The smoke chaser pack carried by Bridgeport Ranger District firefighters in the 1960s included a Pulaski, shovel, canteen, headlight for hardhat, rations, first-aid kit, snakebite kit, map, and other useful odds and ends.
One July 1962 evening a motorist southbound on U.S. Highway 395 drove into the Bridgeport Ranger Station to report a fire high in the crags above Devils Gate Summit. Second-year forestry aide Dick and rookie I were dispatched to the fire in a pickup into which we loaded two smoke chaser packs and two five-gallon water packs. We drove north, spotted the smoke, parked off the highway, put on our hardhats, strapped on our smoke chaser packs, and began the climb up steep rocky slopes toward the fire.
About forty minutes of climbing later we reached the fire. It wasn’t much as fires go—a large Jeffrey pine snag, a few smaller pines and junipers, and some mountain mahogany burning here, smoldering there, and smoking everywhere. But it had potential, and we attacked it with whatever vigor our steep climb had left us.
Once we had a line around the fire, Dick advised the ranger station by radio that we had it contained and controlled. As we began mopping it up, Dick commented on some real hot spots and allowed “We sure could use some water on this job before it gets dark.”
Knowing we meant me, I gazed at the pickup far below. There the two water packs waited. “I’ll go get it.”
“Right,” Dick agreed, and added as I started down the mountain, “Bring both of ‘em.”
Both of them! Water weighs eight pounds a gallon. Ten gallons of water weight eighty pounds, twice as much as a smoke chaser pack. I knew I was in for a long crawl-and-a-half back up the mountain with those two water packs.
It was dark by the time this firefighter had scrambled back to the fire with that ten gallons of water. It was cold by the time the two firefighters had used that water to cool off the last of the hot spots inside their fire line. It was darn cold by the time the two firefighters, who knew better than to try to get off those crags at night, had kindled a small fire inside their fire line to heat their canned rations, boil water for coffee, and warm their hands. And it was colder still when, at first light, they declared the fire out, shouldered their gear, and made their way off the crags toward the pickup, Bridgeport, and a hot two-dollar breakfast on Uncle Sam at the Sportsman’s Inn as it opened for the day.
Hordes of hogs running wild across Wyoming aren’t likely anytime soon, some hunters and wildlife agents said, but feral pigs reaching the Cowboy State could be inevitable.
There have already been reports of feral swine showing up in Colorado, North Dakota and Utah, and there’s serious concern over them pushing south from Canada into Montana.
Perhaps worse, people sometimes deliberately transplant feral hogs, apparently because they want the opportunity to make money by offering “canned” hog hunts, Montana’s state veterinarian, Martin Zaluski told Cowboy State Daily.
“Much of the spread of feral hogs has been in stock trailers being pulled down highways at 80 miles per hour,” he said.
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As a special treat for our TSW Montana residents… here’s a Livingston, Montana resident (Walter Kirn) getting grumpy ( in a good writer way) about a recent New York Times Magazine story…
Walter: There always has to be a center of evil in the United States, right? For a while, it was northern Idaho, like you say, which did genuinely have some Christian white supremacist compounds as it were. But so now I guess it’s Montana’s turn in the stocks. But more than that, I think the piece was a lifestyle piece gone wrong. Everything about it was exotic. Even if I were Marxist, I’d want to move to Montana after I read this piece. It looked unreconstructed and wild and full of characters and conflict and so on….
The funny thing is that having lived there for 32 years, this is now about the third cycle of ‘Montana as militia threat’ that I’ve watched in the press. In the nineties around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, there was something called the Patriot movement and the militia movement. And it was usually located in Montana because, for readers of the New York Times, you can pretty much set any scary trend in Montana without anyone checking on it. It’s harder nowadays because there are direct flights to Bozeman and there didn’t use to be…
Walter: But accompanying the text of this piece, and even more damning in the eyes of the person who knows nothing about Montana, were a bunch of photographs that were absolutely completely manipulated and filtered in the way of like dystopian campaign ads. They put dark filtering on them, and they showed things like some kind of a Republican meeting in a hotel ballroom or something, but filtered so as to look like some satanic pageant.
Here’s a link to the discussion with Walter and Matt Taibi on Substack. It might be behind a paywall.
But the intensity of land use a century or two ago tipped the balance too far. “Back then, we did wide-scale burning on purpose or accident. We abused the system with practices we don’t think [are] appropriate now,” says Stringer. That realization led to policies that introduced decades of fire suppression, such that shade-loving trees have enveloped the undergrowth again. Add in pests and invasive plants encouraged by climate change, and baby oaks don’t stand a chance.
