SOS Forests

Wilderness Recognized As Fire Hazard

Well, what do you know? It turns out that some other folks (beside us) have recognized that wilderness designation does not “protect” resources; instead it endangers them.

Forest Service assesses effects of Wilderness on firefighting

Opinions differ among feds, firefighters and Wilderness advocates

Scott Condon, The Aspen Times, Thursday, March 11, 2010 [here]

BASALT — Turning Basalt Mountain into Wilderness wouldn’t prohibit firefighting there but it would eliminate opportunities to reduce dead trees and fuels that have built up for decades, the top official in the White River National Forest said Wednesday. …

Basalt firefighters and Wilderness activists disagreed with parts of the assessment made by Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams, showing how difficult it is to sort through some implications of the Hidden Gems Wilderness Campaign.

Fitzwilliams said the Forest Service assesses and makes an appropriate response to every fire in the national forest, regardless of whether or not it is in Wilderness.

In a location like Basalt Mountain, the decision to fight a fire will be made most of the time, Fitzwilliams said. “Whether that’s Wilderness or not, the response is probably going to be the same,” he said.

Whenever a fire poses a threat to the town of Basalt or homes in Missouri Heights, the decision would be made to fight the fire, he said. Fires in Wilderness areas are allowed to burn when they don’t pose a threat to lives, houses or infrastructure.

Fitzwilliams conceded that federal land managers are responsible for leaving Wilderness “pretty much as it is.” Using heavy equipment to gouge a fire break in the earth, for example, might require an extra call for clearance, he said.

That’s why the Basalt Fire Department is concerned. Fire Chief Scott Thompson said that, with all due respect to the Forest Service, the written rules and the application of rules aren’t always the same. Written rules that appear to provide flexibility can actually provide an extra hurdle.

The fire department typically handles the first response to wildfires on Basalt Mountain. Requiring an extra step of approval to fight a fire in a Wilderness area might take “hours or days,” Thompson said.

He said his assessment comes from practical, in the field experience in dealing with the Forest Service on Wilderness issues for 15 years as a former Pitkin County deputy sheriff and for 10 years as the fire chief. That experience indicates it won’t always be a speedy process to get approval to fight a fire in Wilderness. And that, he said, could result in a catastrophic fire for the homeowners of Basalt.

Here we have an experienced Forest Service person, White River NF Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams, admitting that wilderness fires do not (cannot) receive the same aggressive rapid response that non-wilderness fires do. Mr. Fitzwilliams also notes that fuel build-up in wilderness areas cannot be dealt with under current laws. And he warns that fires in wilderness area can (and do) propagate beyond wilderness boundaries and subsequently endanger communities.

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Climate Change, Bioenergy and Sustaining Forests of Idaho and Montana

Thoughts and comments by Ned Pence
March 3 and 4, 2010
Boise, Idaho

The following are my thoughts and comments on a recent conference sponsored by the Society of American Foresters and the University of Idaho’s College of Natural Resource. Others involved were the Forest Service, the BLM, the Intermountain Forest Association, Idaho Conservation League, the Wilderness Society, Idaho Department of Lands, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the Nature Conservancy.  The Snake River Chapter of SAF deserves credit for the hard work that went into the conference.  A similar convention was held in Missoula last fall.

I attended the conference seeking information on the possibility of a bioenergy industry utilizing forest fuels with the possibility of sustaining forests in the inland empire. Attendance at the conference were a mix of foresters, environmentalists, and persons involved in attempts at collaboration between the federal agencies, public, forest industry and environmentalists in an attempt to find a solution to the current gridlock of forest management on federal lands.

The stated purpose was, “This conference will help people connect with global-scale issues regarding climate change, renewable energy, and carbon emissions on forests in Idaho and Montana. Discussions centered on strategies for sustaining our forests and the services people expect from them.”

Sponsors recognized the “sustainability premise” identified as “the current and future conditions of our forests determines their ability to contribute to our society’s energy security, climate change mitigation, and resilience goals.” It was recognized that the current forested conditions put the forests at risk of stand-replacing wildfire and insect and disease outbreaks. A key statement of the conference was that forest management actions must be ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially desirable to be sustainable. It is felt by conference organizers that forest managers can take action to meet “sustainability” only by obtaining a “social license” through collaboration. A few collaborative efforts are currently underway in Washington, Idaho, and Montana and the conference had sessions to discuss what has worked well and not so well.

