Congressman Peter DeFazio (D, OR) is preparing legislation he calls the Pacific Northwest Forest Legacy Act. A “draft discussion document” is slated to appear on a new website DeFazio has established [here].
Already on Defazio’s site there are “Frequently Asked Questions,” an outline of the Bill, and “volume estimates,” but the actual proposed draft Bill is not up yet.
The descriptive verbiage indicates that the Pacific Northwest Forest Legacy Act is, in part, an outgrowth of the Dec. 13, 2007 testimonies to the US Senate Energy & Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests [here]. SOS Forests has also posted previously on the political run-up to this legislation [here, and here].
Without the actual language, it is impossible to judge the current merits and demerits of the Pacific Northwest Legacy Act. Some of the descriptive verbiage that has been posted is encouraging; other is not. In some parts the verbiage appears to be self-contradictory. But in any case, it is the actual legal language of the legislation that must be debated, adjusted, refined, and finalized.
There is no substantial reason to be in favor or opposed to the Pacific Northwest Forest Legacy Act at this time. Even if the draft doc was available, no doubt there’s a lot more sausage-making yet to go. But it does seem to have some potential value, if only to bring forest issues to the forefront.
SOS Forests will be tracking the PNWFLA very closely. We have even created a special category. Expect updates and analyses right here as this process unfurls.
January 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Pacific Northwest Forest Legacy Act
There has been no global warming since 1998. The solar cycle that lifted the planet out of the Little Ice Age is over. That worm has turned, and we are headed back into a cooling cycle. This year, 2008 is expected to be the coolest since the early 1990’s. And 2009 will be cooler yet.
Global temperatures are not affected by atmospheric carbon dioxide. The planet is cooling despite “record” levels of CO2 (today’s CO2 concentrations are minuscule compared to paleo-atmospheric concentrations). Humanity has not warmed the planet. Temperatures are dipping despite everything humans do.
The current and former Chiefs of the USFS, Gail Kimbell and Dale Bosworth, both blame global warming for record forest fire acreage during their tenures. The Association of Fire Ecologists went so far as to issue a Declaration calling for direct and immediate conversion of forests to brush via a No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch it Rot, No Regrets policy.
The Wildland Fire Leadership Council, the federal advisory committee that oversees federal firefighting and is dominated by special interest groups, specifically the Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society, has launched a “Black, Dead, Burned Forests Are Beautiful” campaign. The propaganda effort is in support of their WFU program, the Let It Burn policy that encompasses most of the western U.S., public and private land alike.
Yes, in December the USFS formally extended its Let It Burn directive to hundreds of millions acres of private land, an official acknowledgment of their de facto policies of the last 15 years.
That announcement comes on the heels of a government-wide “Blame the Victims” approach to addressing the tens of thousands of private homes the USFS has incinerated during the last 15 years. Nearly 90 million acres have burned in wildfires in the last decade and a half, including the largest fires in the history of every western state.
The destruction of America’s public forests has been horrific. Trillions (with a “t”) of dollars in resource values have been lost. Regional economies have been crippled. Wildlife populations have crashed. Millions of acres of heritage old-growth forests have been converted to brush.
But hark! That’s all over now. Since global warming was the cause, now that global cooling has set in the problem has been solved. Right?
Wrong. Global warming was never the cause; bad land management was and is. And since the bad land management promulgated by the USFS and WFLC is getting worse, expect fire seasons to get worse, too, regardless of “climate change.”
Expect more acres, more forests, more homes to be incinerated this year. Your watershed, neighborhood, property has been targeted. It does not matter whether you live in a rural, urban, or suburban setting. Fire does not discriminate. And megafires arising from the deliberate actions (and inactions) of the federal government especially do not discriminate.
The time to act is now. The time to reintroduce stewardship into the landscape is now. The federal government needs to hear that message and get it in gear, now. The mistakes of the last 15 years must be corrected, now.
Regardless of global warming, cooling, or “climate change.”
