore added. “What’s critical to us is that these mills stay in business, and if we can work collectively across many different landscapes to do that, we should do that.”

Wood products companies and forest policy consultants said the experiment’s success hinges on finding uses for the wood that help make up for the cost of transportation — and on the federal government’s continued willingness to subsidize the effort if it doesn’t pencil out. “I don’t know how the numbers work out unless the feds pay from start to finish,” said Catherine Mater, a wood products engineer in Oregon who frequently works with the  Forest Service.
That’s because many of the trees that would be thinned from ailing Western forests would have diameters of less than 10 inches, Mater said, and many mills aren’t equipped for such small material.

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The wood products company most involved in the timber project, Neiman Enterprises, sees opportunity in medium-sized logs it can secure from markets that are already saturated, said Marcus Neiman, a vice president at the family-owned business. The company makes heating pellets at its mill in Spearfish, S.D., near the Black Hills National Forest, using sawdust and wood shavings from ponderosa pine, which grows in the region. Neiman said the pellet business is challenging but that he sees “plenty of opportunity to broaden the reach of biomass markets in the U.S.” as part of a comprehensive approach to forest management.

In an initial “proof of concept” experiment, the company paid to ship logs from Oregon to its mill in Hulett, Wyo., Neiman said. Negotiations on the first timber sale through the program are nearing completion, he said. The company can turn medium-sized logs into boards, as well as exploring other products, he said.

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The National Wild Turkey Federation, a hunting group that seeks to protect wildlife habitat, is supporting the transport pilot through a 20-year stewardship agreement with the Forest Service. The agreement includes a directive from USDA to help move timber from areas that are short on milling capacity — but need forest work — to areas that have a shortage of timber to supply local mills.
The arrangement, with the Burlington Northern railroad as another partner, isn’t necessarily cost effective but addresses the needs to keep mills running and reduce potential wildfire fuel in forests, the NWTF has said (Greenwire, Jan. 6).

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When I finally ran down an economist, he told me that transportation subsidies, for a variety of reasons, are indeed a thing. If you look under USDA transportation subsidies, you will find transit subsidies for workers to get to work, subsidies to offset logistics cost of getting containers to a container yard and the USDA BCAP program(I’m not sure it’s currently funded, but here’s a link to a CRS report on the program..)

Matching payments are intended to provide incentives for collecting underutilized biomass for bioenergy production. This would remove existing biomass where it might not currently be profitable to do so (e.g., crop residue or forest undergrowth)

Bottom line.. USDA and other government agencies subsidize many things for many reasons. We can disagree about whether they “should”, but it’s not unusual.

We’re not economists, but having observed them ..

If we assume that these logs would otherwise be burned in piles, then there’s the social cost of carbon (which I think is a bogus number but many people use) plus smoke effects.

So to figure out what is the best use, we’d have to look at other possible uses and non-uses.

Then we’d have to make assumptions about “what if the same lumber were produced somewhere else? where would that be? what would be the impacts to the tax base, etc.?”

Then there’s non-market values of all shapes, sizes and descriptions, and timelines.

I think that’s what NWTF (NWTF received 50 mill for a master stewardship agreement, this is just a piece) as trying to get at here..

The process of moving timber by railcar in previous years was viewed as an outdated method, as it was considered unprofitable for companies seeking to create forest products. However, considering the immense ecological value (i.e., wildfire risk reduction, carbon optimization, watershed health, wildlife habitat, etc.), the process has the potential to set the precedent for getting fuels out of the forest and transformed into carbon-storing forest products. [NWTF, USDA Begin Restoration, Timber Transit as part of Master Stewardship Agreement]

There’s also concern for disadvantaged communities.  Hulett isn’t in one, according to EPA’s map  but there are sections of South Dakota that are. it looks like an hour or so away.

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Here’s an answer to a popular question, thanks to Larry’s Kurtz’s blog. 

“what about the bugs?

In 2020 Neiman bought Interfor Corporation’s specialty sawmill in the Klamath County town of Gilchrist, Oregon near where the logs will be loaded. Neiman owns the Klamath Northern Railway which connects to the Union Pacific. The UP intersects with Burlington Northern Santa Fe at Crawford, Nebraska and the BNSF has sidings in Upton, Wyoming. To minimize the movement of insects and diseases the 33 and 16.5 foot fire salvage ponderosa pine logs will be peeled and shipped to Upton then trucked to Neiman’s mill.

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It appears to me that Neiman is successfully running the Montrose and Gilchrist mills,  so the he and the folks he works with know a lot about this and have been successful.  Maybe once they figures this out, someone will entrepreneur a sawmill in California. Who knows? I’m with the Chief on this one, let’s give it a try.  There’s the old story of a CEO who said “we have enough people warning about a flood, bring me someone who can build an ark.”

 

Radio Interview: “Southwest Oregon forest management plan draws backlash”

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Here’s a 15-minute interview by Oregon Public Broadcasting (well, two separate interviews), about a planned BLM timber sale in southern Oregon. Intro text:

The Bureau of Land Management recently approved a controversial forest management project in southwestern Oregon. The plan, called the “Late Mungers” project, includes roughly 7,500 acres of prescribed burning and tree thinning, as well as 830 acres of logging. It’s one of the first projects approved under the BLM’s Integrated Vegetation Management plan, which the agency says will allow it to increase the “scope, scale and pace” of its wildfire prevention efforts.

But as Jefferson Public Radio has reported, the plan has faced significant backlash from environmental groups in the region. They argue that the accelerated project timeline cuts out opportunities for public comment, and that the timber sales included in the project will actually increase fire risks and endanger wildlife.