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Open Letter to Ken Salazar Re WFLC

Letter in pdf format may be downloaded [here]

To: The Honorable Ken Salazar
Secretary of the Interior
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240

Re: Reconvening the Wildland Fire Leadership Council

Dear Secretary Salazar,

In a letter to western governors dated February 19, 2010, you indicated your desire to reconvene the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC). You also stated in that letter that you are committed working closely with “key stakeholders at all levels” to address wildfire issues.

Please be advised that the prior manifestation of the WFLC did not work with stakeholders but instead was a closed door, exclusionary, non-transparent Federal advisory group that violated various laws with impunity. The laws repeatedly violated by the WFLC include the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

The WFLC excluded the public and the press from their meetings. They did however seat deep-pocket lobby groups including the Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society. Federal funds were passed to these lobby groups through the WFLC. The lobby groups also provide a “revolving door” of high-paying positions to former government employees formerly seated on the WFLC.

During closed door meetings in 2008 the WFLC directed the five Federal land management agencies under their purview to adopt Appropriate Management Response (AMR) and Wildland Fire Use (WFU). The agencies did so without implementing any NEPA process, without public comment or review, and in violation of the laws listed above.

As a result, numerous wildfires were allowed to burn without aggressive suppression actions. Tremendous destruction and degradation of natural resource values occurred. Some examples:

* South Barker WFU Fire (2008, Sawtooth NF, 38,583 acres) – The South Barker WFU Fire escaped and burned 38,583 acres. The fire eventually cost over $7 million to suppress. It incinerated miles of riparian zones, stripped erodable hillsides of vegetation, and destroyed forest plantations that had been carefully tended for 50 years.

* Gunbarrel WFU Fire (2008, Shoshone NF, 67,141 acres ) – The Gunbarrel WFU Fire was allowed to burn until it blew up. The fire eventually cost over $11 million to suppress. An estimated 420 residences, 11 commercial buildings, and 149 outbuildings were threatened and 7 buildings destroyed. The highway leading to Yellowstone Park was closed, and numerous residents were evacuated. During the fire USFS officials proudly declared that the MMA (Maximum Manageable Area, or desired incineration zone) was 417,000 acres (652 sq miles) and included public and private properties north and south of Highway 14.

* East Slide Rock Ridge WFU Fire (2008, Humboldt-Toiyabe NF, 54,549 acres) – The ESRR WFU Fire was allowed to burn unchecked until it blew up and threatened the community of Murphy Hot Springs, ID, as well as numerous rural ranches and farms. The fire eventually cost over $9 million to suppress. Riparian zones adjacent to stream habitat for endangered bull trout were incinerated.

* Mill Flat WFU Fire (2009, Dixie NF, 12,607 acres) – The Mill Flat WFU Fire was monitored until it blew up. The fire roared into New Harmony, Utah, forced the evacuation of 170 New Harmony residents, destroyed three homes and damaged eight buildings. The fire eventually cost over $6.5 million to suppress.

* Iron Complex AMR Fire (2008) – Including this fire, 650,000 acres were incinerated in Northern California on the Shasta-Trinity, Six Rivers, and Klamath National Forests. The fires were allowed to burn vast tracts for three months in implementation of “Appropriate Management Response.” Building firelines miles away from the fires and backburning hundreds of thousands of acres of private and public land alike, including habitat for two endangered species, Salmon and Spotted Owl, were deemed “appropriate.” Despite the indirect firefighting techniques, ostensibly intended to save money and protect firefighters, over $400 million was spent on suppression and 12 firefighters were killed.

* Basin/Indians AMR Fire (2008) – 244,000 acres of the Los Padres National Forest and private lands were incinerated in 3rd largest fire in California history. Despite indirect AMR methods, more than $120,000,000 was spent on fire suppression, making the Basin/Indians AMR Fire the most expensive fire in California history, and the 2nd most expensive in U.S. history (the Biscuit Fire in Oregon in 2002 cost $150,000,000). In addition, 26 private residences were destroyed.

Numerous other disastrous AMR and WFU fires could be cited. The suppression costs noted above do not begin to account for the cost-plus-loss damages inflicted, which were 10 to 30 times the nominal suppression expenses. Nor do they express the tragic loss of human life.

Both Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack and US Forest Service Chief Tidwell have recognized (in public speeches) that an increasing number of catastrophic wildfires are plaguing the Nation, and that a collaborative management approach to restoration and conservation are needed.

The secretive and non-collaborative WFLC has been the cause, not a source of solutions, of our ongoing forest fire crisis.

