Flawed Plan, Flawed Article, But We Clarify and Polish Our Apple
Science Mag, that bastion of political bias with occasional glimpses of actual science, published a garbled article which reviewed the blue-ribbon panel review of the languishing USFWS Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted. We have reviewed their review of the review, and present some clarifications for your illumination.
The article in question is Spotted Owl Recovery Plan Flawed, Review Panel Finds by Erik Stokstad, Science, Vol. 320, dated May 2, 2008. A parsimonious summary, all of one sentence long, is available [here]. But we shall provide you a little bit more than that. The article begins:
A blue-ribbon panel of scientists has confirmed major flaws in the proposed recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, a threatened species that has driven forest policy in the northwestern United States for nearly 2 decades. As did earlier reviews, the final one, by the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute (SEI) in Portland, Oregon, concludes that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS’s) plan does not put enough emphasis on protecting the owl’s habitat.
It also says that massive thinning of dry forests is needed to prevent habitat from going up in smoke—a recommendation that makes some environmentalists nervous.
Explanation: in 2006, fully 16 years after listing the northern spotted owl as an endangered species, the US Fish and Wildlife Service finally got around to drafting a Recovery Plan, something they should have done in Year One. It took a series of lawsuits to force them to do it.
But the Recovery Plan was fatally flawed, in that if it had been approved and followed, it would have been fatal to spotted owls, barred owls, owl habitat, old-growth forests, forests in general, rural economies, and various other species, communities, and institutions.
The USFWS’s Recovery Plan was dead in the water from the get-go, and everybody knew it. They withdrew it after a few weeks of high-pitched whining from all sectors. A private consulting company was hired to review the fatally flawed Plan. That company, the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute, appointed a “blue ribbon” panel and held a series of meetings. Their conclusion: back to the drawing board!
Ah, but with one added instruction: Stop Incinerating Spotted Owl Forests!!
We were not asked to serve on the panel. We are evidently not “blue ribbon” enough for those guys. We did not attend any of the meetings, because we were not invited. We submitted no testimony, other than TWO SOLID YEARS of daily HARANGUING on the Internet, wherein our primary message was and is: Stop Incinerating Our Forests!!
So maybe we had some effect after all.
Another tidbit from the Science article:
The [original] recovery plan for the spotted owl [contemplated in 1990] was never finished, however, because it was superseded by the overarching Northwest Forest Plan, which guides forest policy across the region. Many environmentalists think the Northwest Forest Plan wasn’t protective enough—the spotted owl population continues to decline by 3.7% a year …
The Northwest Forest Plan has been a catastrophic failure in every respect. The spotted owl population has continued to decline (3.7% decline per year is the same as 96.3% remainder per year, which raised to the 18th power equals 50.7%, which means the population has declined by roughly half since 1990). Spotted owl habitat has been decimated by megafires. Those megafires have destroyed the “continuity” of the habitat. The rural economies of Oregon and Washington have been the worst in the nation ever since the NWFP was instituted.
Those were the four goals of the NWFP: save the species, save the habitat, save the continuity, save the economy. So far the NWFP is oh for four, and is a miserable, colossal failure.
Back to the article:
In spring 2006, FWS formed a team to draft the recovery plan that included a broad range of expertise, including environmentalists and timber industry representatives, but lacked top scientists …
Yes, that part is true. We were not asked to sit on that team, either. Nor were any of the top scientists who predicted in 1994 all the failures that resulted from the NWFP. All the top scientists who spoke out and were dead right in 1994 have been ostracized from the process ever since.
After the first draft was sent to Washington, D.C., in September 2006, officials at the Department of the Interior (DOI) ordered the recovery team to add another management strategy, called Option 2, says recovery team member Dominick DellaSala, an ecologist who directs the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy in Ashland, Oregon.
Dominick DellaSala was on the recovery team. It follows then from the previous paragraph, that Dominick was not and is not a top scientist, in our opinion, and one that is widely shared among actual top scientists.
The addition of a second option greatly angered Dominick and the other less-than-top-scientist members of the Recovery Team, who wanted only one option. Their option called for blasting barred owls with shotguns and incinerating old-growth forests in whoofoos (Wildland Fires Used For Resource Benefit, an oxymoron if there ever was one).
That brain dead option was thoroughly excoriated by everybody with half a brain or more. The Recovery Team slunk back under their rocks, and the blue ribbon panel (BRP) was empanelled. The BRP said thin the damn forests, you stupid morons, so they don’t incinerate, or words to that effect.
But before that happened, the original Recovery team had a snit fit. Option 2 was bemoaned by all the arsonistic set.
