Frost, Ric, Casey Roberts, Garrett Hyatt, John Fowler. 2007. Montane Meadow and Open Area Encroachment in the Lincoln Forest, Sacramento Grazing Allotment. New Mexico State Univ. Cooperative Extension Service/Agricultural Experiment Station, Range Improvement Task Force, Report 69.
Full text [here] (12,952 KB)
and
Frost, Ric. 2007. Just One Match - An Easy Way To Destroy New Mexico. Range Magazine, Spring 2007.
Full text [here] (329 KB)
The second paper is a “popular” version of the first for lay readers, although both are very good and not too technical for most people.
Selected excerpts from “Just One Match“:
It is amazing how much fire one match can cause. Back in the year 2000, one match ignited the infamous Cerro Grande fire by Los Alamos, N.M. This same fire “ignited” an indepth study of Southwestern forest conditions by the state university. This report reveals that the Cerro Grande, Scott-Able, Viveash and several other fires on government lands that same season destroyed approximately 689 square miles of habitat in New Mexico.
The report points out that the intensity of the catastrophic habitat-destroying fires was a direct result of the fuel-load biomass levels created by the Mexican spotted owl environmental lawsuit. Logging restrictions were imposed on government-controlled lands. The study reveals that U.S. Forest Service-controlled lands in New Mexico forests alone had accumulated approximately 1.4 billion board feet of fuel-load biomass buildup between the years 1986 to 1999, as logging declined 82.4 percent during the same period. …
All of the Mexican spotted owl habitat in the Los Alamos area and the owl-nesting protected locations were lost, as were many of the ground-dwelling endangered species. Other endangered and protected habitat areas were also seriously compromised or destroyed by these fires.
The report also points out the loss of an entire cultural timber-harvesting infrastructure due to owl restrictions and the resulting loss of the economic sector to rural communities in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is in addition to the costs of fire fighting, the personal costs and loss of homes (including the threat to the Los Alamos nuclear facilities in the path of the Cerro Grande fire), as well as the human lives lost as a result of these fires. It is doubtful that the families who lost everything were concerned over the the loss of a few birds.
Read more
April 7, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Management, Ecology
Dubrasich, Michael E. and Gregory J. Brenner. 2008. Comments to the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest Regarding “Appropriate Management Response”. Western Institute for Study of the Environment.
Full text [here]
Note: If you would like a free CD with the Comments and the Appendices (450+ MB), please email W.I.S.E. a request with your address.
Selected Excerpts:
Executive Summary
The purpose of this document is to request that the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before altering or amending their Forest Plan to include unprepared fire, known as Wildland Use Fires.
We believe unprepared fires can have significant effects upon natural resources and the human environment. The National Environmental Policy Act requires the preparation of Environmental Impact Statements before the U.S. government engages in activities that might have significant effects.
The EIS process aids in revealing, analyzing, and public discussion of the potential effects before they happen. That is a beneficial process, as well as required under federal law.
This document is a statement of our rationale for requesting an EIS process. We present this document to the Rogue River – Siskiyou National Forest so that they might understand and comply with federal law. …
April 1, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Policy, Management
Beck, Paul H., Timber Manager, Herbert Lumber Company, Riddle Oregon. Old-Growth Forest Science, Policy, and Management in the Pacific Northwest Region — Testimony to the Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, March 13, 2008.
Full text [here]
Follow-up questions [here]
Selected excerpts:
Chairman Wyden, Senator Smith, members of the committee, good afternoon and thank you for inviting me here today; my name is Paul Beck and I am the Timber Manager for Herbert Lumber Company in Riddle Oregon. I am a fourth generation sawmill worker. The Forests of the Umpqua and the Rogue have not only been my office of thirty years, they have been my home and my recreation for over fifty three. I am here today representing Herbert Lumber, Douglas Timber Operators (DTO) and American Forest Resource Council (AFRC). My goal here today is to help you better understand our company, our industry, our community, our forests, and the true history of those forests.
There are many myths surrounding all of these things. My desire is to dispel those myths.