January 22, 2008 | 5 Comments | Topic: Federal forest policy
This morning I read a dead tree press article about defensible space. The article was okay, but the reporter felt compelled to add the usual PC canard about fire suppression having caused fuel build-ups.
I’m not going to link to the article because I don’t want to embarrass the reporter. There was nothing special about his remark; it’s a common misstatement and falsehood. I could cite thousands of other, similar utterances, probably millions if I had the desire and capital to do it.
Far better (and cheaper) would be to quash this canard once and for all.
Fire suppression, throughout its entire history, has not added one ounce of fuel to the environment. Not even a microgram of fuel has been added by fire suppression.
The culprit is photosynthesis. All the biomass in the Biosphere got there directly or indirectly via photosynthesis. There is an exception: sulfur bacteria growing near undersea vents, but besides that paltry scum, the rest of Life is photosynthetic in origin or dependency.
Reducing, hamstringing, and/or banning fire suppression altogether will not solve our fire crisis. Withholding fire suppression will not stop any fires.
It’s the biotic fuels that are burning, and they got there via photosynthesis.
Another non-solution to our fire crisis would be to attempt to eliminate photosynthesis. This would be an impossible task, for Life is Resilient. If it could be done, it would also have the unintended consequence of killing off all oxygen-dependent life forms, including you and me.
January 20, 2008 | 8 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests
There’s a lot of good stuff building up here at SOS Forests, the New Version. But there’s a bunch of good stuff on the other W.I.S.E. subsites, too.
Forest, Fire, and Wildlife News contains a number of items that boggle the sensibilities. They amuse, surprise, shock, and delight the cynically-inclined! Many suggestions for news articles to post have been received, and all are very much appreciated.
Wildlife and People also has some enlightening posts, and much more to come.
The Colloquia are gradually expanding, too. Bit by bit the best new paradigm science is inching onto the site. Not as fast as I’d like, because it’s time-consuming to read (or re-read) cutting-edge science books and reports and then write decent reviews. But we’re getting there.
Lots to read at W.I.S.E. already, though. And fun to read, whether you agree with the item/author or not. Not to mention educational.
Feel free to comment elsewhere at W.I.S.E. I think Forest, Fire, and Wildlife News especially has some doozies worth a shot or two.
January 19, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Introduction
The US Forest Service is redesigning their NEPA approach. Instead of forest by forest creation of NEPA docs (such as Environmental Impact Statements) they plan to concentrate that work in six new NEPA “service centers.”
For an excellent report on this new arrangement, see the Rogue Pundit [here].
Consolidating the Forest Service
In 2006, the Forest Service hired a consultant to study its work involved in satisfying the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The goal was to come up with recommendations for improving efficiency and saving money, with an eye towards possibly privatizing the work. The resulting feasibility study (here) hasn’t exactly impressed the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Here are the calmer parts of the press release…
The U.S. Forest Service is on the verge of approving a massive restructuring that will remove land management planning from individual forests, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The resulting reorganization will affect one in four agency jobs, shrink its on-the-ground firefighting militia and rigidify resource planning.
The plan, called a “Business Process Reengineering,” would consolidate virtually all work performed under NEPA, the basic planning law that shapes significant agency resource management actions. Altogether, nearly 8,000 employees out of the agency’s 30,000 person workforce now perform NEPA-related work. Almost all of this work is done at the forest level.
Under the Business Process Reengineering, all of these functions would be moved into six “eco-based Service Centers” where forest planning would be standardized… [more]
January 18, 2008 | 4 Comments | Topic: Federal forest policy
The most important things grown in Oregon, the things we most desire to sustain, are not Douglas-fir, salmon, spotted owls, or watershed values. The most important things grown in Oregon are children, human children. That’s what we need to sustain: children and their parents. Without people, there really is no point to sustaining anything else.
Children should grow up where it is clean and green, where there is real dirt, real grass, real trees, and a big outdoors to explore.