But controlling invasive species and pests, and cutting to provide light to the understory, takes commitment and resources many forest owners don’t have. “Missouri’s forest cover is 15 million acres, and 12 million acres are privately owned. Only 10 percent of that is being actively tended to,” notes Missouri State Forestry specialist Hank Stelzer. “Landowners have the attitude, ‘If it’s green, it’s good.’ So the forest is like an unweeded garden, and we know what happens when you neglect a garden. You don’t get large tomatoes; you get insects and disease. We see the same thing in woodlands. We don’t get the quality white oaks or those that can sustain climate change.”
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Decarbonization Corner
Following the Money- Climate Edition
(note there are many things that people can do or fund about decarbonizing, from concrete to nuclear to hydro to geothermal; this focuses on anti-fossil fuels and pro- wind and solar.)
I find ENGO’s interesting and where the $ come from, and to what specific ends.
Robert Bryce apparently had the patience and the facility to look into climate related ones.. which relates to our federal lands issues in that, for example, “rapid scaling” and “stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Given that other ENGO’s are likely to litigate some of the rapid scaling (but will be with the big $ on the “stopping the expansion”), it would be interesting to see (if we could, but I don’t think we can) what this money will be used for.
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Building Things, McKibben on the IRA
Bill McKibben in this New Yorker article which is generally interesting.. talks about rural people being influenced by outside (bad, fossil fuel) groups.
The same kind of manufactured opposition is shaping up on land. For many years, surveys found that solar energy was incredibly popular across political groups—Republicans, independents, and Democrats all favored far more public support for photovoltaics. But front groups sponsored by the fossil-fuel industry have begun sponsoring efforts to spread misinformation, crisscrossing the country with slide shows claiming that wind turbines routinely catch on fire, or lower property values, and that solar farms shed toxic chemicals into the water supply. “There’s always been some run-of-the-mill nimbyism,” Norris, the North Carolina solar developer, said. “But there’s an increasingly organized opposition effort.”
So.. I’ve actually attended public meetings on these things and I didn’t see any sign of “front groups”. Maybe the difference is that it seems like a good idea. until it industrializes your landscape. And we were told industrialized landscapes were bad and to be resisted, until now. Notice how concern for the environment is now NIMBYism and even “the culture wars”. I don’t know the answer, but more listening, and less critiquing might be a start. And if our neighbors, protecting what they see as their environment, become the key to the “climate crisis slipping irretrievably out of control” then perhaps someone has bet on the wrong decarbonization horse.
Based on the way that project approvals work, it’s going to come down to a county-by-county basis,” Norris told me. “I thought solar energy was insulated from the culture wars until relatively recently, but it’s getting worrying.” Nationally, Billy Parish said, “We used to be able to say solar polled in the low nineties for popularity. But I think that’s probably begun to trail off a bit, become a little more polarized. It’s still very popular, but there’s definitely slippage.” And that slippage could mean a thousand different fights, each one delaying change past the point where the climate crisis slips irretrievably out of control. “Thanks to the I.R.A., money is not the chief obstacle,” Gillis said. “What Congress did was change the economics of the technologies we’re talking about. But what they did not do was remove all the other barriers slowing us down. Really, economics was the tailwind for renewables already. It just got better with the I.R.A. But the other friction remains.”
(Photo Courtesy Dayton Gooder via the Cowboy State Daily))
Since we seem to have a recreation theme this week (and discussing outdoor tourism vs. local and impacts), I thought this Cowboy State Daily article from earlier this week might be of interest.
With more than 2,000 miles of groomed snowmobiling trails and millions of acres of back country powder, Wyoming offers an unparalleled winter recreation experience that includes the elusive feel of exploring undiscovered country.
But more and more snowmobilers are discovering Wyoming.
Out-of-state snowmobiling permits rose 38%, according to a 2020-21 report from the University of Wyoming and Department of Agricultural Economics as compared to its previous report for the 2011-12 season.
Registered residential snowmobiles, meanwhile, dropped 13% for the same period.
Surging Midwest Interest
Minnesota now accounts for 27.8% of Wyoming’s snowmobile tourism, followed by, in order, Montana, Colorado, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Illinois and Michigan.
But Taylor believes the Midwest is catching up.
“What has happened,” Taylor said, “is with the improvement in the equipment and snowmachines, people can go farther into the mountains than ever before. And so, more and more people have become attracted to that.”
