USDA to Create Plan to Expand Recreation Economies and Help People Thrive Across Rural America

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Press release — from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture:

I live in one of the “gateway communities.” IMHO, we don’t need a plan or a toolkit, we need the USFS to aggressively address the recreation facility and road maintenance backlog and expand/add rec facilities to meet demand that has increased dramatically in recent decades.

 

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19, 2023 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced that it will create a plan to expand recreation economies to help people thrive across rural America.

Through a Memorandum of Understanding, Rural Development, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and the US Forest Service will partner to develop an annual plan to expand economic opportunities related to recreation in communities surrounding America’s national forests.

The annual plan will outline the ways the agencies will partner to conduct program outreach, host informational sessions and workshops, and develop toolkits to help people access the resources they need to thrive in recreation economies. The agencies will also:

  • Provide technical and planning assistance to help local, state and Tribal leaders develop regional economic development plans that advance recreation economies.
  • Provide funding under Rural Development and National Institute of Food and Agriculture programs to help US Forest Service gateway communities expand resilient recreation infrastructure and business development projects that create jobs.
  • Develop and maintain strategic partnerships, and more.

Today’s announcement supports the Biden-Harris Administration’s interagency effort, known as the Federal Interagency Council on Outdoor Recreation

, to create safe, affordable and equitable opportunities for Americans to get outdoors.

For more information, visit: https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/USDA-Interagency-Outdoor-Recreation-Economy-Memorandum-of-Understanding.pdf.

To subscribe to USDA Rural Development updates, visit GovDelivery subscriber page

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Do Private Foundations or Government Science Agencies Provide the Most Unbiased Research? Re: DellaSala Op-ed and Wildfire Funding

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I’m returning to this claim in the recent DellaSala op-ed in the New Mexican.

come with a fresh pair of problem-solving eyes, free of government research dollars that can otherwise obscure such fact-finding expeditions.

This accusation is kind of a drive-by remark, and probably quite frustrating to some of our wildfire scientist colleagues. Let’s think about DellaSala’s claim for a minute. If government research dollars are “obscuring”, maybe New Mexico should see if it can remove the Los Alamos facility and all those DOE dollars. Perhaps behind this claim is that it’s only some research dollars that are tainted.. perhaps FS but not NIFA, or NIFA but not NSF, or USGS or whatever?

The claim is not without some potential validity. Certainly scientific communities have their own views about topics and approaches. In my years in the science biz, I have seen a great many research fads come and go, sometimes leaving little of practical value in their wake. We do criticize some of those topics and approaches here at TSW, as well as advocate for ground-truthing and practitioner review.

But let’s look deeper at that claim. Scientists will choose topics to study that are likely to be funded. OK, that seems true. Then perhaps they will choose their approaches and findings to somehow fit to what .. NIFA panels or NSF or JFSP panels want to hear? That seems a larger stretch, and finally, to imply that they would change their findings is a slur against their integrity.

I looked at DellaSala’s funding for this paper and it turns out to be:

We thank the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the Weeden Foundation, and the Wilburforce Foundation for project funding; however, the views herein are strictly those of the authors.

And this paper funded by Pew (it’s about roadless, and we all know where Pew is/was on roadless).

It seems to me that if we were to have contest on “whose funding is specifically pointed toward policy outcomes”, NGOs with clearly declared policy goals would be the winners over… the Forest Service, NIFA, USGS, NSF and so on.

For example, Wilburforce Foundation funds:

Actionable research in support of Wilburforce Foundation’s place-based conservation programs
We fund emerging opportunities to address knowledge gaps in conservation science and enhancing biodiversity and ecological resilience in the face of climate change within our regions, with a focus on the synthesis and analysis of existing data where possible.

Probably one of the most applied programs is Joint Fire Science. Here’s a link to their ongoing research. The ongoing projects look more nuts and bolts than policy oriented to me.

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Another interesting paper I ran across in exploring this is one by DellaSalla, Ruediger, and Chad Hanson where they call into question The Nature Conservancy’s fire science, and state that

We present primarily 4 case studies where TNC fire science is called into question and its “members only” collaboratives are a major obstacle for conservation groups seeking protection for and improved management of the under-appreciated biodiversity benefits of mixed-severity wildfires.

As TNC reconstitutes its leadership (Sally Jewell, former Secretary of the Interior, is now interim CEO), by documenting the problems with its fire science and policy herein, we offer this critique as an opportunity to address escalating problems with local NGOs over its questionable and ecologically damaging fire approaches. Before we address the regional case studies, we provide the following broader based conservation issues that have contributed to a rift in the NGO community with TNC.
TNC lacks a science-based global protection area target and seldom advocates publicly for US protected areas on federal lands –

With all due respect to the authors, I doubt that there is/can be a “science-based” global “protection area” target.