Once upon a time human beings considered themselves to be a part of nature. Once there was a time when human beings were the Caretakers of Creation. We were part of nature, nature was part of us. Humanity has tended our landscapes for thousands of years.
That time has apparently passed. Today modern humanity is widely considered to be an infection, a cancer on nature. Ask any environmentalist, “What is the most overriding problem facing the planet today?” and he or she will tell you: too many people.
They will not have to think about it. The response will be knee-jerk automatic. The dogma has been memorized and re-memorized: too many people.
A long time ago forests were valued as home, the neighborhood, places where people lived.
Today, in contrast, forests are valued as dehumanized places. Dehumanization outweighs all the old, passé values. As long as a landscape is devoid of humanity it does not matter if the forest is old or young, beautiful or ugly, green or burned to snags and soot. A “forest” can be a burned-out wasteland, lacking in every respect including trees, but if it is dehumanized, then all is well.
January 18, 2008 | 3 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests
At a Denver news conference yesterday the US Forest Service announced findings that “mountain pine beetles will kill the majority of Colorado’s large-diameter lodgepole pine forests within three to five years.”
From the Denver Post [here]
Beetle-kill rate in Colorado “catastrophic”
By Howard Pankratz, The Denver Post
GOLDEN — Federal and state forestry officials say that at current rates, mountain pine beetles will kill the majority of Colorado’s large-diameter lodgepole pine forests within three to five years.
In a news conference this morning, Regional Forester Rick Cables and Jeff Jahnke, the Colorado State Forester, announced the results of the 2007 aerial survey of the state’s forests.
The survey concluded that the beetle infestation claimed 500,000 new acres of trees last year, bringing the total number of acres up to 1.5 million since the first sign of the outbreak in 1996.
Officials described the infestation as a “catastrophic event” that has now crossed into Front Range areas.
“Dead and dying trees that were isolated to five northern Colorado counties last year can now be seen in some Front Range areas, as well as southern Wyoming,” Cables said in a statement released at the U.S. Forest Service regional office in Golden.
“The bark infestation has spread dramatically,” he said. “This is an unprecedented event.”…
But there is no way to stop the beetles, and he anticipated that the forests would soon mirror those of Yellowstone National Park after fires swept through in 1988.
He said that areas full of dead trees would be susceptible to fires for the next 15 or 20 years.
He was optimistic, however, that those areas would regenerate. He said that within 10 years, there should be a carpet of lodgepole saplings about waist high.
January 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Saving Forests
The US Forest Service has announced their Open Space Conservation Strategy. The Strategy involves the promotion of “wilderness values” on 400 million acres of private land.
“If people have an incentive to hold on to wildlands (rather than develop them), we as a society benefit from that,” she [Gail Kimbell] said in an interview. “We all benefit from keeping wildlands wild.”
That statement is absurd. The real motive underlying the USFS Open Space Strategy is to apply their newest and most favored wildland management tool, wildland fire, to private lands. The Strategy originated with the Nature Conservancy, the biggest international “non-governmental organization” in the world. The Strategy is in line TNC’s strategy of purchasing private land and converting it to public land at a hefty profit (in 2006 TNC’s non-taxable income was over a $1 billion). Burned out private properties can be had more cheaply.
And quite a few private lands, at that. Total USFS land is 192 million acres nationwide, including Alaska. The addition of 400 million more acres of private land more than triples their burning zones. Consider that Oregon is approximately 50 million acres total. The new Strategy will encompass an area 8 times the size of Oregon. It should be noted, however, that the Feds already own more than half of Oregon, and hold similar proportions of all western states. An additional 400 million acres encompasses almost all the land west of the Continental Divide.
The new Strategy is the largest land grab since the Louisiana Purchase.
January 15, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Federal forest policy
The following editorial (unsigned) appeared this morning in the Portland Oregonian [here].
Mark Rey looked really happy to be in Portland on Friday.
We thought it might be because Rey, whose job as undersecretary of agriculture includes oversight of the U.S. Forest Service, liked the view across the verdant West Hills. But maybe he was just thrilled not to be in Montana . . . where a federal judge was threatening to slap him in jail.
