Having perused perhaps zillions of news stories since the inception of TSW, I would have a request of media folks for the betterment of understanding, dialogue, and all that. Please use the word “some”! As in “some” foresters think, “some” ecologists think and so on. I know that’s difficult because it raises the question “what do the other ones think?” I can safely say that in no group with which I’ve been affiliated, that means, my scientific discipline, my professional society, the Forest Service, and our retirees’ organizations… does everyone agree.. pretty much about anything. This thought was triggered by this article on the old “PB vs. mechanical treatments” discussion. This article tends to highlight the “scientists know best and they want PB” view.
Forest restoration versus wildfire mitigation
At its core, the debate between thinning and prescribed fire is one of purpose.
Thinning can achieve what it is intended to do, which is reduce wildfire risk, but it cannot be a replacement for fire and does not address forest restoration, said Bill Baker, an emeritus professor of ecology at the University of Wyoming who wrote the book “Fire Ecology in Rocky Mountain Landscapes.”
“If the goal is restoration, the problem mechanical thinning has is that we don’t have a very good understanding of what those forests really looked like, historically,” he said.
(some) Ecologists believe that mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forests evolved a particular organization called the “ICO structure.” ICO stands for individual, clumps and openings, meaning that forests evolved to have areas with gaps between individual trees, areas where trees of different sizes were clumped closely together and openings where there were no trees.
That structure represented a “healthy” forest.
But after European colonization and the drastic reshaping of the West’s forests, in part for timber production, ecologists and forest managers have little sense of what that looked like locally in Southwest Colorado’s forests.
Of course, there are differences about the whole concept of “forests” evolving. We know species evolve, but there are basically two schools of thought. 1. Species come together through space and time and evolve genetically as they perceive the environment. This could be called the Dynamic Species Assemblages point of view 2. There is a correct way of which species are there interacting, which I think either goes back to holism or some other philosophy, which would be interesting to discuss. Whatever it is, without a mechanism, it’s not science even if scientists talk about it, seemingly authoritatively.
I don’t know about the “drastic reshaping” of Colorado’s forests for timber production. Trees don’t grow very fast in most of Colorado; hence people cut them down at various times in the last 100 years (for mining or railroads or fuel) or so and they may not have had time to grow back to timber-ish size.
It touches upon the history of the land grants of New Mexico, as well as issues of how the Forest Service works with local people, and indeed the role of local people in managing federal forests.
In today’s fire zone, the descendants of the dispossessed are among the Forest Service’s sharpest critics. They are joined in their distress by villagers, small-scale farmers, loggers, foragers of traditional food and medicine, Indigenous peoples and acequia parciantes, caretakers of the age-old irrigation ditches now compromised by flames. The USFS has fallen short of its commitment to the land and those who live alongside it, they say.
As the conflagration whips through public and private lands – as of 6 June, burning nearly 500 sq miles – anger, frustration and grief define the tenor at public forums, in evacuation centers and on social media. Some locals say that, if given the chance, they would have practiced far more sustainable forest thinning in partnership with the USFS, thereby lessening the impacts of a catastrophic fire. Others criticize the way fire crews heavily relied on backburning, a fire-suppression tactic that involves starting smaller fires to deprive a larger wildfire of fuel.
And yet, is it also possible that some ENGO’s, perhaps with a mesic-against-corporate-logging mentality, were partially responsible for these policies (thinning is really logging in disguise, etc.) To what extent are these folks recolonized by the Coastal view of how forests “should be” managed? Does our current “policies based on litigation” system disenfranchise some voices?
The forests belong to the people, as San Miguel county commissioner Janice Varela puts it.
“We locals, we feel like, hell yes, it’s our forest,” says Varela, a longtime water activist. “Yeah, we let the forest service manage it and we let everybody in the world come here, but it’s our forest. We have ownership from our proximity to it, from our history and cultural connection to it, from our heart.”
If we feel sympathy with those folks, would we equally feel sympathy with folks from “red” counties in other States? Is it because of their party affiliation (we all know that R’s are Bundys-waiting-to-happen) or because of their historical claims? And of course, what historical claims do we think are valid, and on what basis? And how does this fit with the concept of “environmental justice”?