Anyway, here are their recommendations to TNC:

To close the growing divide between TNC and conservation groups/scientists, TNC should:
§ Provide transparency and accountability in disclosing funding sources and include a more inclusive approach to collaboratives that represents local and regional conservation interests and not mainly extractive and agency interests.
§ Provide evidence-based comprehensive literature reviews to ensure that not just the science TNC uses to support collaboratives but the full breadth of science (including those that contradict TNC assumptions) is presented and uncertainties/limitations/impacts of proposed management aptly addressed and minimized.
§ Field-validate predictive fire models and use empirical evidence before widely applying questionable models at project and regional scales.
§ Purge the good vs bad fire messaging and concentrate more on the ecological benefits of wildfires, including high-severity burn patches (large and small) characteristic of low and mixed-severity fire systems.
§ Work with diverse members of the conservation community to coordinate policy and conservation priorities.
§ Correct the record when politicians or the media use TNC science to usher in sweeping changes to forest-fire policies inconsistent with biodiversity conservation.
§ Include or endorse fully representative and large inviolate protected area networks on federal lands with bolder conservation goals (e.g., see Noss et al. 2012, Nature Needs
Half), maintain connectivity among reserves, protect imperiled species/habitat from logging, protect all remaining primary (unlogged) forests and roadless areas from
logging, protect complex early seral forest habitat from logging, and reduce anthropogenic stressors in fire-adapted forests (see DellaSala et al. 2017 for approaches).
§ Assess and fully disclose life cycle analysis associated with TNC proposed thinning and burning and abandon all efforts to convert burned forests into biomass energy.

I think it would be good if all ENGOS provided transparency and accountability in disclosing funding sources. Otherwise, this letter sounds like “we’ll like you better if you do what we want.” 🙂

Storymap of 2020 Wildfires, Willamette NF

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Here’s an informative Storymap about the road system in the areas burned by wildfires (176,000+ acres) on the Willamette National Forest in 2020. It explains the damage and dangers from falling trees and looks at the recovery and rehabilitation of roads.

One page in the Storymap has links to photos at various points in the burned area, such as this one:

https://services1.arcgis.com/gGHDlz6USftL5Pau/arcgis/rest/services/PhotoPointMonitoring_View/FeatureServer/0/4/attachments/15

Thanks to Mike Archer for the link in his free WIldfire News of the Day email today.

Cattle Free by ’93- A Thirty-Year Retrospective and Discussion

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BLM photo

Thanks to John Persell, in his comments on Les Joslin’s multiple use post,  for reminding me that this has been on my list.   Rebecca Watson’s comment today on sustainable mining also reminds me of the two common dichotomies (or threads or ??) in our work. 1. Don’t do it (or not on some lands) and/or 2. Improve the practices.

Anyway, I thought a good kickoff to the discussion would be an undergraduate honors thesis from 2019here by Cloe Dickson. I tried to contact the author prior to publishing this, but was unsuccessful. There’s much good stuff in this 77 pages and I only excerpted a few bits below. She begins:

Three distinct questions will guide my study of the public lands ranching issue:

(1) What were the motivations of ‘Cattle-free by ‘93’?
(2) What were the direct and indirect outcomes?
(3) What does the formation of the ‘Cattle-free by ‘93’ movement tell us about the nature of rancher/environmentalist conflict?

She traces the relationship in the Sierra Club between zero-cut (remember that?) and zero-cud policies. She also tracks the extremism of no-cud and Cattle-free to being an impetus for efforts at collaboration between ranchers and environmentalists like the Malpais Borderlands Group and the Quivira Coalition. Her view is that the dialogue has shifted.

Cattle-free by ‘93’ has evolved significantly in the last 25 years. Widespread exurban development on and near western rangelands has dramatically changed the way in which people view the public lands ranching debate. The fear of habitat fragmentation from the environmental community, coupled with the desire to continue the western ranching tradition in the face of the ranchette and dude ranch phenomena, may prove to be an area of compromise between the once divided respective camps. In formal and informal arenas, the ‘Cows Not Condos’ campaigns marks a significant shift away from the cattle-free mindset that once dominated the western range.

I thought these arguments about social justice were interesting..