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Wyoming’s The Whole Package
One of the trends that may be helping drive up the Cowboy State’s snowmobiling tourism, now worth an estimated $193.8 million annually, is that a number of other states have begun closing access to motorized backcountry riding.
“People go where there is access,” Taylor said. “We have access in Wyoming, where places like California and Nevada and (states) like that, the access has been shut down to motorized travel.”
Wyoming also offers an unparalleled backcountry experience in multiple locations around the state, including Yellowstone, Togwotee and the Snowy Range.
“Just the beauty of it, I mean, the farther back into the hills it just seems like the prettier it is,” Taylor said. “And so it’s the terrain, it’s the enjoyment of the riding, the better snow, the vistas.
“You know, it’s just the whole back country experience is exceptional in Wyoming.”
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Consistent Snow Helps Too
The high elevation also helps, Gooder acknowledges.
“The higher you get, the more consistent your snowpack is,” he said. “Our snowpack is always really consistent. Riders are able to come out, you know, plan vacation months in advance and they’re able to rely on having good snow. We average roughly 350 to 400 inches of snow a year up here.”
The Snowy Range also has one of the largest grooming contracts in the state, Gooder added, which is another key reason the destination is attractive to so many snowmobilers.
From UC Davis…. We have a Northwest Forest Plan to address northern spotted owls and old-growth. Maybe we need a Western Wildfire Forest Plan that amends forest plans to address wildfire….
Unprecedented Levels of High-Severity Fire Burn in Sierra Nevada Forests
The ‘Wrong Kind of Fire’ Is Burning Compared to Historical Patterns
For the study, published in the journal Ecosphere, scientists analyzed fire severity data from the U.S. Forest Service and Google Earth Engine, across seven major forest types.
They found that in low- and middle-elevation forest types, the average annual area that burned at low-to-moderate severity has decreased from more than 90% before 1850 to 60-70% today.
At the same time, the area burned annually at high severity has nearly quintupled, rising from less than 10% to 43% today. (High-severity burns are those where more than 95% of aboveground tree biomass is killed by fire.)
The Boulders Loop Trail allows off-road vehicles access to the trails behind the houses built near the cul-de-sac at the end of Phoenix Street. Newer owners object to the public accessing the Forest Service trails through easements by their property. Michele Nelson/Roundup
This is one of our series of posts by the original authors summarizing, riffing on, and updating essays from the Steve Wilent-edited book 193 Million Acres. This is the second post on my essay on recreation: Wild and Free,.
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A brief foray into NVUM from 2018:
The Forest Service’s National Visitor Use Monitoring program (NVUM) website (www.fs.fed.us/recreation/programs/nvum/) provides a wealth of information about recreation visits and visitors at the forest, region, or national scale. Here are a few interesting statistics drawn from the most recent NVUM data (USDA Forest Service 2018):
Most visitors (88 percent) use neither wilderness (0.05 percent) nor overnight developed sites (0.07 percent).
Most visitors (95 percent) are somewhat or very satisfied.
Approximately half (48 percent) of all visitors have a household income less than $75,000 per year.
Half (50 percent) of the visitors travel less than 50 miles, and 75 percent of the visitors travel less than 200 miles.
The NVUM data at the national level indicate that national forest visitors are mostly local and semi-local people from a variety of incomes, who visit the forests for a variety of reasons and are mostly satisfied with their experiences.
Yet there is a growing crisis of funding and capacity.
********** Update: well, there’s a great deal more funding, but then Covid hit and the needs also went up. So today’s situation is very different than when I originally wrote the essay. I wonder what more recent NVUMs would say?
Maintain and Improve Access to Public Lands. This problem has been described in the paper “Landlocked: Measuring Public Land Access in the West,” by the Center for Western Priorities (2013): “The enclosure of public land can result from different circumstances. Lands may be completely surrounded by private lands without any right-of-way to access the adjacent public lands. There may be a public road running through private property which has been closed off. Public lands can be surrounded by private lands in a checkerboard pattern. Sometimes landowners have been known to illegally fence off public roads, effectively shutting out the public from crossing onto publicly-owned land.”
Neighbors to Forest Service land sometimes post no trespassing signs on legal public Forest Service roads. In the Rocky Mountain West, the center’s study estimates that four million acres of public land (Forest Service and BLM) do not have adequate access (defined as adjoining a road or adjoining other acres that adjoin a road). In 1993, a General Accounting Office study showed that an estimated 14 percent of Forest Service and BLM land nationally did not have adequate access (US General Accounting Office 1993).
