The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views

After fires in 2020 and 2021, the Forest Service’s California region bit off more than it could chew when it proposed to log “hazard” (sic) trees along 5,800 miles of forest roads. Now the regional office has asked the Chief for an emergency exemption from NEPA review for 167 miles of its roadside logging. Why? “Because “project planning and Endangered Species Act (ESA) consultation is taking longer than anticipated.” The Chief granted the exemption yesterday.

Who could have known that the Forest Service’s largest logging project in its history might take “longer than anticipated?”

PS: The FS claims these fire-affected trees are “hazardous” because “within the last 10 years, the Forest Service has documented 69 claims against the government of property damage, 11 injuries, and four fatalities in the western regions associated with falling trees/limbs.” There’s no evidence that these damage claims are associated with fire-affected or dead trees. Most tree-related injuries result from live, green trees falling. That’s because most trees that fall are live and green when they keel over.

An essay from The Conversation, “A case for retreat in the age of fire.”

“It has been nearly four years since the Camp Fire, but the population of Paradise is now less than 30% of what it once was. This makes Paradise one of the first documented cases of voluntary retreat in the face of wildfire risk. And while the notion of wildfire retreat is controversial, politically fraught and not yet endorsed by the general public, as experts in urban planning and environmental design, we believe the necessity for retreat will become increasingly unavoidable.”

MEDFORD, OREGON—Today, conservation organizations WildEarth Guardians and Oregon Wild filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s misuse of an agency regulation to evade its obligation to analyze and disclose the environmental impacts of three projects on the Fremont-Winema National Forest in southcentral Oregon. The organizations allege the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it failed to analyze the impacts of commercial thinning across thousands of acres of national forest as part of the South Warner, Bear Wallow, and Baby Bear logging projects. The organizations are represented by Crag Law Center.

To duck its obligation to analyze the impacts of the projects’ extensive commercial logging, the Forest Service relied on a categorical exclusion—an agency regulation exempting certain projects from the usual NEPA public disclosure and appeal requirements. CEs are reserved for small, low-impact, routine activities like replacing a culvert or rebuilding a section of trail. Here, the Forest Service relied on CE-6, a categorical exclusion for “timber stand and wildlife habitat improvement” activities, such as thinning or brush control to improve growth or to reduce fire hazard, and prescribed burning. Though the agency adopted CE-6 in 1992, until 2018 it had never used the categorical exclusion to bypass environmental analyses for projects that included commercial logging.

“The Forest Service is misleading the public as to what these projects entail. Commercial thinning is logging—trees with marketable value are cut and removed from the forest to be sold on the market—which requires heavy equipment and roads that can disturb soils, cause erosion into streams, destroy or degrade habitat, and release stored carbon,” said Chris Krupp of WildEarth Guardians. “Over the past few years the Forest Service has taken to re-labeling logging projects as timber stand or habitat improvement projects with a commercial thinning component, in order to avoid having to analyze, and inform the public about, the impacts of public lands logging that the law requires.”

The three projects being challenged indicate the agency’s intention to increasingly rely on CE-6, regardless of the scale and scope of commercial thinning employed. The South Warner project authorizes 16,000 acres of commercial thinning (25 square miles), Bear Wallow 10,000 acres (15+ square miles), and Baby Bear 3,000 acres (4+ square miles).

”Logging our National Forests has complex effects on the environment, and should be carefully planned. For 50 years Congress has required federal agencies to disclose environmental impacts and involve the public in decision-making that affects the environment. The Forest Service cannot unilaterally carve out a giant loophole to avoid this important public process.” said Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild.

The lawsuit further alleges the Forest Service has never determined that commercial thinning—much less commercial thinning of the scale and scope authorized by the three projects here—does not cause significant environmental impacts. Such a determination is necessary if projects that include commercial thinning are to be categorically excluded from NEPA’s mandate to disclose the environmental impacts of an agency proposal through either an assessment or more comprehensive impact statement.

“Categorical exclusions basically represent a bargain between the Forest Service and the public,” said Oliver Stiefel of Crag Law Center. “Before adopting a new CE, the Forest Service must prove that the environmental impacts of a set of activities will be insignificant. In exchange, when the Forest Service later proposes a project that fits within the CE, it may dispense with the detailed analysis and disclosure of environmental impacts otherwise required. The Forest Service here hasn’t lived up to its end of the bargain—relying on a CE for 29,000 acres of logging is unprecedented.”

A copy of the complaint is available here: https://pdf.wildearthguardians.org/support_docs/CE6-Oregon-Complaint.pdf

Excerpts from “Why have all the trees been dying?” in a Lake Tahoe area paper [emphasis added]. I think this mortality will spread north in to the Cascades in Oregon and Washington.

Jonathan Cook-Fisher, District Ranger for the Tahoe National Forest in Truckee said, “It is happening from the west shore to the north. The fir trees are the first to go. There are some beetles, but the primary driver appears to be overstocked forest stands with drought conditions.”