The Obama Administration has promised transparency, accountability, and tougher restrictions on lobbyists. In his 2009 State of the Union address, President Obama said, “Let me say it as simply as I can – transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

The WFLC in its prior manifestation violated transparency and the rule of law with disastrous consequences.

Please be advised that if you reconvene the WFLC under the previous format and model, you will be doing a great disservice to America.

Sincerely,

Mike Dubrasich
Executive Director, the Western Institute for Study of the Environment

cc: Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack
Chief of the US Forest Service Tom Tidwell
Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey
National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis
Governor Brian Schweitzer, Chairman, Western Governors Assoc.
Governor C. L. “Butch” Otter, Vice Chairman, Western Governors Assoc.
Ann M. Walker, Forest & Rangeland Health Program Director - WGA
NM State Forester Arthur Blazer, Chair, Western Forestry Leadership Coalition
AK State Forester Chris Maisch, Chair-Elect, Western Forestry Leadership Coalition
Congressman Doc Hastings (WA-04)
Congressman Greg Walden (OR-02)
Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis (WY)
Congressman Wally Herger (CA-02)
Congressman Denny Rehberg (MT)
Congressman Norm Dicks (WA-06)
Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva, (AZ-07)
Congressman Peter A. DeFazio, (OR-04)
Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, (SD)
Senator Ron Wyden (OR)
Senator Maria Cantwell (WA)
Senator John Barrasso (WY)
Senator James E. Risch (ID)
Senator Robert Bennett (UT)

Searching This Site

A commenter requested that he would like to see some posts about anthropogenic fire regimes in the Pacific Northwest.

By my count there have been 40 posts about anthropogenic fire in Oregon, and over 100 on anthropogenic fire in general.

Also, at the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes, we have posted at least 25 scientific papers on the topic.

There is a method to help you search this site and all the sub-sites at W.I.S.E. for topics of interest to you. That method is to use the Search Applet in the upper right hand corner of every page. To use the Search Applet, follow these simple rules:

1. First, go to the root home of the sub-site you wish to search. You can do that by clicking on the large type, bold header at the top of the page.

On this sub-site, the large type, bold header is “SOS Forests“. Click on that. To insure that you are at the root home, check the URL. It should say:

http://westinstenv.org/sosf/

2. Type your search words into the little box that says “search”.

The word “search” will disappear. Your search terms will replace it.

3. Push *Enter*. That is, tap the *Enter* key on your keyboard.

You should see a new URL that will look something like this:

http://westinstenv.org/sosf/?s=anthropogenic+fire

Notice that your search terms will appear in the URL. That is the way to check and see if you completed all the above instructions correctly.

4. All the posts that contain your search terms will appear. It happens very quickly, so you might not notice it at first. But scroll down the page and you will see all the posts that contain your search terms.

5. If your search returned more than 15 posts, at the bottom of the page you will see a hot link that says “Next Page –>“. Click on that. Another page will appear with a URL that looks something like:

http://westinstenv.org/sosf/page/2/?s=anthropogenic+fire

Notice that “page/2″ in there? That tells you that you have found the second set of 15 posts containing your search terms.

Scroll to the bottom again. If you see the hot link that says “Next Page –>” again, that tells you that more than 30 posts meet your criteria. You can click on the hotlink again and see the third set of 15 posts. And so on. If there is no “Next Page –>” hot link at the bottom of the page, you have reached the end and found all the posts with your search terms.

6. To perform a new search (you may wish to try some other search words, for instance), be sure to click on the large type, bold header first. That will take you back to the root home. If you don’t do that, you may inadvertently search within your old search results.

7. All the sub-sites at W.I.S.E. are their own, stand alone databases. You cannot search multiple sub-sites from one location.

8. However, you may perform an author search at the W.I.S.E. Library by going to that subsite and typing the author’s name into the search applet. All the authors of papers posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquia are listed at the Library.

Important: the Library lists the Colloquia posts, not the Commentary posts. To find authors at the Commentary sub-sites, you must visit the appropriate Commentary sub-site and do your search there.

The Library may be accessed by clicking on the hotlink that says “Library” in the upper lefthand corner of every page.

Any questions?

The Royal Statistical Society on Data Disclosure

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) [here] is one of the oldest continuously operating scientific societies in the world. Originally founded in 1834 as the Statistical Society of London, the RSS is now an international society of impeccable distinction.

The RSS has submitted a memorandum to Parliament regarding the inquiry into the controversy known as Climategate. The statement has much wider application than that, however. It deals with scientific integrity and the disclosure of data and analyses in all scientific disciplines.