Because access issues tend to be dealt with by the Forest Service Lands and Realty Management section staff personnel, these acknowledged and serious problems can be overlooked in discussions of recreation needs. These issues will require serious and sustained attention if the public lands are to be kept open for public use. In fact, the Forest Service may not be capable of handling this issue on its own. The lands staffs are overburdened, and at the end of the day, the Department of Justice may not have the capacity or the priorities to take many access cases to court. The problem of neighbors putting up signs could be reduced by focusing on making sure visitors have correct maps (clearly marked paper maps or correct maps via GPS apps on cell phones) and perhaps by posting standard signage on public roads through private land. The difficulties and lack of focus on the issue were described in a story by Marshall Swearingen in High Country News (Swearingen 2015).
In an ideal world, anyone would be able to easily access the half-billion acres managed by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies in the West. But I’m struck by how tenuous, even fragile, our connection to that land is — including the land in this particular corner of Montana, near my home in Bozeman: just thin threads of roads, where access often hangs more on the will of a landowner than on whether a road is truly public or private. Who gets to enjoy the benefits of public land, and at what cost, is more complicated than the crisply mapped property lines. And opening public access is always more difficult than closing it off.
Swearingen’s article outlines the importance of the work of the Public Land Water Access Association in Montana, a group of retirees and others that are focused on this issue and fund litigation to protect public access. Also, in Montana the State has stepped up to work on access, as reported in “Montana kicks off program to improve public land access,” in the Great Falls Tribune (Drake 2017). The article describes MT-PLAN, a new program approved by the state legislature, that “starts a contribution account and grant program to get public access easements to open up public land for recreation and aid public access sites statewide.” The program, overseen by the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, received $25,000 in seed money.
The Forest Service deals with forest visitors that are sometimes poorly behaved in ways that affect neighbors of forests and with some forest neighbors that are poorly behaved in ways that affect forest visitors. Ultimately, mediating these disputes are just about as local as it gets, and perhaps that’s why many of the national interest groups who want to protect public lands don’t seem to focus on or fund this work.
The Forest Service needs to bolster its efforts to deal with the access issue, but interested citizens need to step up as well. Perhaps federal public lands retirees could set up a group similar to Montana’s Public Lands and Waters Access Association (plwa.org), which has a mission to “maintain, restore, and perpetuate public access to the boundaries of all Montana public land and waters,” in other states and increase capacity to deal with this problem? A side benefit of volunteer activities would be that the efforts toward protecting access would be buffered from partisan political drama and administration philosophical and budget changes.
Land Designations by Congress or Presidents that Reduce Access. Much of the dialogue about the need for new wilderness areas or national monuments is about protecting the land from future possible activities like mineral extraction, timber harvesting, and grazing. Whether intentional or via a kind of policy collateral damage, access and recreation uses may be reduced or removed.
On its “Why Wilderness?” web page, the Wilderness Society (TWS) states that “Wilderness is a haven from the pressures of our fast-paced society. It provides us with places where we can seek relief from the noise, haste and crowds that too often confine us. It is a place for us to enjoy with friends and families — strengthening our relationships and building lasting memories.” (The Wilderness Society 2017)
However, NVUM numbers show that only 0.05 percent of national forest visits are in wilderness. And later, on the same webpage, TWS notes that: “Wild places are a great source of economic activity, especially in the rural communities that surround them. Outdoor recreation contributes more than $646 billion annually to the economy, supports 6.1 million jobs, and generates nearly $80 billion in federal, state, and local taxes.”
As part of its advocacy for increasing wilderness, TWS equates “wild areas,” where most people recreate, with legislated Wilderness. Since mountain bikes are not allowed in Wilderness, a push for more Wilderness necessarily reduces the diversity of recreation opportunities. As John Fisch comments in “Do Bikes Belong in Wilderness Areas?” in the December 20, 2017, edition of Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club: “…bikes don’t belong in the backcountry… and all backcountry must become designated Wilderness. Ergo, the ultimate goal results in mountain bikes losing all backcountry access….” (Teasdale 2017).
It may be that increasing the number of acres in legislatively-designated wilderness areas and increasing, or even maintaining current access for the kinds of recreation that most visitors prefer (in NVUM data) are ultimately on a collision course.
****************** Update: perhaps the recent trend toward Monumentizing could be seen as a “protection with recreation” and as a substitute for Wilderness. And the question of which recreation, where, to be hashed out later during some less-sensationalized and tedious planning process.