There are concerns about the use of backburning..
Back-burning, however, has caused the greatest enmity. To fight ferocious blazes, wildland firefighters are trained to set small back fires to burn grasses and other tinder, starving the larger blaze of fuel.
In Mora, back-burns were set without private property lines in mind, says Patrick Griego, the owner of a small logging business who stayed behind to protect his property. He saw several of his neighbors’ lands get back-burned and, determined to save his 400 acres (162 hectares) from a similar fate, cut an extensive fire line with his grader. The wildfire was still distant, he says. To his shock, wildland firefighters appeared one night and back-burned a swath of his property anyway. He recalls watching, seething and feeling helpless, as they set his land on fire. The flames shot 30 feet high in places. Forty acres (16 hectares) were gone in 15 minutes, he says.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say.” He calls the people who set the back-burn “arsonists”.
More history…
The ever-present past
Recovering from the fire will depend to a certain extent on extinguishing pain from the past. And the past can seem omnipresent in northern New Mexico.
Over the past 60 years, intense conflicts have erupted over how the USFS has managed the forests, limiting people’s ability to graze livestock, hunt for food and repair acequia headwaters. Some of the protests are still talked about.
In 1966, land-grant activists occupied part of the Carson national forest, declaring that the land had been appropriated; a year later, they carried out an infamous armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse, attempting to win the release of fellow activists.
Even a casual conversation in the fire zone can suddenly pivot to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which promised – and failed – to protect the rights of land-grantees and allow them to keep their commons.
Today, almost one-quarter of the Carson and Santa Fe national forests are made up of former land-grant commons. In other parts of the state – in a district of the Cibola national forest, for example – a staggering 60% is made up of these commons, research shows.
Pola Lopez sits by a hole where a ponderosa pine was burned to ash by the fires. Lopez says she is most brokenhearted by the loss of the old-growth ‘grandfather trees’. Photograph: Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico
The forest service has taken local needs into account, spokesperson Overton wrote in an email. For example, people with permits are allowed to cut firewood in designated areas, she notes. Many employees of the Santa Fe national forest are members of the community, she adds. “They grew up here, they have the same ties to community and cultural heritage as their neighbors.”
But today, this offers little comfort. Pola Lopez can still remember how her father, the late state senator Junio Lopez, made it his life’s mission to reunite the dispossessed with their land. He was unable to produce wide-scale change, however, and the purchase of the 157 acres (64 hectares) now blackened by the fire was a kind of consolation prize. That land, his daughter says, “became his sanctuary”.
In 2009, Pola had the property designated a conservation easement, to protect the forest from development for what she thought was perpetuity.
Now, the willows and scrubby oak are razed and the stream that once flooded the banks of the canyon are completely desiccated. But Lopez is most brokenhearted by the loss of the old-growth forest, the “grandfather trees”, as she calls them. Some were scorched so badly that only holes full of ash remain.
In other news, the “biggest” of three fires in Alaska has burned “about 0.06 square mile,” according to the Associated Press (quoting Alaska Division of Forestry spokesperson Sam Harrel). The two smaller fires have burned one and five acres, respectively.
For the numerically challenged, 0.06 of a square mile = 38.4 acres.
PS: A “barn” is a unit of area equal to 10−28m2. You’re welcome.
Indigenous knowledge reveals history of fire-prone California forest
A collaboration between scientists and Native American tribes finds tree density in parts of the Klamath Mountains is at a record high, and at risk of serious wildfires
“Combining multiple lines of evidence, Knight and her team show that the tree density in this region of Klamath Mountains started to increase as the area was colonized, partly because the European settlers prevented Indigenous peoples from practising cultural burning. In the twentieth century, total fire suppression became a standard management practice, and fires of any kind were extinguished or prevented — although controlled burns are currently used in forest management. The team reports that in some areas, the tree density is higher than it has been for thousands of years, owing in part to fire suppression.”