The timber wars of the last twenty years in Oregon are full of villains and heroes, which vary by storyteller. But as policymakers, I urge my senators from Oregon and other Members of Congress to separate reality from mythology.
Myth 1
If manufacturers would convert to only small log operations then we could thin young stands to provide all the material necessary to supply society’s needs for wood products.
Just as you cannot build a house out of one dimension of lumber, say 2×4’s, you cannot build an industry that produces nothing but one type of wood. If you walk through a house under constructions you certainly will find a lot of 2×4’s. This is a primary framing component. But if you look closer you will see a vast number of various other grades and dimensions. The timber industry of the Northwest has evolved to fill the needs of this market.
Read more
March 22, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Management
Bonnicksen, Thomas M. The Forest Carbon And Emissions Model. 2008. The Forest Foundation, Auburn, CA
FCEM Report No. 1 — Overview and technical information (beta version). Full text [here]
FCEM Report No. 2 — Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Four California Wildfires: Opportunities to Prevent and Reverse Environmental and Climate Impacts. Full text [here]
Review with selected excerpts by Mike Dubrasich:
The Forest Carbon and Emissions Model (FCEM) is a mathematical method (model) for estimating the amount of greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O) emitted by forest fires. FCEM requires minimum input of stand data, the number of acres burned, and the percent understory and overstory mortality. From those FCEM computes carbon stored and the emissions from fire combustion and from subsequent decay of dead wood.
FCEM is based on the (scientifically) reported biomass for various forest types and species, and the reported partitioning of that biomass into above-ground and below-ground components, as well as into trees and shrubs. Other components include equations that estimate the biomass lost to combustion and subsequent decay, the carbon stored in harvested trees, and the biomass stored in post-fire forest regrowth.
At this time FCEM (the beta version) is a deterministic model. That is, it outputs a value, not a range of probable values. However, by adjusting the inputs a user may generate a range of output values.
FCEM also provides a comparison of the output value to passenger car per year equivalents, megawatts of coal-fired power plant equivalents, as well as comparing them to total greenhouse gas emissions in California.
Read more
March 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Management
George M. Leonard - Chairman, Board of Directors, National Association of Forest Service Retirees (NAFSR)
Recommendations to the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Regarding the FY2009 Budget for the U.S. Forest Service
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
The following recommendations relate to all programs of the U.S. Forest Service. In developing these recommendations, we used the FY2008 Omnibus appropriation, as enacted, as the starting point. We find the Administration’s FY2009 budget proposals for the Forest Service to be irresponsible. We believe the base funding for all programs should be the FY2008 appropriation level adjusted for pay act and other uncontrollable costs (an increase of $77 million across all program areas). …
The most critical issue that needs to be addressed in the Forest Service budget is the funding of fire suppression. The current procedure of including the ten-year average cost of fire suppression within the agency’s discretionary budget is destroying the capability of the Forest Service to carryout the remainder of its statutory missions. From 25 percent in FY2000, fire funding is now approaching 50 percent of the budget. The suppression cost trend means the ten-year average is going to continue to grow, further cannibalizing funding for other programs. While the overall Forest Service budget has increased nine percent over the last six years, the diversion of funds to fire suppression has had a major impact on the workforce available to carry out the multiple-use mission of the agency. The number of foresters, biologists, and other resource specialists, along with supporting technicians, is a good measure of the capability of a resource management agency to carry out its mission. As illustrated in the following table, the capability of the Forest Service has been seriously compromised. …
There is wide spread recognition of the need to thin our overstocked forests to reduce their vulnerability to fire, insects, and disease. Funding for hazardous fuel reduction is important and must be continued, but it is only scratching the surface. Annual growth on the currently roaded portion of the timberlands on the National Forests is about 4 billion cubic feet. Not all of the material that needs to be removed has economic value, but portions are suitable for conventional wood products. Much more is suitable for energy production, including ethanol. Capturing these economic values is essential for making real progress in improving the conditions of our forests. It can also contribute to meeting our energy needs. …
One of the primary purposes for which the National Forests were established is to provide favorable conditions of water flow. Our forested watersheds provide much of the water that meets the needs of our growing population, particularly in the West. Resource management specialists and supporting technicians available to protect and enhance our watersheds have declined by 44 percent in the last six years. This decline must be reversed. …
The National Association of Forest Service Retirees believes that the National Forests and Grasslands should be managed so they are an asset to the communities within and adjacent to these lands. In too many instances, rather than being an asset, the overstocked, insect-infested, poorly maintained, understaffed Forests are becoming a liability. We believe the funding increases recommended above will begin the process of restoring the capability of the Forest Service to provide proper stewardship for these national treasures.