Forest Service Decisions that Reduce Access. For a variety of reasons, the agency sometimes takes actions that reduce access, such as closing or decommissioning roads or trails because they are expensive to maintain or cause environmental harm. As an alternative, volunteers and partnerships are sometimes used to help reduce costs and environmental impacts.
Access via Guided Group Recreation. According to the Outdoor Industry Association (2017), “The agencies need to improve access to public lands and waters,” and the ways to improve it are to streamline permitting processes for guided and educational groups. These groups “afford urban youth and first-time recreationists the opportunity to get outside.”
The outdoor industry and others have a narrative that goes something like this, as stated by Myles Pham in “How Access to Public Lands Can Lead to Environmental Activism,” an October 17, 2017, Sierra Club blog post (Myles Pham (2017): “New participants are essential to growing the outdoor recreation economy and encouraging a new generation of climbers, fishers, and skiers. These kids will become the next generation of environmental advocates by virtue of protecting our public lands that give them joy.”
This is the instrumental view of increasing access for future consumers of outdoor products and environmental advocates. It is about increasing access for certain groups, such as urban youth and first-time recreationists, by making it easier to get to public lands in organized groups. It sounds like the idea is to make sure that in the future, people vote to “protect” public lands by increasing their recreation opportunities now. It could be argued that that will only encourage people to impact the land more (if we acknowledge that recreation has impacts) and lead to less ultimate “protection.”
Unless, of course, the concept of “protection” includes recreation of preferred types, still -even Wilderness is not protected from impacts of recreation. It’s all puzzling and seems illogical to me.
******Riffing.. in my career in the FS, when I couldn’t follow peoples’ logic, there was usually something they weren’t telling me. In this case perhaps we’ve entered some kind of ideological thicket.
*********Updating… perhaps funding should be used to focus on “protecting” land closer to marginalized communities, as per this study from 2022, for example.
The concept of access can clearly mean different things to different people. Everyone thinks that access to public lands is important but may disagree about who should get more access, who should get less access, and how much effort should be directed at maintaining and increasing public access through private lands. Access by recreationists of whatever kind has undeniable environmental impacts, and outdoor recreation is growing. How are these tensions to be managed?
Mike Archer’s wildfire news email today has this item:
The U.S. Forest Service has more than 120 fire-related job openings in the Stanislaus National Forest, paying from $15 to more than $35 per hour, and the agency is hosting an in-person application-assistance and hiring event in Sonora today. Stanislaus National Forest to host hiring event Tuesday in Sonora for 120+ openings https://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/article_3a99fa0a-9b88-11ed-aab7-33e4233e8071.html
The article says it’s not quite $15:
The job openings represent all aspects of the forest’s fire operations, from basic, boots-on-the-ground wildland firefighters, who start at $14.38 and can earn up to $18.06 per hour; to fuels managers, who start at $27.07 per hour; and assistant forest fuels manager, who start at $39.69 per hour, Forest Service spokesman Benjamin Cossell said Monday.
I’d say $14.38 isn’t going to attract folks. What amount would? $20/hour?
This is one of our series of posts by the original authors summarizing, riffing on, and updating essays from the Steve Wilent-edited book 193 Million Acres. I thought this would be a good time to discuss as Patrick McKay raised the issue of “what does the FS as an agency think about recreation, and how is that manifested through their actions?”. There’s also the Reimagine Recreation initiative that the Forest Service is currently undertaking. Perhaps many of you have been asked to participate in the Engagement sessions.
Given that background, here’s my essay. Or Part I, anyway.
If national parks are, as the writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner once said, “America’s best idea,” then perhaps national forests are America’s best experience. The American people agree, and they are voting emphatically with their feet, bikes, horses, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), snowmobiles, and recreational vehicles (RVs).
National forests tend to be wide open for a variety of both traditional and new personal uses and experiences, from firewood and Christmas tree cutting, to mountain biking, off-road vehicle riding, hunting and fishing, berry and mushroom picking, developed and dispersed camping, and simply being in nature.
Although mediated experiences provided at ski areas and through guides and outfitters can be an important piece of connecting to the outdoors, that is not the quintessential national forest experience. If you were to travel, as I once did, from the Kootenai National Forest in Idaho to the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico during elk season, you would see a thousand “dispersed camping” elk-hunter camps. You would see mothers and brothers, cousins and college buddies, grandfathers and friends, with dogs and horses and ATVs and camps of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of comfort, from roughing it to luxurious. Most of these thousands of people have a variety of both guns and alcohol in camp, law enforcement is far away, and cell coverage often is unavailable. For the most part, these people get along and behave responsibly toward each other and the land. They get along with cattle that have not yet trekked to their home ranches for the winter (and occasionally leave deposits as they walk through camp). In some parts of the Rocky Mountains, hunters on all-terrain vehicles share the road with mountain bikers, while in other parts, they share with log trucks or tractor trailers carrying natural gas pipes. Day to day, mostly it works. People generally get along with each other and have meaningful outdoor experiences that form lasting and powerful memories. The experiences can be pragmatic (providing meat for the freezer), relational (spending time with family or hunting buddies), and spiritual (encountering nature one on one).