When viewed in an environmental justice frame, the public lands ranching issue becomes much more complex. Atencio argued that, “this is more than a ‘cows versus condos’ argument. And it is more than an argument of cows versus the loss of mere lifestyle or profession choice. It is an argument of a unique culture and communities that have endured in this region for 400 years. It is an argument of environmental justice” ( 2004, p. 23). It is not just about removing ranchers from public lands; the ‘Cattle-free by ‘93’ campaign directly interferes with many components of the culture of the rural American West. Atencio argued that viewing cattle ranching as a profit-motivated industry forces environmentalists to think that the only way to stop the damage done to rangelands is to outright remove all livestock. He warned that the “…the danger of straight and narrow economic thinking is that it fails to take into account the less quantifiable, though no less important, issues of social well-being and cultural vitality” (Attencio2004, p. 23). Atencio’s claims prove valuable in understanding the responses generated by ‘Cattle-free by ‘93’ and how broader anti-ranching rhetoric was received in the 21st century.

If you are a fan, as I am, of Justin Farrell’s book “The Battle for Yellowstone”, that might resonate with some of his observations that in the debates around Yellowstone, issues that are actually values and culture-based are treated as if they were really scientific and economic. Which gives folks much funding to generate more info, but does not address peoples’ real differences. As we used to say in planning, sometimes you need more analysis, but sometimes you just need more dialogue. Which may be why local collaboratives are more successful at finding middle ground.

Another topic Dickson discusses is why the Clinton Admin backed off their original Range Reform package. Seems like they lost the fire in their belly, they didn’t have the votes and or ????

I know many TSW readers were involved in all this. I’d be interested, as I’m sure future students will be, on your perspective on all this history.

And are the strategies of “just say no” and “fix the practices” in some sense complementary? Does emotional intensity developed in a “make those pesky ranchers go away” campaign get transferred in political capital that can be used to improve practices? Not sure that it has worked that way for “no-cut”.

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Final historical question:

In the paper..

Preservation, or the notion that wilderness must be put aside for its own sake, has long been a source of division within the natural resource management community. When Congress passed the Forest Management Act of 1897, forest reserves were opened up to logging, as well as mining and livestock grazing (Wuerthner 2002). While conservationists like Gifford Pinchot was a proponent of this move, John Muir on the other hand remained adamant that livestock grazing threatened watersheds and wildlife, as well as negatively impacting the ecology of the overall forest ecosystem (Wuerthner 2002).

I was under the impression that grazers and loggers, in different places, had been there first. For example in this history of the SW Region of the Forest Service

By the time the first forest reserves were proclaimed in 1891, the free use of public lands by cattlemen and sheepmen had become a way of life. They knew nothing of grazing capacity and there was no fund of technical knowledge about forage management to rely on. Overgrazing could not readily be recognized until in an advanced stage. Thus, when the Forest Service came into being February 1, 1905, the most complex problems facing southwestern foresters related to grazing rights and range management. Instructions to foresters in the Use Book regarding grazing responsibilities were very simple: “Inform yourself as to what sheep and cattle men graze their stock upon your district, the number he actually owns, and whether or not he confines himself to the range described in his permit.” [12]

What was actually going on on the land before the federal reserves were established? Does this vary by area?

A National Forest and the clean-energy revolution

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This January 2022 article in The Atlantic was recently mentioned in an email from the magazine to subscribers. A quandary: the shift from fossil fuels to cleaner fuels — and electric cars — requires metals such as cobalt, and thus mining.

Excerpt:

The Salmon-Challis sits atop what is known as the Idaho Cobalt Belt, a 34-mile-long geological formation of sedimentary rock that contains some of the largest cobalt deposits in the country. As the global market for lithium-ion batteries has grown—and the price of cobalt along with it—so has commercial interest in the belt. At least six mining companies have applied for permits from the U.S. Forest Service to operate in the region. Most of these companies are in the early stages of exploration; one has started to build a mine. In Idaho, as in much of the world, the clean-energy revolution is reshaping the geography of resource extraction.

…

Johnson’s group, which has fought for decades to protect the state’s forests and streams from mine pollution, is watching the new and proposed cobalt mines closely, evaluating them on a case-by-case basis. “Do we have a moral obligation to mine cobalt here in the U.S.?” asks Idaho Conservation League Executive Director Justin Hayes. He suggests that the answer is yes: He’s well aware of the human-rights abuses documented in the Congo, and of the need to secure a reliable supply of cobalt in order to reduce the threat of climate change. Still, he emphasizes that “sustainable mining,” a term used often by industry insiders, is a misnomer; the best anyone can hope for is “environmentally responsible mining.”