The story begins in 2002 when air tankers dropped thousands of pounds of flame retardant on a fire raging around Fall Creek in central Oregon. One ingredient in that chemical soup was ammonium phosphate; it killed an estimated 20,000 fish in the creek. That rate of piscine mortality prompted a Eugene-based group called Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics to file a lawsuit. Two years later, Judge Donald Molloy ruled in Missoula that the Forest Service had violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act when it failed to go through a public process to analyze potential harm from retardant. He promptly ordered a formal environmental analysis. Last week the judge said the Forest Service, and Rey, have been duplicitous ever since. Then he took to talking about holding Rey in contempt of court and rattling those keys to the cell.
It was Rey, the judge understood, who years earlier had slapped an embargo on an agency environmental analysis of retardant, one more reminder of the sad track record of this administration in opting to ignore science for political ends.
We have long held reservations about federal policy regarding wildfire in the West. We start with mounting concern over the rate at which firefighting costs are raging through Forest Service resources. In 2006, the agency spent $1.6 billion — more than 40 percent of its entire budget — putting out fires. That left it with a brutally abbreviated balance to spend on all the other things we think it should be doing: planning and conducting timber sales, managing recreation areas and wildlife habitat, and massively ramping up the tree-thinning and brush maintenance that would make our public forests far less susceptible to fire in the first place.
All too soon, another fire season will be upon us. Once again the vast infrastructure of the firefighting community will be brought to bear. Clearly we face growing challenges in protecting housing, especially in that increasingly controversial interface between urban and wild lands. And clearly decades of policy that permitted fuel loads to accumulate in the woods means letting fires run their natural course is rarely a viable option.
That’s why the administration must move now to chart a new course, especially here in the West, for managing fire on public lands. And why the environmental community must partner in, not set up roadblocks to, this process. Appealing though it may seem to some, jailing high-ranking government officials is not the answer.
January 15, 2008 | 6 Comments | Topic: Federal forest policy
This morning US Forest Service Region 6 (Pacific Northwest) Regional Forester Linda Goodman announced her retirement at the end of March. The following statement accompanied her announcement:
This morning, I sent the following message out to all Region 6 employees and had a conference call with our Regional Leadership Team telling them I am retiring the end of March. I wanted you all to hear from me personally of my plans and to tell you how much I have enjoyed working with you. The message below applies to all of you, too! Thank you for all that you have done for me. I feel very blessed with good friends and colleagues!
Dear R-6 Employees:
When I think about my almost 34 years with the Forest Service, I know how lucky I have been. I have had the opportunity to work with dedicated professionals who love the land and are committed to America’s forests and grasslands and our youth for today and future generations. Whatever the area our employees work from administration to Job Corps to natural resources to cooperative programs, I know they are providing service to America and can be proud of what they accomplish every day. I also know that we have leaders in place that I have great confidence in leading us to even a higher level. Our Chief has the vision, dedication, and the compassion to make tough choices each and every day.
This week is my official fifth year (plus another six months as acting!) as your Regional Forester. I have been honored to serve in that position and feel good about where the region is and where we are heading. Together we have made the region a good investment and are focused on the land. We have an outstanding leadership team and one that will continue to focus on our priorities of landscape resiliency, infrastructure and public service, and organizational leadership. I have every confidence in their ability. I also have enjoyed working with our many partners and know that they will continue to be engaged in national forest management; we can’t do it alone.
Because of all of that, I am comfortable announcing my retirement effective the end of March. It is not easy leaving the people I care so much about but I have made friendships that will last a lifetime and I will always care about our employees and the Forest Service. Thank you for all that you have done for me; I can’t begin to tell you how much you all mean to me.
And remember what Teddy Roosevelt said, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” Our work is worth doing. Please take care of yourself and your coworkers - everyone goes home every night.
Linda
January 15, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: Federal forest policy