We provide the first assessment of aboveground live tree biomass in a mixed conifer forest over the late Holocene. The biomass record, coupled with local Native oral history and fire scar records, shows that Native burning practices, along with a natural lightning-based fire regime, promoted long-term stability of the forest structure and composition for at least 1 millennium in a California forest. This record demonstrates that climate alone cannot account for observed forest conditions. Instead, forests were also shaped by a regime of frequent fire, including intentional ignitions by Native people. This work suggests a large-scale intervention could be required to achieve the historical conditions that supported forest resiliency and reflected Indigenous influence.
Since we’re featuring the Kootenai National Forest here, a clearcut (at least that’s what the public would call it) near the OLY project on that Forest. (Randy Beacham photo)
On April 19, the Council on Environmental Quality finalized the first of two phases of rulemaking to replace the Trump administration’s 2020 rewrite of NEPA procedures. The Phase I Regulations address three primary issues: (1) how to prepare a purpose and need statement in NEPA documentation; (2) the scope of agency-specific NEPA implementation regulations; and (3) the definition of “effects” and “cumulative impacts.” (The article includes a link to the new rule.) The second phase is expected to be broader. Five lawsuits currently pending on the Trump rule will continue. Litigation also continues against the Forest Service NEPA regulations adopted in 2020.
On May 5, eight conservation groups notified the Custer Gallatin National Forest and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service of their intent to sue over the East Paradise Range Allotment Management Plan, which authorized grazing on three of the six allotments described in the plan. The notice states that the agencies failed to take a “hard look” at the plan’s impacts on grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Court decision in Center for Biological Diversity v. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (9th Cir.)
On May 12, the 9th Circuit affirmed the district court of Arizona’s decision that the Forest Service acted arbitrarily and capriciously in approving the plan of operations for the Rosemont Copper Mine on the Coronado National Forest based on its misunderstanding of Section 612 of the Surface Resources and Multiple Use Act of 1955, and on its incorrect assumption that Rosemont’s mining claims are valid under the 1812 Mining Law. (This article provides additional information.) The Copper World Mine on adjacent private land is proceeding.
Court decision in Desert Survivors v. U. S. D. I. (N.D. Cal.)
On May 16, the district court overturned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s withdrawal of a proposed Endangered Species Act listing and section 4(d) rule for the “bi-state population” of the greater sage grouse found along the California-Nevada border (including the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest). The court held that the agency failed to adequately explain their determination that the species did not warrant listing based on the available science. The court reinstated the 2013 proposal to list the species as threatened and required a new listing decision. (The article includes a link to the opinion.)
New case: Friends of the Flathead River v. U. S. Forest Service (D. Mont.)
On May 16, a newly founded nonprofit filed a suit claiming the Flathead National Forest is violating the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Forest Service Organic Act and the Administrative Procedure Act by not updating a 1985 comprehensive management plan for the Wild and Scenic River to better manage heavy use.
New case: Center for Biological Diversity v. U. S. Forest Service (D. Mont.)
On May 17, five conservation groups filed suit against the Knotty Pine timber project on the Kootenai National Forest. The project would include roughly 3,000 acres of commercial logging as well 40 miles of road maintenance and road building. Plaintiffs allege violation of forest plan requirements to provide habitat security for grizzly bears. (An ESA claim may be added.) (A link to the complaint is at the end of this article.)
Court decision in Center for Biological Diversity v. Haaland (D. Wyo.)
On May 17, the district court upheld the Upper Green River Area Rangeland Project’s approval of continued livestock grazing on six allotments on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The court held that the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service properly determined that 72 grizzlies could be taken as a result of grazing conflicts within 10 years without specific guidelines for age and sex. (Note: the characterization of incidental take as being a “threat” to these bears is not inappropriate as suggested here.)
Court decision in Citizens for a Healthy Community v. U. S. Department of the Interior (D. Colo.)
On May 19, the district court remanded a master development plan for oil and gas development in Colorado’s North Fork Valley. The court said the BLM and Forest Service had admitted that they did not comply with recent executive orders and other rulings that they must weigh any proposal’s contributions to greenhouse gases and climate change. (Additional background is in this article.)