Anonymous peer reviews, organized by the Society for Conservation Biology and two other science groups, raised many concerns. In August, for example, reviewers recruited by the Wildlife Society, a nonprofit association of wildlife conservation and management experts, called the draft plan “seriously flawed.”
Is “peer review” a joke or what? The eco-nazis organized “anonymous” peer reviews? Anonymous to everyone but the eco-nazis! Then they called in a BINGO! (A big international non-governmental organization, one of the Big Five, hugely political, rolling in dough, and about as expert in their field as Al Gore is in climatology!)
The Wildlife Society urged the agency to start over. In December 2007, the agency contracted with SEI to analyze all the reviews and suggest scientifically valid recovery options.
Science Mag leaves the impression that the USFWS contracted with SEI on the advice of TWS. Not hardly. TWS wanted the job, and the money. The USFWS went elsewhere, on the advice of a good many others. TWS was already represented on the original Recovery Team, in the person of Dominick DellaSala! TWS blew their chance, wanted only the one bad option, and basically shot themselves in the foot.
In a major departure from both previous reviews and the draft plan, the SEI panel called for much more aggressive thinning to reduce the risk of massive forest fires, especially in the dry, eastern part of the spotted owl’s range.
“We think the threat of wildfire is so great that we need to do thinning,” says lead author Steven Courtney of SEI.
Ecological restoration is also necessary, [Jerry] Franklin adds.
In contrast, DellaSala and reviewers for the Wildlife Society say that more needs to be learned about possible detrimental effects of thinning on spotted owls.
Well hush my mouth. The BRP and SEI reiterated the findings of SOS FORESTS!!! To a “T”. Jerry even threw in restoration forestry (although he minced the wording). And the BINGO arsonists mumbled something about how ignorant they are, and how we all have to waste another 16 years and endure all the failures of the last 16 years some more, while they try to figure out what everybody else already knows!
Given the pressure from BLM and the Forest Service, he [Dominick] is pessimistic about how much protection the final plan will afford old-growth forests. “It might get decided in the courts,” he notes.
What? The eco-nazis are going to sue? Whodda thunk it?
Is all this as plain as day yet? The NWFP was and is a colossal failure. Everybody knows it. Even the primary DRAFTERS of the NWFP know it. Everybody now realizes that stewardship is preferable to abandonment, that active management and restoration forestry might have a chance of saving old-growth and spotted owls, but that incineration DOES NOT save anything.
It just kills. Forest incineration is deadly to trees, owls, and other living things.
And that the eco-nazis are going to sue, sue, sue to ensure as much forest incineration as they can. No surprise there.
And that SOS Forests has been right about everything, from the beginning and even before then, going back all the way to 1990 when we joined the chorus of soon-to-be-ostracized real forest scientists who predicted the failure of the NWFP and offered the forest restoration solution, only to be ejected from the debate.
Well, well, well. The worm has certainly turned. Nobody has given us a blue ribbon yet, but we are polishing our acceptance speech.
by bear bait
The log market is down, not out. A sawmill can be sited, built, and put into operation in less than a year, about half to a third the time it takes to grow a plantable seedling. If the logs are available, the mill will be built.
What it takes is a guarantee that the logs will be available. The gummit needs to make a commitment. But that’s Step Two.
Step One is realizing that we need restoration forestry to save forests, endangered species, watersheds, history, and legacy. Slowly but surely Step One is being accomplished. Kudos to Steven Courtney and SEI for their assistance with Step One.
Until cutting green trees can be seen by the public as the “green” and “patriotic” thing for us to do, not many sticks will be moving to mills. Portraying wood as the “building materials that make America strong” can be one way of propping up the value of wood. Showing that using good silviculture and cutting green trees is very good for our environment can also drive the public into using more wood.
Will it be soon enough to save our forests? Us foresters have the benefit of WISE to basically etch in stone our prophecies and predictions to show the public we’ve been right all along. We need to build this trust to slow this emergency situation in our forests. Otherwise, the Gaia-ists self-fulfilling prophecies of global-eco-Armageddon will come true.
by bear bait
This is the Yew Nited States of ‘Merica. We don’t pay no nevermind to history. Not at the PhD level of education, or the Joe Sixpack level. Nobody seems to care how we got here from there, or if that process has a reverse that might be of benefit.
Until THAT history can be taught in schools, we be doomed. And that history won’t be taught in schools because those places are atrophying and growing more rigid by the day. It is now more about their voting for their protectors, their minders, their benefactors, than it is about what Sally or Billy learn. I have no hope for having an educated electorate in how the living world really works and where humans are a part of it. We are bad. No more need to be said. Next.