The position of the RSS regarding public dissemination of scientific data is that where the results of scientific analyses have been published or are otherwise in the public domain, the raw data, and associated meta-data, used for these analyses should, within reason, also be made available.

Preservation of confidentiality is necessary in only a limited set of cases: where privacy, security, and commercial propriety may be compromised. Otherwise, in government-funded science all data and models used to derive findings should be made publicly available.

[T]he basic case for publication of data includes that science progresses as an ongoing debate and not by a series of authoritative and oracular pronouncements and that the quality of that debate is best served by ensuring that all parties have access to the facts. … The best guarantor of scientific quality is that others are able to examine in detail the arguments that have been used and not just their published conclusions. It is important that experiments and calculations can be repeated to verify their conclusions. If data, or the methods used, are withheld, it is impossible to do this.

That lesson is central to the advancement of science and to the relationship of science to society. It certainly applies to forest science, where the hiding of data and analyses by publicly-employed forest scientists is illegal as well as unethical.

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Obama Admin Considering Lock Up of 13 Million Acres

Republicans Request Missing Pages and Documents on Administration’s Targeting of New Monument Designations

House Natural Resources Committee Republicans Press Release, February 26, 2010 [here]

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb 26 - House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Doc Hastings (WA-04); National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee Ranking Member Rob Bishop (UT-01); and 14 Members of Congress sent a letter today to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar requesting further information related to an internal DOI document that revealed the Administration is considering designating numerous new National Monuments that would lock up at least 13 million acres of land.

Secretary Salazar has publicly said that there is “no secret agenda” and wants to have a “public dialogue.” Therefore, the Department should be willing to answer questions regarding the exact undertakings and status of the potential Monument designations, as well as what outside group and individuals have been involved in the secret planning.

“If this internal document had not been exposed, Americans would still be in the dark about the Obama Administration’s potential plans to lock up millions of acres of land across the West,” said Hastings. “While Secretary Salazar says that the discussions are just ‘preliminary,’ no assurances have been given that the President will not designate these monuments. When you catch someone in the kitchen in the dark of night with their hand in the cookie jar, it’s very hard to believe they’re just checking to see what’s inside and that no cookies were just about to get eaten. The communities and those workers whose jobs could be directly affected by the locking up of these lands deserve to see a full picture of what was happening inside their government. We’ve asked for copies of documents relating to the planning, which includes coordination with outside groups, and all of the missing pages from the document we uncovered last week.”

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Where Have All the Fires Gone?

Stephen J. Pyne. 2000. Where Have All the Fires Gone? Fire Management Today, Vol 60, No. 3, Summer 2000

Full text:

IN the United States, few places know as much fire today as they did a century ago. Fires have fled from regions like the Northeast that formerly relied on them for farming and grazing. They have receded from the Great Plains, once near-annual seas of flame, ebbing and flowing with seasonal tides. They burn in the South at only a fraction of their former grandeur. They have faded from the mountains and mesas, valleys and basins of the West. They are even disappearing from yards and hearths. One can view the dimming panorama of fire in the same way that observers at the close of the 19th century viewed the specter of the vanishing American Indian.

Missing Fires, Missing Peoples

And with some cause: Those missing fires and the missing peoples are linked. The fires that once flushed the myriad landscapes of North America and have faded away are not fires that were kindled by nature and suppressed, but rather fires that people once set and no longer do. In some places, lightning has filled the void. But mostly it has not, and even where lightning has reasserted itself, it has introduced a fire regime that can be quite distinct from those shaped by the torch.

Anthropogenic (human-caused) fire comes with a different seasonal signature and frequency than natural fire. Moreover, it is profoundly interactive. It burns in a context of general landscape meddling by humans—hunting, foraging, planting—in ways that shape both the flame and its effects. So reliant are people on their fire monopoly that what makes fire possible generally makes human societies possible. What prevents one retards the other. Places that escaped anthropogenic fire likely escaped fire altogether.

Pre-Columbian Fire Practices

Did American Indians really burn the land? Of course they did. All peoples do, even those committed to industrial combustion, who disguise their fires in machines. The issue is whether and how those fires affected the landscape. Much of the burning was systematic. Pre-Columbian peoples fired along routes of travel, and they burned patches where flame could help them extract some resource — camas, deer, huckleberries, maize. The outcome was a kind of fire foraging, even fire cultivating, such that strips and patches burned as fuel became available. But much burning resulted from malice, play, war, accident, escapes, and sheer fire littering. The land was peppered with human-inspired embers.