Settlement in Center for Biological Diversity v. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (D. Oregon)
On May 24, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to reconsider its decision in 2019 to reverse itself and not list the red tree vole under the Endangered Species Act. The voles are found in old-growth forests on the Oregon coast. (A link to the original complaint may be found here.)
Court decision in Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility v. National Park Service (D. D.C.)
On May 24, the district court found that the Park Service had failed to comply with NEPA when it authorized e-bikes to travel on trails and roads used by conventional bicycles without preparing an EIS or EA. However, the judge did not block their use pending NEPA compliance. (The article includes a link to the opinion.)
On May 24, The Xerces Society and Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for failing to properly consider harms to endangered species caused by insecticide spraying across western grasslands. The most popular insecticide, diflubenzuron, is used to control gypsy moths and pine beetles, as well as grasshoppers on rangelands. There are more than 230 listed species in the 17 states encompassing the spraying and legal challenge, ranging from bull trout to sage grouse. In Oregon, the federal government is accepting bids to spray 30,000 acres of public lands.
Court decision in Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Gassman (D. Mont.)
On May 25, the district court enjoined the Ripley timber project (including 10,854 acres of commercial logging and 238 acres of clearcutting), on the Kootenai National Forest in a lawsuit filed by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies for failing to adequately consider the effects of associated roads on grizzly bears. There would be 13 miles of permanent roads and six miles of temporary roads, as well as maintenance or reconstruction on 93 miles of existing roads.
Court decision in Center for Biological Diversity v. Haaland (D. Mont.)
On May 26, the district court vacated the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2020 withdrawal of a proposed rule to list wolverines as threatened or endangered. In November, 2021, the FWS had filed a motion for voluntary remand of the withdrawal without vacatur. Vacating the 2020 decision means the prior proposed listing rule is in effect, and wolverines receive ESA protections as a proposed species; the agency has 18 months to submit a new listing decision. (There is a link to the opinion on this web page.)
New case: Swan View Coalition v. Haaland (D. Mont.)
On May 31, plaintiffs filed a complaint against the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to properly re-evaluate the effects of the Flathead National Forest’s revised land management plan on grizzly bears and bull trout. The re-evaluation was required by the district court in its June 2021 decision discussed here and pertains to changes in road management. (The article includes a link to the complaint.)
We’ve talked about trust having psychological and sociological aspects. Now we want to turn from describing trust to working with it. Here are ideas that come to my mind. If you have others, those would be great to put forward as well. Like the first article in this series said, the
stakes are getting higher and trust, as a coin of the realm, is getting more valuable.
When I bring all this forward into a natural resource management situation, several things stand out. First, a traditional authoritative approach to managing public lands at best only asks for public trust; it does little to earn that trust. Authoritative decision-making too often seems to mean waiting for a crisis and then asking the public to trust a heroic response, as opposed to working together upstream across jurisdictions, across interests, across disciplines to avoid or reduce the crisis in the first place.
Second, managers who are passively receptive to ideas if someone brings those to them, like in traditional public hearing, also do little to earn trust because passive behavior, by definition, doesn’t show trust. This is not to suggest that a more traditional hearing format has no place. The point is, if you want to build trust, that format alone won’t work because of the reciprocal nature of trust. Showing trust helps build trust; being passively receptive to ideas shows no trust that good ideas are out there and that shows a lack of respect, a lack of confidence.
Third, just gathering information about what people think or believe, like with surveys, also won’t earn trust. Again, this is because it can only address reason and rationality, not emotion or behavior. Trying to convince someone to trust based only on data will never work, so how
you use those data and that information is what really matters.
Fourth, a negotiation model of management, where managers ask for positions and state those of the agency, is more likely to build distrust because no one gets everything they want and, thus, everyone loses something. A negotiation-compromise model of decisions encourages an adversarial, low-trust dynamic, something to avoid if building trust is a goal.
So, if you want to earn trust, to build trust, you might start with a more robust understanding of how your management style, approach, and decisions affect—and are affected by—trust. It won’t be a stand-down alone that builds trust in prescribed fire, for example. But what you do
with that stand-down can have a great effect, positive or negative. In other words, intentional use of a stand-down within a broader effort to build trust can make a real difference if that is the goal.