March 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Policy
Hageman, Harriet M. The “Roadless Rule” and Global Warming - What You Should Really Know. Wyoming Agriculture Dec. 2007/Jan. 2008
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
On Oct. 19, 2007 the parties to the ongoing dispute over the “Roadless Rule” appeared once again before Judge Brimmer to argue about whether the Rule violated numerous federal environmental statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Wilderness Act. The current dispute is a continuation of the State of Wyoming’s 2001 lawsuit, and stems from Judge Brimmer’s 2003 decision (found at 277 F.Supp.2d 1197 (D.Wyo. 2003)) to enjoin enforcement of the Roadless Rule based on the fact that it violated NEPA and the Wilderness Act.
Despite Judge Brimmer’s injunction, and because of the numerous lawsuits that have been filed challenging any sort of active and effective forest management, many National Forest Managers have continued to adhere to the mandates of the Roadless Rule, thereby implementing an illegal, politically-driven, and ecologically-devastating policy.
In 2004 I explained in several editorials that the Roadless Rule is bad for forest health and is bad for Wyoming. It was developed in the waning days of the Clinton administration to deny access, management and use of, 58.5 million acres of National Forest lands (30% of the National Forests; 2% of the total land mass of the United States; 3.2 million acres in Wyoming). It was adopted following what was arguably the most truncated, superficial and scientifically-devoid NEPA rulemaking in history. The alleged “public process” associated with the Roadless Rule was politically driven rather than scientifically supported, with less than thirteen (13) months having elapsed between the announcement of the proposed Rule and publication of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS).
It was an illegal, Washington, D.C. driven, one-size-fits-all approach to management of 1/3 of our National Forests. It was designed to ignore the physical aspects, management considerations, economic issues, and social/cultural dimensions that make each National Forest unique. It treated Wyoming’s National Forests exactly the same as the National forests in North Carolina and Puerto Rico, and violated the individualized Forest Management Plans that have been painstakingly developed pursuant to the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). The Roadless Rule bypassed scientific analysis; hijacked local participation in forest management; and anointed Washington, D.C. as the supreme authority on forest management decisions …
Read more
March 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Policy, Management
by Mike Dubrasich
The horrendous megafires that are punishing our landscapes arise in what many call “late successional stands”. Government vegetation maps indicate that the most fire-prone areas are designated late successional. The government has incorporated the term late successional into our legal system. It is a land use class, much as commercial, industrial, or residential zones are designated on urban zoning maps.
Many forest scientists maintain that late succession is some sort of ecological state or condition. And not just any condition; late succession is the cat’s meow, the most treasured condition that forests can attain. We have shut down and locked up tens of millions of acres of our public forests because they are or soon will be (we hope) late successional. Nobody talks about old-growth anymore; the term of art is late successional.
It therefore behooves us to try to figure out what the heck “forest succession” is and when it becomes “late.”
But that is a fool’s errand, because forest succession is itself a bogus concept.
Ideally, in the eco-babble dream world, forests begin as bare ground, totally seared to the dirt, with nothing alive above ground. First “pioneer” plant species move in, followed by “settler” species, and eventually “climax” species take over.
That’s succession, a gradual change in species, particularly tree species, until a stable, “climax community” of plants is established and sets there, unchanged, for the rest of time.
It is similar to the succession of kings to a throne. The first king named Henry is Henry I. When he dies, another king succeeds him. And then that king dies, and somebody else succeeds him. Eventually, if enough time passes, you might see another King Henry, and then another, all the way up to Henry the Eighth or even more. Of course, no king lives forever, so no climax stable kinghood ever comes about.