And from that we have this insane land use policy across the West, this insane overuse of water resources to promote growth that is not sustainable in a desert with a huge evaporation rate and only winter snows to provide water as it melts in summer. I sometimes wonder how much of the water resource is lost just in transport from its source to end user.
So to have my incantations chiseled in the stone, I will say that if we don’t have a policy of physically removing fuels to a state where the remaining fuel can burn without catastrophic results, we will fail at every juncture.
Trees grow during droughts. They even germinate and add to their own numbers. The addition of fuel never stops. Needle and leaf litter, small twigs and limbs fall, bark sloughs, grasses and brush grow and die back annually, creating fine fuels. Less competitive trees die as they stand, and weaker ones suffer from insect attacks. The fuel buildup never ends.
But by taking out a whole lot of trees, leaving a number that matches the site, climate and ground conditions, we remove enough fuel so that directed understory burning might take place on a schedule of need. Over time, modifications of effort will fine tune the process. If Native Americans could do it from sea to shining sea, one would hope an advanced society such as we purport to enjoy today could also bring about a human managed wildland that would be around for generations, providing the many products and peace of mind that are of such benefit to people. But so far, there is no national will for a solution that works, and the obfuscation experts are still driving the process with their grants, trust money, and foundation help. They have invented a perpetual motion machine of sorts, for advocacy, but like all those machines, new energy is all that will allow them to run, and there seems to be no end to new money to drive their agenda. Buy asbestos underwear. Don’t build at the top end of a draw.
The worm might have turned as to taking out a number of trees to protect the remaining from fire, but the market has turned also, and softwood timber is in a world wide glut. The created expense of the pointed attempts to make forests as difficult to log as possible have enjoyed huge success, and all those decommissioned roads, roadbeds ripped, culverts pulled, and now planted to trees, are going to present a huge obstacle to accessing the land that needs trees removed. Into what market are they proposed to be sent? Is there a buyer left to purchase the timber? $4.50 diesel has reduced truck haul distances and exploded logging costs. Anything you do is going to burn fuel; even the drip torches to burn slash piles and thinned understories, and that fuel costs double what it did just a year or so ago.
I could go into myriad reasons as to why removing thinnings is going to be much more costly that it would have been a few years ago. But that is not the point of my raising the issue. The point of my raising the issue is that to get the job done, it will have to be subsidized. Yep. Sub-see-dized. The landowner, Uncle Sammy, is going to have to pay to “git ‘er done.” No other way. When the market place has reduced demand in the USA for dimension softwood lumber by 19 BILLION board feet in less than two years, (19 billion feet is more timber than has ever been cut West of the Mississippi in any one year), you have to realize that the market cannot afford the logging costs of small log thinning at this time. You can’t get there from here. I do not think that in any way is the US Congress going to subsidize the people their Green fellow travelers have painted as greedy self serving timber thieves for so long. Those Timber Barons (a group of great grand daughters in St. Paul and Chicago in their 80’s) will not get one dime of subsidy from Congress to thin public timber.
In a very interesting twist and turn of events, the Eastern Oregon Econazi Lobby has figured out they can’t get their forests thinned and fire proofed without a market for the logs produced. Those mills are presently shut down, out of wood, with little private timber available because the private landowners don’t want to cut trees at a loss to send to town just for the drill and a chance to run up a fuel bill. So the USFS has been prodded to put up a modicum of salvage from two of the great fires of last summer. It has been Oregon congressional folks and the econazi lobby that has driven the process, in hopes of keeping the mills alive. My bet is the USFS will put the minimum stumpage rate too high, due to inexperience and ignorance, and nobody will come to the dance, buy a ticket, let alone bid on the box lunch. A party attended by government and environmentalists, and the center of attraction, the logless sawmills, will not be there. The wood will be too far degraded by the time the sales are put up, and the price will be too high.
My prescient intuitions and feelings come from a lifetime of being around the agencies and having observed their hip shots, empty chamber clicks on the firing pin, flinches, and just plain aimed foot shootings. Sometimes the foot was in a mouth when the gun went off.
This Oreygawn, where future Governor Straub implored the State to put the unemployed to work tomorrow planting trees!!! By God, he would!!! And some knowing person leaned over and explained that to plant trees, you first had better gather cones, by site and elevation, extract the seeds, cool them through dormancy, plant them in a prepared bed, grow some seedlings, and then plant them. The process will take more than one term of a Governor, just to plant the first tree. And the same process is the law for laying out timber sales, even salvage, and by the time they get from here to there, the trees have rotted enough to lose the value that would have made the logging NOT have to be subsidized. Time to do that was last year while the land was still smoking. Too little too late. My thoughts. My take on it. Prove me wrong. Please.