Similarly, it won’t be a traditional approach to interagency fire management that builds trust. Without building something better than we see now, the ability to work together across agencies, organizations, and communities faces a deficit even as the stakes get higher and consequences more real. We’re heading into a dynamic, unpredictable, risk-filled future where trust, being future oriented, will become more valuable. Being intentional about building trust seems wise because the alternative, based on a less robust understanding, is likely to encourage more vicious cycles. Building trust depends most on having the understanding necessary for a virtuous cycle, one that builds on itself.
Aerial view of the Gila Wilderness and Gila River in New Mexico. Photo by Adriel Heisey.
The following guest post was written by WildEarth Guardians’ John Horning. – mk
I once looked at a map showing the United States at night. Lights lit up the coasts and our massive cities across the hinterlands. Though my eyes were attracted to the energy of the lights, they eventually settled on the blank spots on the map.
One of those large, blank spots was the Greater Gila of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, which is home to some of the last, best, wild—but still largely unprotected—public lands in the continental United States.
It’s also home to the Gila Wilderness—America’s first designated wilderness.
We celebrate the Greater Gila on this day because 98 years ago, on June 3, 1924 the U.S. Forest Service did something quite remarkable. Based on ancient and emerging wisdom at the time, it chose to exercise restraint and allow wild country to be wild.
We chose to celebrate the Gila and its looming centennial by creating an anthology of essays that capture why the Greater Gila is so loved and so deserving of even stronger protection. First & Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100 has been a great collaboration between Guardians, Torrey House Press, our editor Elizabeth Hightower Allen, and the many inspired writers who love the Gila.
I encourage you to order a copy of the book right here. And as a bonus, Torrey House Press is generously donating 20% of all book sales to WildEarth Guardians through June 10. Just use promo code “WILD” at checkout. Need more inspiration? Watch this film trailer that captures the spirit of the book.
If the Greater Gila is to endure, and life as we know it is to survive the compounding climate and biodiversity crises, we must continue to think boldly, celebrate wildly, and collaborate deeply.
Matthew’s post on oil and gas leasing reminded me of one of the annoying aspects of being involved in litigation, at least for me. I had been following climate and climate science seriously since the 90’s from the R&D perspective. And I found myself in NEPA, where conceivably we were supposed to use “the best science.”
NEPA asks the USG to look at the environmental impacts of its actions. It does not force the USG to choose the least impactful choice. And I have read many news stories about BLM O&G leasing that simply accept that “the judge said that they did not analyze the impacts correctly.” No one wants to hear the other side, or the details of the analysis. Especially when the impacts are about climate change, which is world-wide, obviously, and shall we say.. speculative, and contested.
This goes back to “what is speculative” and “how far should analyses go?”
You might wonder “how could this (the BLM didn’t analyze it right” happen so often?” “Can’t the BLM folks get it right?” But that raises the question, “is there a “right way”?
You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in energy sciences to think this through. Again, during the Obama Administration, CEQ had a number of listening sessions about analyzing climate change. At the one I attended, all the NEPA people said that analyzing climate impacts of use of fossil fuels is at the power plant permitting or other “use” stage, not the “getting it out of the ground” stage. Of course, there are impacts of “getting it out of the ground” and we have some idea of those, and they can be readily analyzed.
But let’s look at “how much will drilling one lease’s worth of O&G wells here in on the federal lands of the US contribute to climate change, and what will be the effects to the world, say, toad populations in Malaysia?”
Now if we look at demand, (or even our own history with forest trees) we note that substitution occurs when resources are not available from federal lands. As to oil and gas, we know where the other formations are on private land that could be tapped. And due to the vagaries of the investo-econosystem with some international security issues thrown in, we might get them instead from our friends (or not-so-friends) in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran. (That’s oil, but substitution also works for natural gas).
So do we figure out where substitution might occur from and analyze that? Not really. Of course, any of those countries could become unfriendly at the drop of a hat and your analysis would no longer be accurate (“approved with outdated NEPA”).