That’s true in nature, too, obviously. No tree lives forever. The theory of forest succession accounts for that: the individual trees may die, but the species eventually stop changing, and that is the climax state. Of course, eventually and inevitably another disturbance occurs, and then the whole successional parade starts over.
The problem with the theory of forest succession is that it does not occur in nature. It is a phenomenon that occurs only in the minds of dreamers. The real world is quite different than that.
February 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Ecology
Pyne, Stephen J. The Wrath of Kuhn: Meditations on Fire Philosophy. Informal talk presented to Association of Fire Ecology, November, 2006.
Full text [here]
Review by Mike Dubrasich
The paper’s title is a pun, a play on words (Steve Pyne is partial to puns, see his satirical novelette, Brittlebush Valley [here]). The Wrath of KAhn is a StarTrek movie featuring Ricardo Montalban as an angry Klingon. The wrathful KUhn in Pyne’s title is Dr. Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and popularizer of the notions of scientific paradigms and paradigm shifts.
The titular jest is an apology of sorts, because although Pyne bemoans the overuse and misuse of Kuhn’s concepts,
[C]alls for paradigm shifts are a cliché of our times, and deserve the righteous wrath of Thomas Kuhn.
he more or less calls for a paradigm shift in the scientific study of fire.
Sidenote: If any wrath is forthcoming, it will be from Thomas Kuhn’s ghost, because the Greatest Philosopher of the Post-Modern Era merged with the Infinite in 1996 at the age of 75.
Pyne’s essay is sparkling and brief, as befits a good speech, but it is also very profound. In The Wrath of Kuhn he examines three parallel but contrasting paradigms in fire science. The first is the physical view of fire. This is the dominant paradigm today:
Fire is a chemical reaction, the rapid oxidation of hydrocarbons, shaped by the parameters of its physical environment. These determine how the zone of combustion moves about the landscape. From this premise all other fire scholarship and fire practices arise. …
So dominant are these beliefs that I am willing to assert that few now among us can imagine any other configurations.
Pyne can, however, and does offer two. The first alternative paradigm he presents is the “biological paradigm”:
January 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Philosophy
Pyne, Stephen J. “The Solution is Aircraft”: Aircraft and the Political Economy of Canadian Forest Fires. American Review of Canadian Studies, 2006, pp 458-477.
Stephen J. Pyne is Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and author of 18 books and numerous essays. This essay derives from Pyne’s newest book, Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Introduction: Fire and the Northern Economy
The paradoxes are two, and both are well grounded in Canadian experience. The first is that institutions must reconcile the dynamics of political confederation with the rhythms of the boreal forest. The former builds on measured action, a steady pooling of many competing interests into a collective mean. The latter revels in extremes. Especially when it burns, the boreal forest goes from boom to bust to boom; and while nowhere is wildfire a bureaucratic category, the boreal landscape particularly mocks the norms, means, and statistics of aggregation that allow most agencies to plan. Almost always there is too much or too little, and never do reforms after the last firefight immediately lead to successes in the next. Instead, institutions repeatedly take a drubbing.
Aggravating the situation is the British North American Act that led to Confederation in which the provinces were granted control over their lands and natural resources. For 60 years an exception emerged in that the territory acquired from Hudson’s Bay Company, notably in the west, along with the Railway Belt and Peace River Bloc in British Columbia (B.C.), remained under the auspices of the Dominion even as provinces evolved and sprawled over those lands. Instead, the Dominion administered the resources; of particular significance was the Dominion Forestry Branch (DFB) within the Department of Interior which oversaw an archipelago of forest reserves, modeled closely on those of the United States. This estate gave the national government an active presence in and considerable leverage over how forestry might be conducted. Then in 1930 the Dominion ceded those lands to the provinces. The Dominion Forestry Branch nearly vanished, spared only because of its research capabilities. Thus, while the dynamics of the boreal environment argued for large entities, the politics of Canadian confederation pushed for smaller ones. That is the first paradox.