The contrast with the national parks in the Rockies could not be more striking. In the parks, people’s options are limited; their dogs are prohibited on trails and in many backcountry and wilderness areas, campsites are tiny and clumped together, and they endure crowded lodging and restaurants and standing in long lines with tourists from far away places. The atmosphere can be more like a shopping center—more “mall-ic” than bucolic—and certainly more expensive than the national forest experience. The national parks experience is clearly a good thing for many people, but not for all. And these experiences can’t substitute for the diversity of opportunities on national forests today.
What makes national forest experiences so different? They tend to be unmediated and relatively unmanaged. (The same goes for lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management [BLM], an Interior Department agency). You might say that these experiences are wide open, wild, and free. Free in the sense of not having to pay fees for most places and activities, and free in the sense of having few regulations in place, and only as needed to protect the land or minimize user conflicts. The perception is a sense of trust—it’s a kind of Tennessee Williams policy that “depends on the kindness of strangers” to each other and to the land, and yet the surprise is that people can be left alone and will mostly be decent to the land and to each other. To circle back to Stegner, who also said that the national parks are “Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst,” I would have to respectfully disagree. It’s that very basic trust in self-governance, personal freedom, and responsibility that plays out in the national forests, on all 193 million acres, 24/7. For me, this is not about ideas or abstractions; it is rooted in the direct experiences of people on the land.
We don’t even have a word for these types of experiences and these forms of recreation. If we look at agency definitions of “unmanaged” recreation, Brooks and Champ (2006) note that “Conversations with recreation researchers and Forest Service employees are often peppered with alternative labels such as ‘unmanageable recreation’; ‘difficult to manage recreation’; ‘inappropriate dispersed recreation’; or ‘unmonitored nontraditional activities, growing in popularity.’” Certainly, the term “unmanaged” carries a negative tone, so there should be an expression for diverse and dispersed recreation opportunities that acknowledges that, like managed recreation, dispersed activities can occur at any place on the problematic spectrum. For the purposes of this essay, I will call this diverse dispersed recreation, and I advocate that the Forest Service and BLM increase their capacity to provide quality diverse dispersed recreation opportunities.
*** I’ve thought since that maybe “self-managed” has a nicer tone. And the better people behave, the less enforcement and regulation will be necessary. *********
The challenge for the Forest Service in the future is how to maintain diverse dispersed recreation opportunities and how to transition gracefully into a period of more restrictions due to increasing populations of visitors and unknown future budgets. In 2050, will there still be places where the current range of recreation experiences are still allowed? I, for one, hope so.
Burning off Forest Service dumps, to which campground and permittee refuse was hauled, was a hazard reduction part of my 1960s Toiyabe National Forest fire prevention guard job and just about the only part of the job I really didn’t enjoy.
Why not? Well, it started cold and dark, got dirty and smelly, and finished hot and dry. It involved getting up long before sunup, loading a couple five-gallon cans of diesel fuel onto the patrol truck, driving to the dump to be burned that morning, pushing garbage and trash piled up around the sides into the pit, anointing the whole mess with diesel fuel, touching it off with a fusee, watching the surrounding area for spot fires while the dump burned, and making sure the whole thing was dead out by about ten o’clock before the winds came up.
Oh, dump burning had its compensations, like communing with Mono Lake’s seagulls which winged north to forage for tidbit supplements to their brine shrimp diets. Once, at the Virginia Lakes dump, I saw a bear. And once, burning the Twin Lakes dump led to an amusing encounter with some fishermen.
Extinguishing the dump fire had drained the patrol truck’s pumper tank, so I drove to the nearby Timber Harvest Road bridge over Robinson Creek for a refill. Crossing the bridge, I pulled off the road and backed down to the creek. Not long after I had dropped the drafting hose into the stream and reversed the pump, two vehicles halted on the bridge. One was a flashy convertible and the other a battered Jeep. The occupants gestured in my direction, pulled off the road, and parked next to the patrol truck.