The assumption is that the impacts on climate change from this project will occur if the project is approved. And of all the coal and oil and gas being developed around the world, even if we believed this lack of substitution theory, how would we discern impacts from x amount of CO2? X being a tiny amount of the total. And we don’t know the impacts of even large amounts, in reality. Because we don’t know what will happen, and we don’t know how people and organisms will adapt. So we are making policy based on essentially some scientists’ best guesses. So how do you pick the scientists the judge will agree with in advance?
From my perspective, we are making USG employees jump through all kinds of bizarre analytical hoops. and most of us know that it’s all BS. Then there was the social cost of carbon, which is quite a silly number also. But it doesn’t matter which number you pick to analyze, the USG can still decide to go with actions that have some kind of negative impacts on climate change.
The fact is that some groups don’t want oil and gas on federal lands. Some groups don’t want oil and gas on private lands either, but if your favored tool is litigation, then going after private lands won’t work as well. As Chief Jack Ward Thomas said, DOJ settlements can actually be another tool the Admin has to gain their favored goals.
The frustrating part is not that some groups don’t want oil and gas drilling, and use critiques of analysis to get their way. That’s a legitimate policy tool that folks have been able to use to get their way. It was frustrating that most of us at the science end know that the numbers are bogus, and have to use them anyway. I actually think lawyers and judges know they are bogus also. Perhaps we’re all pretending to the citizens of the US that the Emperor is wearing fine clothes.
These settlement agreements resolve lawsuits over the leasing of nearly 4 million acres of federal public lands across Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming to the oil and gas industry.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In response to lawsuits filed by WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Western Environmental Law Center, the Biden administration will review and reconsider decisions to sell nearly 4 million acres of public lands oil and gas leases as part of three settlement agreements upheld by a federal judge this week.
“This is a big win for the climate and a real test to see if the Biden administration is going to get serious about confronting the climate impacts of selling public lands for fracking,” said Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians. “With the oil and gas industry bent on despoiling America’s public lands and fueling the climate crisis, this is a critical opportunity for the Biden administration to chart a new path toward clean energy and independence from fossil fuels.”
Between 2016 and 2021, the groups filed lawsuits challenging the sale of millions of acres of public lands for fracking in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
The suits targeted the failure of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management to address the climate implications of leasing oil and gas, which conveys a right for companies to extract and pollute. In an order late yesterday, Judge Rudolph Contreras dismissed the cases, upholding the settlements and rejecting industry attempts to derail the agreements.
“This suite of cases has entirely recast the federal government’s obligation to consider the cumulative climate impacts of oil and gas leasing on public lands,” said Kyle Tisdel, senior attorney and Climate and Energy Program director for the Western Environmental Law Center. “The incompatibility of continued fossil fuel exploitation with a livable planet is crystal clear. These settlements represent a fundamental opportunity for the Biden administration to align federal action with this climate reality and to keep its promise to present and future generations.”
Fossil fuels extracted from public lands and waters, including coal, oil, and gas, are responsible for more than 900 million metric tons of climate pollution, equal to the emissions from nearly 200 million vehicles. As these fossil fuels are produced and consumed, the emissions account for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gases released in U.S.
Together, oil and gas extracted from public lands and waters account for nearly 10% of all climate pollution released in the U.S.
“Our settlements give new hope that we can more effectively confront the climate crisis and protect our health from oil and gas extraction,” said Barbara Gottlieb, director of Environment & Health at Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Given how dangerously greenhouse gas levels are rising, it’s critical that the Biden administration put the brakes on fracking and speed up the transition away from fossil fuels.”
Scientists have warned that to prevent the worst effects of the climate crisis, oil, gas, and coal production must rapidly decrease worldwide, and ultimately end. In spite of this dire warning, the federal government has for years rubber-stamped more oil and gas leasing, locking in more greenhouse gas emissions. Most of this leasing has involved public lands in the western U.S.
The groups’ agreements provide new hope that the Biden administration will change course from previous federal administrations. President Biden already ordered a pause on new oil and gas leasing as part of an executive order tackling the climate crisis. Although this pause was halted by a federal judge, the administration has appealed this ruling.