The aboriginal lines and fields of fire inscribed a landscape mosaic (see Lewis and Ferguson (1988) for a different terminology). Some tiles were immense, some tiny. Some experienced fire annually, some on the scale of decades. In most years, fires burned to the edge of the corridor or patch and then stopped, melting away before damp understories, snow, or wet-flushed greenery. But in other years, when the land was groaning with excess fuels and parched by droughts, fires kindled by intent or accident roared deep into the landscape. People move and fire propagates; humanity’s fiery reach far exceeds its grasp of the firestick. Remove those flames and the structure of even seldom-visited forests eventually looks very different.

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Open EAJA Act of 2010

From: Budd-Falen Law Offices, LLC
300 East 18th Street
Post Office Box 346
Cheyenne, Wyoming 82033-0346

Call To Action

Tuesday March 2, 2010 Is the Day!!!

Western Legacy Alliance is proud to announce that on Tuesday, March 2, 2010, Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis (R-Wy) and Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.Dak) will introduce the “Open EAJA Act of 2010.” This Act is a start to bringing transparency and accountability, and level the playing field in the payment of attorney fees. Research has documented that radical environmental groups are reaping millions and millions of dollars of taxpayer funding from suits against the federal government which push their radical agendas and beliefs — $42 million and counting. These groups are being paid by the federal government to sue the federal government using American taxpayer dollars.

If passed, the “Open EAJA Act of 2010″ would require the federal government to create a publicly searchable database of all attorney fees awarded under the Equal Access to Justice Act (”EAJA”) including the total amount of attorney and expert fees paid in each case, the hourly attorney fee charged and who is collecting the American taxpayers’ money. This is the first step to leveling the playing field and stopping the abuse of the legal system.

I have a short-term request and a long-term request for you.

Short-term: By Tuesday morning, March 2, 2010, please e-mail or mail a note of support for this legislation. We need as many groups and organizations as possible to support the introduction of this bill.

Long-term: Upon introduction, please contact your Congressmen and request that they co-sponsor this legislation.

Shedding light on the payment of taxpayer money under EAJA will start to bring the transparency and accountability to this system. Please help to get this bill started on the right track.

Letters of support from organizations and individuals may be sent to me for forwarding or can be sent directly to Congresswoman Lummis. Please also copy <WesternLegacyAlliance at gmail.com> on your letters.

Thank You!!
Karen Budd-Falen
February 25, 2010

******
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Science Desaparecidos

From the Vanished Gallery [here]

Desaparecidos is the Spanish word for “The Disappeared.” For thousands of Argentine families, this word has become a symbol of a long harrowing nightmare.

In a coup on March 24, 1976, a military junta seized power in Argentina and went on a campaign to wipe out left-wing terrorism with terror far worse than the one they were combating. Between 1976 and 1983 - under military rule - thousands of people, most of them dissidents and innocent civilians unconnected with terrorism, were arrested and then vanished without a trace.

In 1983, after democracy was restored, a national commission was appointed to investigate the fate of the disappeared. Its report revealed the systematic abductions of men women and children, the existence of about 340 well organized secret detention centers, and the methodical use of torture and murder. According to former president, Carlos Menem, records of the atrocities were destroyed by the military, following the 1982 Falklands War. The disappeared have not been heard of to this day.

What does this have to do with forests? Consider this essay by Donna Laframboise:

Let There Be No More Scientific Consensuses

NOconsensus.org, Feb 26, 2010 [here]

[C]limate science problems extend far beyond one man. In my view, they can be traced in large part to a phrase that should be struck forever from the scientific and journalistic vocabulary: “scientific consensus.”

Science is about doubt – not certainty. … When media outlets vigorously trumpet said consensus, they “disappear” highly-qualified, dissenting scientists.

There’s nothing wrong with saying there’s a prevailing or dominant view among scientists on a particular topic. There’s nothing wrong with saying there’s a preponderance of opinion in one direction. But those phrases do something the term “scientific consensus” does not. They acknowledge the existence of other points-of-view. …

When I began examining the climate change debate I was shocked to discover a huge disconnect between how the media described matters and what a few hours of independent research revealed. The Economist, a publication I normally trust and respect, spoke of a “consensus on global warming” as though it were gospel that had been hand-delivered by Yahweh himself.

The once stodgy Time magazine insisted there was “a clear scientific consensus connecting the rise in man-made greenhouse gas emissions” to physical changes in the natural world. …

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More Junk Forest Science from OSU

By Mike Dubrasich

Destruction and Sabotage

I write this essay with a heavy heart. As a professional forester for 35+ years, I have always professed good forest stewardship backed up by the best forest science. But over the last 20 years or so, forest science has been polluted and degraded by political advocacy of a pernicious and destructive nature, and so too have our priceless, heritage forests been destroyed by horrendous and catastrophic fires.