At first I thought something might be up. Perhaps they were going to report a fire! But the rapid unloading of fishing gear soon betrayed their misguided urgency. This had happened before.
“Hey! Are they biggies?” a couple blurted in unison as they scrambled past me to peer into the stream where my drafting hose lay. The rest of the pack followed, clutching fishing rods and carrying tackle boxes.
Feigning ignorance, I responded to their question with another. “Big whats?”
“Rainbows! Man, you know! Trout! Fish! You are the fish man, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m not the fish man,” I answered almost apologetically. “Fish are planted by the California Department of Fish and Game. I work for the U.S. Forest Service.” Then, after a pause, I added with a smile and only slightly exaggerated pride, “This is a fire truck.”
“A fire truck?” They looked unimpressed, to say the least. More like disdainful. But the awful truth was beginning to sink in. “You mean…you’re not the fish man?”
“Sorry,” I shrugged. They probably had been looking for a “fish man” with a “fish truck” all morning. “I’m just filling the tank on this fire truck.” I slapped the hose reel affectionately. Then I informed them of the days on which the Department of Fish and Game usually planted fish in Robinson Creek. Needless to say, those fishermen—a dismayed “that’s a fire truck” look on their faces—didn’t hang around very long.
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.
How NEPA guidance could favor climate projects over ecosystems
A White House document would emphasize carbon reductions when permitting large projects. That could have unintended consequences on forests, wetlands and species.
Excerpt:
The White House interim greenhouse gas guidance could amplify climate considerations in a way that overshadows other environmental benefits, like preserving forests and wetlands.
The draft document, which directs agencies on how to treat climate change when reviewing projects under the National Environmental Policy Act, could show that things like solar arrays and transmission lines are more beneficial than protecting trees or marshes because of their potential for large-scale carbon reductions.
That’s because the guidance includes for the first time a monetary test to measure the costs and benefits of a project. And it’s weighted toward lowering emissions, due in part to the Biden administration’s soaring damage estimates from carbon dioxide.
…
The NEPA guidance, released earlier this month, stressed that agencies must consider indirect and cumulative greenhouse gas emissions associated with a proposed project, not only on-site emissions. Add that to an updated social cost metric, and the premium associated with avoiding greenhouse gases could be astronomical.
In contrast to the previous NEPA guidance on greenhouse gases finalized in 2016, it gives agencies very little wiggle room to claim that a project’s aggregate contribution to climate change can’t be estimated. In the “rare instance” that tools and methodologies aren’t available to allow a permitting agency to quantify all the direct, indirect and cumulative greenhouse gas consequences, the guidance states, the agency should offer a range of values instead.
Once the greenhouse gases are known, it states, monetizing them using the social cost figures should be a “simple and straightforward calculation.”
That prompts some experts to wonder whether this step toward cost-benefit analysis as a feature of NEPA review might cause other priorities like forest preservation, waterways or biodiversity to suffer by comparison — and perhaps to be sacrificed for projects that promise large climate gains.
Court decision in Glenwood Springs Citizens’ Alliance v. U. S. Department of the Interior (D. Colo.)
On November 8, the district court denied a motion to dismiss the case by the Federal Defendants, allowing it to proceed with a claim that the BLM unreasonably delayed taking action to address unauthorized removal of limestone, in violation of a 1982 plan of operations, for a quarry on federal lands. The opinion is here.
On November 23, plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the Twisp Restoration Project on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. The complaint alleges failure to give adequate notice for public participation after changes were made following the 2021 Cedar Creek Fire. Among other issues, the complaint challenges the use of “condition-based management, which “makes it impossible for the public to adequately determine what trees will be cut, where, or in what amounts.” The lawsuit also states that there is scientific controversy over the use of thinning to manage wildfire risk, and that the Forest Service has been using the North Central Washington Forest Health Collaborative as an advisory committee in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Los Padres ForestWatch filed a lawsuit against the Los Padres National Forest for not releasing public records about the Ecological Restoration Project—a fire mitigation proposal that will impact roughly 235,495 acres of land – in a timely manner. They submitted a Freedom of Information Act request during the 30-day comment period in July. After a second request in November, they received a response confirming there are 3,726 pages of documents, but did not provide them. Normally compliance with FOIA requests must occur within 20 days, but plaintiffs allege that this lack of responsiveness is typical.