In 2016, the groups filed suit challenging the sale of nearly 460,000 acres of public lands oil and gas leases in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of D.C., the case was the first to target the failure of Interior to address the nationwide climate impacts of its oil and gas leasing program.
In 2019, Judge Contreras ruled in favor of the groups. In the landmark ruling, Judge Contreras chided the federal government for ignoring the cumulative climate implications of oil and gas leasing.
Following this ruling, the groups again filed suit in 2020, challenging nearly 2 million acres of oil and gas leases in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Interior ultimately conceded defeat in late 2020 over most of the leasing. Shortly after, Judge Contreras issued another ruling in favor of the groups over the federal government’s failure to respond to his original order on remand.
In January 2021, right before President Biden assumed office, the groups again filed suit challenging the sale of more than 1 million acres of oil and gas leases in the western U.S.
The settlements resolve the three lawsuits, committing the Biden administration to address the climate implications of oil and gas leasing and reconsider past decisions. Citing the agreements, Judge Contreras today dismissed the three lawsuits.
When it comes to wildland fire, whether a prescribed burn, an escaped burn, arson, or a natural start, managing fire well requires trust between land managers and communities, between different land management agencies, and between crew members and more senior
management. With more trust, the work is safer, coordination stronger, costs lower. With more trust, community support is greater, media coverage often has a different tone, and residents believe more of the information provided.
But how does trust work in a group, socially, in a community? Three psychological aspects of trust, laid out in a separate article, give us some good ideas. For one thing, trust really is social. It doesn’t exist except between or among people. Even that old saying about trusting yourself
is somewhat sketchy even if sometimes useful.
Digging into the social aspects of trust, it’s important to realize that trust operates at multiple social scales. Three that often come up are these: person to person, group and organizational, and social systems. You may trust someone as a person but not trust the organization they work for. You may not trust the healthcare system but trust your doctor. You may not trust the financial market or the economy but trust your local grocery store. Applied to wildland fire, building trust depends on person-to-person interactions as well as on what a group or
organization does and whether the wildland fire management system seems to be working well, at least in some meaningful way, whatever it might be.
Another social aspect of trust is that it is oriented towards the future but based on what has happened in the past. It makes no sense to talk about trusting something you know has already happened. On the other hand, it makes total sense to talk about whether you trust something about the future, like trusting that someone will act or behave in a way consistent with at least some of your interests, perhaps because of previous experience.
Because trust is about the future, it is what some call supra-rational, beyond reason alone. This is because, when you trust, you’re taking a leap of faith from what you know about the past to what you believe about the future. This is important because it suggests facts and data alone are inadequate to build trust because those are always about the past, again going to the idea that building trust requires attention to all three bases: cognitive, emotional, and behavior.
And all this goes to an important fourth point: because trust is about future behavior yet to occur, trust is risky. The importance is that, because trust is risky, thinking about how other people see risk can help if you want to build trust. For example, since trusting someone is
always somewhat risky, anything you can do to increase another person’s confidence that their trust is well placed works in part by lowering their sense of risk. Somewhat similarly, anything you do to help someone feel less exposed to risk also helps build trust. When you reduce a risk for someone, you lay a foundation from which you can build trust.
Another significant aspect of trust is that it can emerge or grow even when there is no existing trust. In some cases, distrust can turn to trust remarkably fast in the right circumstances. For example, if you distrust someone but they surprise you with an act of kindness, you may be
more willing to reconsider that distrust and, just maybe, their action plants a kernel of trust. Perhaps one of the more important social aspects of trust is that it is reciprocal, it works in both directions. You are more likely to trust someone who shows trust towards you or behaves in a trustworthy way towards you. This has implications for building trust too: if you want to build trust, showing trust towards a person or group can help.
If you want to build trust, these insights from the social perspective can be as important as those from an individual perspective. Trust depends on what someone thinks, perceives, or experiences, as well as on what they feel about those experiences and how they behave or act. And those individual, psychological aspects play out in social settings, whether between individuals, group, or institutions. Building trust with individuals, as with building it between organizations, is helped by understanding depth and nuances of trust. We’ll look at that next.
