The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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For awhile I had been saying it was time to do Colorado Roadless Fact Check. Most of the stories that crossed my desk seemed fairly innocuous, though, or at least not worth the effort of writing clarifications. Recently, I ran across this, which seemed deserving of further discussion. This is from the Wilderness Society, and … Read more
Certainly public land managers need to be climate aware; and that also means being climate-debate aware. Here is a recent report- “Climate Shift A Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate.” Many of the findings may be of interest to NCFP readers. This is from the summary.. Just as public opinion needs to … Read more
Today this story was in the AP “Burned forest value central to Tahoe logging fight.” So far, I have seen it in a Bellingham Washington paper and the San Jose Mercury News. I wonder about the timing, as the lawsuit was filed in February (11th?) as per this press release. As with all vegetation management … Read more
Adaptive Governance is art and science, blended with management and politics. It is art since political decision-making is an art. One face of adaptive governance is a dance wherein public land managers engage with particularly ecological and social scientists in learning from experience about transformations in ecosystems and institutions. The dance is broadened further, since … Read more
“If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing.” Aaron Wildavsky [Author’s note: This is a lengthy (for a blog), partisan, historical view rant on the road from NFMA “forest planning” to “adaptive governance.”] Let’s face it, the “forest land and resource management plan” is an anachronism—an artifact of a bygone era. That era was in its … Read more
It’s starting to look like “A New Century of Forest Planning” may ultimately come to refer to the hundred years or so it takes to get a new planning rule implemented. Will the “Hundred Years War” come to signify the length of the timber wars? Way back in the 1900’s, Chief Dale Robertson was convinced … Read more
The above chart is from the Convention on Biological Diversity website here. My question: do we really understand what requiring maintenance and restoration of ecosystem diversity means under 219.9 ? At least we have some idea of what vertebrate species are or aren’t (except for them crossing with each other, but at least that is … Read more
Here is a post from a short-lived blog I ran in 2005, Forest Planning Directives, about Forest Service planning Manual/Handbook rewriting. I think it may shed light on our planning rule critique as well. And it can serve as a guidepost, for the inevitable Manual/Handbook rewriting that will ensue just after the Draft Planning Rule … Read more
GUEST VIEWPOINT: Obama threatens to shatter political peace in the forest By Andy Stahl Published: Wednesday, Mar 2, 2011 05:00AM, The Register-Guard A generation ago, in the twilight of his career and his life, U.S. Sen. Hubert Humphrey shepherded into law a new manifesto for our national forests. With passage of the 1976 National Forest … Read more
As our readers know, there has been a considerable amount of debate on this blog regarding place-based national forest legislation (e.g., the Tester and Wyden bills). A while back I put together some tables comparing various bills and formalized agreements, to see how they approach things such as NEPA, restoration, and other matters. [Here it … Read more