 

USDA Legal Review Supporting Co-Stewardship with Tribes

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When Joint Secretarial Order 3403 on Fulfilling the Trust Responsibility to Indian Tribes in the Stewardship of Federal Lands and Waters was signed, both DOI and USDA were required to provide a legal review of their “current land, water and wildlife treaty responsibilities and authorities that can support co-stewardship and Tribal Stewardship.  Here is a link to the USDA response.

The Forest Service section starts on page 8. There are many opportunities related to “working on projects together.”

As to planning..

Forest Service Planning Rule
The National Forest Management Act requires the Forest Service to promulgate a land management planning rule and to develop land management plans for all national forests and grasslands.40 Land management planning provides an early opportunity for Tribes to engage in developing co-stewardship proposals for management of national forests and grasslands and to incorporate tribal knowledge, and the Forest Service’s Planning Rule guides revisions to Forest
Service land management plans. The most recent version of the planning rule was promulgated in 2012.41

The 2012 Planning Rule requires the Forest Service to:
• “[a]s part of tribal participation and consultation . . . request information about native knowledge, land ethics, cultural issues, and sacred and culturally significant sites.”42;
• “coordinate land management planning with the equivalent and related planning efforts of federally recognized Indian Tribes [and] Alaska Native Corporations”43;
• “review the planning and land use policies of federally recognized Indian Tribes . . . ,Alaska Native Corporations [and] include consideration of . . . compatibility and interrelated impacts of these plans and policies . . . opportunities for the plan to address the impacts identified or to contribute to joint objectives; and . . . opportunities to resolve or reduce conflicts”44; and
• “include plan components, including standards or guidelines, to provide for: … (ii) Protection of cultural and historic resources. (iii) Management of areas of tribal importance.

How is Open Access to Articles By University Scholars Working?

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An example of how this works  is the below excerpt from the Oregon State University website.  For those of you who don’t know about it, it is pretty cool.  However, I can’t always find these via Google Scholar, which is where I tend to find Forest Service open access papers.  Maybe there’s a better approach. What have been your experiences? Many universities have open-access policies but how well are they working?

At the end of the day, I’ve been pretty successful asking authors for e-reprints, but certainly access via Google Scholar would be more efficient for me and the researchers.

 

2. How does Open Access benefit faculty?

Open Access increases the visibility and impact of faculty scholarship. Studies show that articles available through Open Access are cited more often than those available only through subscription. Increased visibility and use of Open Access articles increases impact, as demonstrated by increased citations. See also: a summary of open access citation advantage studies.

As a land-, sea-, space-, and sun grant institution, the people who will ultimately use some of our research aren’t other scientists. They are practitioners and decision-makers, or in some cases school teachers and students. Impacts of especially practitioner-based scholarship may be better measured by the number of times these works are downloaded than by citation studies. ScholarsArchive@OSU provides download statistics for every item and collection of items in the repository. Some Faculty articles deposited to ScholarsArchive@OSU have been downloaded more than 1000 times.

Articles available open access in ScholarsArchive@OSU are preserved, cataloged, indexed and collocated, bringing together all of an individual faculty’s scholarship, an academic unit’s scholarship, and the institution’s scholarship. Oregon State University will provide persistent storage of and access to a digital copy of your work, ensuring that it will continue to be available to readers. Each article has a persistent URL and metadata pertaining to the article DOI. The web page at Oregon State University that this URL points to includes a link and citation information for the original article on the publisher’s web site as well as an archival copy in the OSU repository that is accessible to those who do not have subscription access to the published version.

Federal agency Open Access mandates are becoming more common, and pending federal legislation would vastly increase the numbers of funded research works for which open access will be a requirement. A license given to OSU will allow the university to make the process of fulfilling these mandates much easier for individual authors.

(Partly from the Benefits to Open Access at Duke University)

3. How does Open Access benefit citizens?

A key element of the land grant mission is public access. Taxpayers fund universities and faculty to do research. Open Access allows the fruits of that research to be read and used by taxpayers, decision-makers, teachers and students. OSU’s Extension and Experiment Station recognizes the importance of making OSU research available to the public by making every one of their publications available Open Access. Open Access also makes knowledge available to people in the developing world, not just to those colleagues and students who belong to institutions that can afford subscriptions to the journal literature.

TSW Website Design Feedback Requested

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As you may have noticed, originally I was looking at getting donations of $3K to improve the design of The Smokey Wire.  Well, that’s been going on for some years, and meanwhile upkeep has eaten into some of the funds collected. However, having reached that goal, there is still some funding left for making design changes or fixes.