…

Overstocked forests didn’t just happen in the last few years. It has been a growing (sorry couldn’t resist) problem for the past 100 years. Sierra Nevada forests (and forests throughout the west) have adapted to regular fires that were spurred by lightning storms. Trees adapted by growing rapidly and close together in an attempt to “out-grow” the fires. The lightning caused fires stayed low to the ground, burned out the brush and those swiftly growing young firs before the stands could get too thick, leaving a forest of primarily mature, bigger trees spread out around the forest. Fewer, large trees were better able to fend off pests and drought. 

…

In a scientific study in the Journal of Ecological Applications [2021] on the impact of tree mortality on wildfire severity entitled “Recent bark beetle outbreaks influence wildfire severity in mixed-confer forests of the Sierra Nevada,” Rebecca Wayman and Hugh Safford found: 

“Our analyses identified prefire tree mortality as influential on all measures of wildfire severity… All measures of fire severity increased as prefire mortality increased…Managers of historically frequent-fire forests will benefit from utilizing this information when prioritizing fuels reduction treatments in areas of recent tree mortality, as it is the first empirical study to document a relationship between prefire mortality and subsequent wildfire severity in these systems.”

Report: Federal logging projects put 10 climate-saving forests on chopping block

Trees in Kootenai National Forest included on list of 10 threatened forests that help fight climate change

MISSOULA, MONTANA—Federal agencies are targeting mature and old-growth forests for logging despite these trees’ extraordinary ability to curb climate change and President Biden’s directive to preserve them, according to a new report spotlighting the 10 worst logging projects in federal forests across the country.

In the report released today, Worth More Standing, the Climate Forests coalition details federal logging proposals targeting nearly a quarter of a million acres of old-growth and mature forests overseen by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The report outlines “a pervasive pattern of federal forest mismanagement that routinely sidesteps science to turn carbon-storing giants into lumber” and calls on the Biden administration to pass a permanent rule to protect these big old trees.

“The best way to protect these carbon-storing giants is to let them grow, but our federal agencies keep turning them into lumber,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Biden administration can help curb climate change by permanently protecting mature and old growth trees. It takes centuries to make up for the carbon lost when these trees are chopped down and we don’t have that kind of time.”

The threatened forests are in Montana, North Carolina, Vermont, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Wyoming, Arizona, California, and Oregon.

In northwest Montana, the U.S. Forest Service’s Black Ram project will allow nearly 4,000 acres of the Kootenai National Forest to be commercially logged, including clearcutting more than 1,700 acres and logging hundreds of acres of centuries-old trees. These rare, old forests are champions of carbon storage, which reduces harms from climate change. Conservation groups sued to challenge the logging and road building project on June 30, 2022.

“The U.S. Forest Service is racing to eradicate ancient primary forests on our public lands in direct opposition to President Biden’s proclamation to protect old and mature forests as an effective means of battling climate change” said Rick Bass, chair of the Yaak Valley Forest Council. “Primary old forests in the proposed Black Ram project on the Kootenai National Forest can store up to 1,900 metric tons of biomass per hectare. The Forest Service is committing climate treason in broad daylight, racing to cut the last old forests in the backcountry—logging in the wet swamps, the one place fire doesn’t go. It’s climate madness disguised as greed.”

“This report demonstrates that logging remains a critical threat to mature and old-growth forests,” said Adam Rissien, ReWilding Manager with WildEarth Guardians. “The urgent need for meaningful protections could not be more evident and until then we will continue to challenge the Forest Service when the agency seeks to decimate habitat important for imperiled species such as grizzly bears and Canada lynx.”

Mature and old-growth forests hold enormous amounts of carbon. Preserving old-growth and mature forests is a meaningful, cost-effective measure the Biden administration can take immediately to mitigate climate change. Biden issued an Earth Day executive order directing an inventory of old forests and policies to protect them.

“Without a federal rule in place to restrict logging of these critical forest tracts, these mature and old-growth trees could be lost, along with the opportunity to make significant progress toward addressing climate change,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, Senior Legislative Representative at Earthjustice.

Also today, more than 125 groups sent a letter to the U.S. Agriculture and Interior departments requesting an immediate start to a rulemaking process to ensure permanent protections for mature and old-growth trees and forests across federal lands, while allowing for necessary measures to reduce wildfire risk. Large, older trees are more resistant to wildfires and studies show logging them doesn’t reduce the risk of climate change-driven fires.

“This report highlights what we have—but also what we stand to lose,” said Alex Craven, senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club. “Our old and mature growths are a natural climate solution, and we must protect these trees if we wish to tackle the intersecting climate and biodiversity crises.”

Scientists have pointed to forest preservation as one of the most effective ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere. U.S. federal forests sequester 35 million metric tons of carbon annually, a number that could rise steadily with new conservation measures.

Protecting older forests also safeguards clean water, clean air, wildlife habitat, biodiversity and recreational opportunities.

The full report is available here: https://www.climate-forests.org/worth-more-standing