There is a crisis in our forests and in our forestry schools and those crises are interconnected. Bad forest science, junk or pseudoscience if you will, has sunk to the level of promoting forest destruction. Instead of commitment to saving forests from destruction, our forestry schools now promote that destruction on the most tenuous and disingenuous grounds.

The root cause of both crises is a corrupt political movement that seeks to impose centralized control and oppression, authoritarianism if you will, in the name of environmental protection. But protection is the furthest thing from the minds of the advocates and activists; diminution of freedom and liberty is foremost. The propaganda about environmental protection is a smokescreen, and behind the smoke lays a wasteland of environmental abuse on a landscape scale.

This essay is not about the crass political motivations of the neo-authoritarians, however. It is about catastrophic forest fires and corrupted forest science, and how the two go hand-in-hand.

It is an essay written in grief, grief for the loss of our heritage, our rationality, our institutions of higher learning, and most especially grief for the priceless forests incinerated by exceedingly bad decisions founded on exceedingly hateful and hurtful lies.

The Rape of Forest Science

A case in point: an article in Science Daily dated Feb 25, 2010 and entitled More Frequent Fires Could Aid Ecosystems [here] (unsigned but “adapted from materials provided by Oregon State University”).

The article reeks, of myths, half truths, and out and out lies.

Its ostensible purpose is to promote a conference taking place today at OSU, where the pseudoscientific justifications for forest holocaust will be preached to the public, the paying public mind you, and we all pay for it in more ways than one.

Its actual purpose is promotion of catastrophic and irreparable forest fires.

The pernicious fallacies in the article are numerous, and I shall demolish them one by one. This exercise may be tedious, but I see no other way to thoroughly deconstruct the lies.

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Nicholas Dennis: Put National Forests To Work For Community

Note: This guest editorial appeared in the February 14th edition of the Redding Searchlight [here], and at Evergreen Magazine Online [here]

By Nicholas Dennis

Last August, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visited Seattle to deliver a speech laying out the Obama administration’s goals for conserving the national forests. Vilsack noted that polarization has long dominated the national forest agenda, but that the threats currently facing the forests make it imperative to move toward a shared vision “that conserves our forests and the vital resources important to our survival while wisely respecting the need for a forest economy that creates jobs and vibrant rural communities. Our shared vision begins with restoration. Restoration means managing forest lands first and foremost to protect our water resources, while making our forests more resilient to climate change.” Closer to home, California Regional Forester Randy Moore lists five strategic priorities for managing the state’s national forests on the region’s Web site. Unfortunately, sustaining rural communities isn’t mentioned.

Restoration forestry is not the way national forests were managed before the spotted owl listing. Restoration does not involve clear-cutting, at least not in our mixed-conifer forests. It involves selecting smaller trees from crowded patches in the forest understory, patches that if unmanaged would likely fall prey to insects, diseases or stand-replacing wildfires. Who would oppose forest restoration? Professional appellants, such as the Montana-based Conservation Congress, who make their living filing claims for legal fees have used appeals and litigation to stop or stall several local restoration projects that would otherwise have improved forest health and created dozens of well-paid jobs. These self-serving outsider legal challenges have increased unemployment, decreased revenues for schools and county governments, and undermined economic opportunities in our rural communities.

Last year, a Natural Resources Defense Council spokesman lauded the 700,000-acre addition to the federal wilderness system in California, proclaiming wilderness the “gold standard for forest protection.” Shasta-Trinity and Klamath National forests neighbors will see the irony in this statement after the fires that burned uncontrolled through the forests, including wilderness areas, in three of the past four summers, causing sickening air quality. Protecting forests takes more than Congress redrawing maps. It requires the hard work of restoration by a skilled forest work force.

Rural communities in Shasta, Siskiyou and Trinity counties are not economically vibrant today. The recent recession has only deepened a downward trend that’s continued since federal timber harvests plunged in the early 1990s. Layoffs and social service cutbacks have taken a heavy toll on families. Essential public infrastructure repairs have been postponed indefinitely. Empty storefronts are gradually dominating our main streets. The Siskiyou County district attorney recently opted not to prosecute an alleged child murderer based on fiscal considerations. But bad as things are, wait until Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act funding runs out in three years, as it surely will. Then the pinched budgets for the three counties will have to absorb an additional $18 million hit and our collective belt-tightening will take on a different specter.