For more details about the plan, we’re joined by BLM Medford District Manager Elizabeth Burghard and Luke Ruediger, conservation director for the Klamath Forest Alliance and executive director of the Applegate-Siskiyou Alliance.

It would have been interesting to have two two folks on at the same time, for rebuttal and clarification. For example, I suspect that some “large” trees are being removed from near much larger trees. Regardless of the diameter of the trees to be cut, this may well be warranted — see our recent discussion of the “eaetside screens.”

FWIW, here’s BLM’s project FAQ.

What Our World Needs Now- More Forest Economists?

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I’m interested in the workings of the journalism-academia-agency-practitioner ecosystem and how these interact to shape how many of us see the world. When I first read this E&E News story on the (thanks to a TSW reader) “logs on trains” issue- the idea of sending logs from California to Wyoming. The next post will be on that topic. This post is a reflection on how hard it was to get input from knowledgeable economists on this issue.

Aside.. culturally, I was trained that “appearance of conflict of interest is to be avoided”. Fortunately for us, we can see the work of the reporter over time has not changed, but for Politico I don’t think it’s a good look.

As you may recall, a few years ago I became curious about “why the economics are such that British Columbia can export chips to Asia, but the US cannot?”. As I wandered through various faculties at universities, it appears that “economists who know about forest products” were either vanishing, or difficult to locate. The only people I had any success with were emeriti (plural of emeritus?) professors.

***Note: I am not being criticizing universities here. Institutions of higher education need to follow the scientific trends and money to stay in business. At the land-grants, this has always been a tension, as attracting federal research grants and serving the research needs of the citizens of the state can be in tension. In some cases, this tension is resolved by hiring the people solving more practical problems in extension appointments, which in some cases makes these folks more difficult to locate.

For example, but the holder of the SJ Hall Chair in Forest Economics at one of my alma maters, UC Berkeley, studies a variety of things not in the same bailiwick. Here’s a link to his lab’s website.

And yet there are practical economists helping people solve problems in the Forest Service and Cooperative Extension. So for a reporter (or me) it can be hard to find the experts. There are some in the Forest Service I know, but for them to speak to reporters requires approval of the public affairs shop. This can be simple sometimes and difficult other times, at least that’s been my experience. And unlike The Smokey Wire, reporters usually have some kind of timeline. Plus one might imagine a Forest Service economist would be quite careful talking about something with policy implications- the things we are most curious about. So at the worst, this is some form of “those who talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk.” Then there’s also a generation gap where many of the old stalwarts of the field recently retired, new people have been hired, but they’re not yet at the same level of knowledge and experience as those they’ve replaced. That’s even if their supervisors want them to study the same things. So it’s all very complex.

Consequently, as a result of university hiring and government grants, we might be missing an entire story when it comes to “getting rid of wood waste” or “getting the highest value from wood waste.” And we might even wonder whether the efforts of the last thirty years or so of trying to develop markets for small-diameter material might have been assisted by the presence of more academics studying the problems and working toward solutions. Isn’t that the point of having experts? To help find solutions and be knowledgeable of what is working and what isn’t?

Maybe it’s just me hankering for a simpler world where there were identifiable experts in useful subjects at our (land grant) schools. I’m not really expecting this from other schools, as it isn’t part of their mission. When I look at what the current faculty is studying, with notable exceptions, it seems more abstract with quite a bit of international work, and it seems that there are actually fewer social scientists (including economists) percentage-wise than in the past. Of course, the departments were different then, and I’m comparing the old forestry to the current department of environmental science, policy and management. Is it still possible to identify the State’s problems (like small-diameter material products and markets) and hire scientists to work collaboratively and help solve them?

Is this happening instead at another campus? How would we find out?

It seems that all this makes reporting, at least in our forest space, much more difficult than it needs to be. So please share the names of any experts you have found out there..

Law and Moomaw: Protect mature US forests to slow climate change

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From The Conversation: “The Biden administration has called for protecting mature US forests to slow climate change, but it’s still allowing them to be logged.” By by Beverly Law and William Moomaw. Much to critique here. Many links. For example:

“Some studies indicate that thinning forests by harvesting some trees and reintroducing low-intensity fires can reduce the intensity of future wildfires, leaving more carbon stored in trees. But these studies don’t account for the large amount of carbon that is released to the atmosphere after trees are cut.”

Law’s work has been discussed numerous times on Smokey Wire, such as here, in looking at a paper by Law et al, “Carbon sequestration and biodiversity co-benefits of preserving forests in the western USA.”

Moomaw is a proponent of “proforestation.”

 

 

Effects of e-bikes on wildlife management areas

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by AltoRider

We’ve discussed e-bikes, and one of the questions was what kinds of effects they have, and on wildlife in particular.  It looks like some places have seen enough use to say something about that.  Here is one report on that from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.

Class II and Class III e-bikes are now banned in off-road areas at all 193 wildlife and waterfowl management areas in the state, according to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources…

Division officials explained that they altered the rule because some e-bikes were “ruining” habitat meant to protect the state’s wildlife. They believe the rule change can help reduce habitat destruction.

“In areas where there is a lot of e-bike use, notable habitat damage is occurring,” said Utah Division of Wildlife Resources Capt. Chad Bettridge in a statement Thursday. “With the increased use of e-bikes, we are seeing these properties damaged, ultimately limiting our ability to manage them for their intended purpose.”

“While we would like to provide recreational opportunities on our WMAs, these properties were purchased for the benefit of wildlife and wildlife habitat,” he said. “These properties are public land, but they are not multiple-use like many other state and federally-owned properties.”