The November 19 update discussed actions by the State of Arizona to place shipping containers on federal land along the border with Mexico and to sue the United States. On December 14, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a Notice of Intent to Sue the state for violating the Clean Water Act, and the U. S. Justice Department filed a complaint in USA v. Ducey (D. Ariz.) accusing the state of trespassing on federal land. On December 20, the State of Arizona filed documents in court agreeing to cease installing the containers in the Coronado National Forest, and to remove the containers already installed, in consultation with the Forest Service, to settle the case.
On December 16, WildEarth Guardians filed a notice of intent to sue the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service regarding the effects of over-snow vehicle use on the Sierra Nevada red fox on the Stanislaus and Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forests. The species was listed as endangered in 2021, after OSV designations were made by these forests, and ESA consultation on the red fox has not occurred. The press release includes a link to the notice.
Court decision in Wild Virginia v. Council on Environmental Quality (4th Cir.)
This is the challenge to the Trump Administration’s 2020 changes in the regulations governing how federal agencies conduct reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. On December 22, the circuit court affirmed the district court decision that the district court did not have jurisdiction to decide this case. The Biden Administration has since adopted the 2022 version of the CEQ regulations, which mooted plaintiffs’ case regarding some issues by returning to pre-2020 requirements for direct, indirect, and cumulative effects, and reasonable alternatives. Remaining issues may be addressed by additional pending changes by CEQ. The court rejected jurisdiction primarily because those issues are not ripe for review or plaintiffs lack standing since harm depends on future actions by other parties. This case was discussed earlier here.
Settlement and withdrawal in Wildlands Defense v. Brummett (D. Idaho)
On December 30, the Boise National Forest withdrew the Sage Hen Integrated Project, which covered 67,800 acres of land over a 20-year period, and explicitly used a “’condition based management’ scheme left over from the Trump administration that has been rejected by courts.” There were also endangered species issues. The withdrawal was required by a settlement of the litigation on October 19. That litigation was discussed here, where we speculated about the outcome (and now we can speculate about the Forest Service’s reasons for withdrawing it). The article includes a link to the withdrawal letter.
On December 29, the Pacific Northwest Regional Forester withdrew the Flat Country Project on the Willamette National Forest. This was not the result of a lawsuit, but rather of the Biden Administration’s directive to conserve old and mature forest. The Forest Service indicated that the parts of the project most groups agree on will move forward, while other parts, such as the logging of the older trees, could be dropped.
Court decision in Rocky Mountain Wild v. U. S. Forest Service (10th Cir.)
On December 30, the circuit court upheld the district court’s finding that the Forest Service conducted a reasonable search for records associated with the Village of Wolf Creek Access Project on the Rio Grande National Forest. The request was filed in 2018 and yielded over 140,000 pages in 14,740 documents, and plaintiffs had challenged the file-searching process. The court allowed the Forest Service to choose the search terms it used. It also allowed the Forest Service to “claw back” two documents it released by mistake. The article has a link to the court opinion. The plaintiffs had recently won their lawsuit against the Forest Service on the merits, as discussed here.
New lawsuit: Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Kaiser (D. Mont.)
On January 6, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council filed suit against the Black Ram Project on the Kootenai National Forest. Plaintiffs argue that the project will destroy grizzly bear habitat for the declining Cabinet-Yaak population with logging, prescribed burning and road building, in violation of the Endangered Species Act. The project includes 579 acres of “intermediate harvest” in designated old growth forest. The complaint includes a claim that the project fails to demonstrate it would comply with a forest plan standard for road density. The article includes this link to the complaint. Plaintiffs provide their views here.
On January 9, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent to sue the Bureau of Land Management over cattle observed grazing in the recently designated critical habitat for this newly listed endangered species in Nevada. The article includes a link to the notice.
The same area is the site of a possible lithium mine (we have discussed prior litigation here), and the BLM cited the mining company for trespassing on the critical habitat five days after the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $700 million conditional loan to the mining company. The DOE said the loan was contingent on, among other things, the completion of an environmental impact statement.
On January 9, the San Francisco-based Burning Man Project and four co-plaintiffs (Friends of Nevada Wilderness, Friends of Black Rock/High Rock Inc. and two local residents) filed a lawsuit in federal court in Reno accusing the Bureau of Land Management of violating NEPA in approving Ormat Nevada Inc.’s exploratory drilling within the Black Rock National Conservation Area, home to the annual Burning Man Festival. The lawsuit said Ormat has attempted to evade analysis of the geothermal power plants’ potential negative effects on the environment by segmenting the project, which limits BLM’s review to only the exploration stage of its plans. The proposed wells would be adjacent to a number of unique hot springs that are ecologically important and are relied upon by the local community for tourism.