All conceptions of forest sustainability give social and economic resources equal priority to environmental resources. The Northwest Forest Plan was intended to restore national forests and rural communities. Yet of all the major commitments in that plan, only one has never come close to being met: the commitment to harvest enough timber to sustain reasonable levels of forest-sector employment. Over the past decade, the Shasta-Trinity and Klamath National forests have sold less than half the timber called for in their land management plans.

The need to manage our national forest assets so as to provide sustainable income sources is as valid today as ever. A 2009 economic study for the National Association of Forest Owners found that the average per-acre contribution to gross domestic product from public forests in California was only 18 percent of the average contribution from privately owned forests. When public forests don’t do their share to create wealth, they become more of a liability and less of an asset for rural communities.

The U.S. Forest Service has been doing its best to get forest management projects approved and implemented, but it’s fighting a losing battle. The ground rules are stacked against it, varying from abuses of the Equal Access to Justice Act, which rewards nearly all litigants, to planning rules addressing sensitive species that are so complex that even in-depth expert assessments can’t pass legal muster. Former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth aptly described this as “analysis paralysis.”

Two things need to happen to put the national forests to work for our communities. The agency’s planning rules must be changed to make it feasible to get projects through the environmental compliance process. And we must align behind a shared vision for forest restoration and make clear to its opponents that their obstructionism is counterproductive and unwelcome.

Nicholas Dennis is chairman of the Northern California Society of American Foresters. He lives in Weed.

NEPA Process to Include Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

THE CEQ announced today in the Federal Register that “climate change and greenhouse gas emissions” must be considered in future NEPA processes.

The Council On Environmental Quality (CEQ) is the Federal board charged with implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Enacted in 1970, NEPA mandates that Federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their proposed actions before acting, principally through the preparation of Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) or Environmental Assessments (EA’s).

The announcement [Federal Register: February 23, 2010 (Volume 75, Number 35)][Notices][Page 8046] requests that public comments be submitted before the CEQ adopts the new “guidance” regulations.

The proposed new regulations also modify language related to Categorical Exclusions (CEs) and mitigation and monitoring.

More information is available at the following CEQ websites:

New CEQ NEPA Guidance [here]

In conjunction with NEPA’s 40th Anniversary Celebration, CEQ is publishing three draft NEPA guidance documents for review and comment. Below are links to the draft guidance documents and instructions for submitting comments:

- ESTABLISHING AND APPLYING CATEGORICAL EXCLUSIONS [here]

Comments are due 45 days after publication of the Federal Register notice.

Submit Comments to http://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/initiatives/nepa

- MITIGATION AND MONITORING [here]

Comments are due 90 days after publication of the Federal Register notice.

Submit Comments to http://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/initiatives/nepa

- CONSIDERING GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS AND CLIMATE CHANGE [here]

Comments are due 90 days after publication of the Federal Register notice.

Submit Comments to http://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/initiatives/nepa

Additional information is available at www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ceq/initiatives

Global Cooling, Not Warming, Is the Problem

An excellent summary and discussion of Holocene temperature trends has been posted at JoNova Blog. JoNova is the creation of Joanne Nova, an Australian science writer, former TV host, and the author of The Skeptics Handbook [here].

Her recent post, The Big Picture: 65 Million Years of Temperature Swings [here], was written primarily by David Lappi, Alaska geologist and President of Lapp Resources, Inc.

Of special interest are two graphs derived from ice core proxies, one of Greenland temperatures over the last 10,000 years and one of Antarctica over the last 12,000 years. They clearly demonstrate that polar temperatures have been declining since the Hypsithermal of 6,000 to 9,000 years ago.

The next graph of temperature from the ice core for the last 10,000 years (the current interglacial period) shows that Greenland is now colder than for most of that period (vertical scale in degrees C below zero). We can see the Medieval Warm Period 800 to 1,000 years ago was not particularly warm, and the Little Ice Age 150 to 650 years ago was one of the longest sustained cold periods during this interglacial. We are now recovering from this abnormal cold period, and the recovery started long before anthropogenic greenhouse gases were produced in any quantity. … Our current warming is well within natural variation, and in view of the general decline in temperatures during the last half of this interglacial, is probably beneficial for mankind and most plants and animals. The graph clearly shows the Minoan Warming (about 3200 years ago), the Roman Warming (about 2000 years ago), and the Medieval Warm Period (about 900 years ago). Great advances in government, art, architecture, and science were made during these warmer times.

Graph by David Lappi based on GISP2 Temperature Reconstruction and Accumulation Data [here], NOAA icecore-2475, reported in Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226 [here]. Click for larger image.