The second is that the Canadian scene matches the world’s most savage fires against its most advanced machines. Here, free-burning flame meets internal combustion. For Canada, however, combining the primitive with the technologically modern is far from unusual. Harold Innis early pointed out the apparent incongruity of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the industrial tip of global capitalism’s spear, thrusting through the Canadian wilderness, and later observed the necessity, for a country that was both modern and dispersed, to seize the latest developments in communication and transportation. Donald Worster, less kindly, has pointed out the industrial basis for Canada’s exploitation of its natural wealth, likening the country to a technological crack-baby. That Canada should turn to industrial technology to cope with backcountry fires should surprise no one…
The apparent solution was to apply capital to acquire equipment to move water. The outcome was a magnificent expression of the Canadian genius for applied knowledge. Canada became the world authority on portable pumps and hoses, and in order to move those appliances to the flaming front, on aircraft. Planes did for fire what railroads did for wood, wheat, and minerals. Instantly, aircraft began to change the geography of Canadian fire, and reformed permanently its political economy. Equally helpful, it allowed technology to substitute for philosophy. Cansos, float-equipped Beavers, Wajax pumps, these could furnish a common medium for the Canadian fire community in ways that politics could not. Canadian fire officers would come to share technology, and the means by which they would commit technology; they would not share institutions or ends. That technology imposed its own politics of power was a consideration they ignored in their determination not to surrender the levers and throttles that governed the relationship between province and Dominion.
December 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Philosophy, Management
Pyne, Stephen J., Burning Border. Environmental History, 12 (Oct 2007)
Stephen J. Pyne is Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and author of 18 books and numerous essays. This essay derives from Pyne’s newest book, Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada, reviewed [here].
Full text of Burning Border [here]
Selected excerpts:
ABSTRACT — The United States and Canada approach wildland fire differently. Fire matters to both countries for reasons of economics, public safety, duty-of-care to nature preserves, and bureaucratic identity and inertia. A useful survey of their differences could focus on three simple indices: how each assesses fire threats, how each assigns responsibility for fire management, and how each relates fire protection to land use. In all three instances, each country has evolved apparently similar but in reality parallel strategies that, like their shared border, meet but don’t merge. These differences reflect larger national traits.
IT IS OFTEN SAID that fire is no respecter of borders. In fact, it respects any boundaries that affect its ability to propagate. Satellite images routinely reveal stark contrasts in fire behavior among landscapes partitioned to farming, ranching, nature preserves, public forests, shopping malls, and exurbs. The U.S.-Canada border is no exception. The delineation would remain abstractly political if both countries had identical land use, adopted similar fire policies, and managed fire the same way. They don’t. There are national styles in fire as in literature and health care. Their practices are only superficially interchangeable, like pumps and CL-215s. In their deep structure their fires differ as much as the divergent politics behind the American style of federalism and the Canadian brand of confederation.
Does fire really matter? Here an answer is simple: Canada is a large and combustible swathe of fire-planet Earth. Historically, fires swept its prairies every two or three years; combusted its Cordilleran forests every five to fifty; and devoured its boreal forest, in immense chunks, every 50-120 years, a rhythm of binge-burning equaled solely in Russia. Only its sodden outer limits, Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) and Cape Breton, have evaded serious burns. On average Canada now experiences 8,500 fires a year that burn 2.5 million hectares, although statistics mean little in a place where the episodic big burn does all of the ecological work and where fires can blister 7.5 million hectares in a summer. All this matters because Canadians have sought to shield much of their national estate from flame and now spend $500-$900 million annually on the effort, a number galloping upward. The determination to battle blazes has come from commercial concerns over timber, a need to protect vulnerable human settlements, and bureaucratic inertia. Canada’s forest fires are thus a matter of economics, public safety, duty-of-care obligations to nature preserves, and, for those agencies who fight or study them, institutional survival. In all this it resembles American cognates-with a difference.
Byway of example, reflect how each assesses fire danger, how each distributes responsibility for fire management, and how each relates fire protection to land use. (The fire communities of both countries are congenitally partial to grouping by threes-the fire triangle serving as the water cycle does for hydrologists.) In all three instances, each country has evolved apparently similar but in reality parallel strategies that, like their shared border, meet but don’t merge…
December 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Philosophy, Management