So.. what changes would you like to see?  Please mention device, browser or if you are reading within the WordPress app when you run into problems or suboptimalities.  I can figure out how many we agree on, and how many we could fund.  Do you use the search function? How is that working?

Explaining Multiple Use

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Cattle graze on Buckeye Meadow allotment.

 

Among the many challenges of my 1960s seasonal Toiyabe National Forest fire prevention guard job was explaining multiple use management practices to citizen-owners of the National Forest System.

One afternoon in Buckeye Canyon, for example, I met a family of four backpackers returning from a several-day trek into the Hoover Wilderness high country. They’d had a great time, the prosperous-looking head of the family told me, but he wanted to talk about cattle. The round tin cup hanging from each family member’s belt gave me more than a hint of his opinion on the subject.

“Why are all these cattle here?” the man demanded to know, waving his arm toward Big Meadows, well outside the wilderness boundary.

“This is a national forest grazing allotment,” I answered. “The rancher who owns those cattle holds a grazing permit and pays a fee to graze them here.”

“They’re ruining the country,” he countered. “They shouldn’t be here. Why are they allowed to be here?”

I didn’t get far with my explanation of the multiple-use concept under which our district range conservationist labored to manage cattle and sheep grazing allotments in a way that would maintain the quality of the forage resource as well as the integrity of the watershed, wildlife, and recreation resources. He didn’t care that some ranchers depended on national forest range to stay in business. He just wanted those cattle out of there, pronto! And, although there were no active timber sales on the district, he wanted national forest timber cutting stopped, too. Basically, he wanted national forests to be national parks.

So I took a different tack. After assuring him I shared his concerns for proper public land management, I used the next few minutes of our conversation to find out more about him. I soon knew this gent was a corporate executive who lived the good life in Palo Alto. He and his family resided in a rambling redwood house and dined on steaks at fashionable restaurants college students such as I certainly couldn’t afford.

“You know,” I suggested, “the resources that make the way you and millions of other Americans live possible have to some from somewhere.”

“Look, I see what you’re driving at,” he responded. “But they don’t have to come from places that should be wilderness areas.”

“Places like California’s redwood coast? Places like public rangelands?”

“Exactly….” Just for an instant, his eyes showed he had made the connection, he had recognized the conflict between his affluent lifestyle and his environmental convictions. But only for an instant. He wasn’t ready to accept—or concede to me—the fact that he couldn’t have it both ways forever.

“The Forest Service should get those cows out of here!” were his last words to me. But he sounded more thoughtful, less arrogant, less certain.

 

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.

Tribal Co-Management Between the Karuk Tribe and the USFS

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This article from the American Bar Association has this section: Tribal Co-Management Between the Karuk Tribe and the U.S. Forest Service in the Klamath National Forest (thanks to Nick Smith for the link).

Excerpt:

A short-lived co-management arrangement between the Karuk Tribe and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in the Klamath National Forest illustrates both the potential possibilities and challenges of co-management arrangements between tribes and the USFS in National Forests. The “Ti Bar Demonstration Project” was a co-management arrangement between the Karuk Tribe and the USFS relating to management of “cultural areas” within the Klamath National Forest in the latter half of the 1990s. This arrangement aimed to demonstrate culturally appropriate management techniques and “develop effective processes to jointly undertake projects.”

Karuk tribal land managers served as project co-leads and were empowered to propose restoration treatments for this area within the National Forest. Notably, the USFS appointed a tribal member to the interdisciplinary team that was developing a new Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP) for the Klamath National Forest. This allowed the Karuk Tribe to successfully lobby the USFS to “address several cultural resource management concerns,” and include within the LRMP a land use designation for Cultural Management Areas that included a memorandum of understanding between the USFS and the Karuk Tribe to support management activities that are “consistent with [the tribe’s] custom and culture.” Tribal inclusion on the interdisciplinary team enabled “agency managers to work with tribal managers as a new kind of expert,” and was the main method through which the Karuk Tribe participated in the formal decision-making process. This allowed Karuk tribal members to take on an authoritative position in implementing their own chosen restoration projects, such as a novel “eco-cultural” restoration strategy that included prescribe burns.

Unfortunately, after the first management treatments under the Ti Bar Demonstration were initiated, USFS leadership changed, and the new forest supervisor was not supportive of this arrangement. The planned restoration was canceled, and the interdisciplinary team including both USFS and Karuk Tribal members fell apart. Nonetheless, the Ti Bar Demonstration project represents the first time the USFS formally recognized the rights of tribal managers to manage cultural resources within federal forests.