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Global Warming: The Economics of a Scare

by Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D.

Presentation to Oregon Economic Roundtable, February 17, 2010

GLOBAL WARMING: THE ECONOMICS OF A SCARE

Full text [here]

Selected excerpts:

The scientific hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming has completely collapsed. That is to say, human emissions of carbon dioxide due to everything from the burning of coal and oil on a massive scale to the respiration of six billion humans on this planet are not now having any measurable effect on the global climate, nor will they likely EVER have catastrophic consequences. Although this is my conclusion, based on an excellent education and a lifetime of experience, science is not determined by what I say, nor by my seniority or pedigree.

Although 31,000 American scientists, 9,000 of us with PhDs, have signed the Oregon Petition Project against Global Warming hysteria, science is not determined by a popular vote. Although one of the signers was the late Dr. Edward Teller, one of the great physicists of the 20th century and another was Professor Richard Lindzen who is widely acknowledged as the greatest meteorologist alive today, science is not determined by hierarchy or authority.

How then can I be so sure of my conclusion? How is science determined, even if it is never completely settled? EVIDENCE! Any scientist is welcome to come up with a hypothesis about how the world works. A clerk from a patent office did so in 1905. He published papers on both his Theory of Relativity and the Photoelectric Effect. His name was, of course, Albert Einstein. Evidence supporting his explanation for the Photoelectric Effect was easily obtained but evidence for his Theory of Relativity was much more difficult to find, because among other things, radioactivity had not yet been discovered.

Einstein famously pointed out that “One man can prove me wrong.” No one did and he eventually received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, when the Nobel Committee thought that there was then sufficient evidence to back up Einstein’s theoretical conjectures.

Proponents of Global Warming would like you to believe that their nearly two hundred year-old hypothesis is valid, if only because it has not been discarded over the centuries. But bad ideas seem to have a way of resurfacing every so often. WHY? We will get to that in a moment.

Proponents also will never accept Einstein’s comment that “One man can prove me wrong.” WHY? We will get to that in a moment.

Many scientists have pointed to fatal flaws in the Global Warming arguments. One of the simplest and therefore most elegant arguments comes from our own State Climatologist, George Taylor. Yes, I know that Governor Kulongoski forced George out, but he is still MY State Climatologist! George reasons that if Global Warming is really happening, then ALL observing stations should be seeing the warming. That is not the case, even in Oregon. Well sited and well maintained stations in rural areas do not show net warming. In contrast, urban stations show net warming in conjunction with the urbanization that has occurred around them. End of story. Localized warming is not Global Warming.

In science as in the law, the burden of proof lies with proponents, not opponents of a hypothesis. After spending a monumental 80 billion dollars in search of evidence to back up their conjecture, advocates have fallen back on substitutes for real evidence like computer simulations of the climate that seem real to the average guy but are no more realistic than a Hollywood movie. Aside from the fact that these simulations can easily fool the unwary, why do Global Warming proponents keep promoting them? … [more]

Ecology Politics and Crocodiles

In a post last week [here] we discussed certain aspects of a recent paper: Duncan, Sally L., Brenda C. McComb, and K. Norman Johnson. 2010. Integrating Ecological and Social Ranges of Variability in Conservation of Biodiversity: Past, Present, and Future. Ecology and Society 15(1): 5.

One claim made in that paper is worth deeper examination:

The role of burning by Native Americans is a subject of debate, but the general consensus is that humans individually and collectively had only a marginal impact on the creation of this [conifer early seral forest] condition.

There are at least three problems with that statement.

First, the authors are making a quantitative statement in a science paper. They claim a “consensus” exists. A consensus is defined as general agreement, unanimity, agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole. But the authors provide no evidence to support their claim. They did not take a poll of scientists, or if they did, they did not present the data or a summary of the data.

Second, the paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, Ecology and Society [here]. The editorial board is extensive [here]. Yet neither the unnamed peer-reviewers nor the editorial board questioned the claim. They did not request or examine the polling data, which frankly we do not believe exists. They accepted the quantitative statement in a science paper without question, a complete failure of the peer-review system.

Third, the statement is demonstrably false. We have posted numerous papers (and reviews of books) wherein the authors (who are environmental scientists) make the opposite claim; that indeed humans have individually and collectively had major impacts on the creation of a wide-range of vegetation conditions, including early seral conifer conditions, for millennia, across the continent. Therefore, the “consensus” claimed in support of the paper’s contention does not exist. QED.

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