SOS Forests

Incinerating California Judiciously

The lamebrained leftwing arsonist judges on the 9th Circuit Court have done it again. This week they issued an “opinion” that enjoined the USFS Plumas National Forest from implementing pilot thinning projects called for in the 1998 Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act.

The Plumas proposed thinning thicket forests overloaded fuels and crowded trees to create DFPZ’s (Defensible Fuel Profile Zones: areas approximately 1/4 to 1/2 mile wide where fuel loadings are reduced, usually along roads) that would have saved hundreds of thousands of acres of Sierra forest from catastrophic fire [here].

Last October, Judge Morrison C. England of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California issued a written judgment denying the injunctions demanded by a coalition of environmental groups led by Sierra Forest Legacy, formerly known as Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign. Others in the coalition are the Center For Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society.

The Plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction on grounds that the Slapjack, Basin and Empire Projects risked irreparable harm to old forest habitat and imperiled wildlife including California spotted owls, Pacific fishers and American martens. However, no fishers or martens have been seen within 200 miles of any of the project areas during the last 40 years.

The Projects are forest thinnings in the Wildland-Urban Interface, that most dangerous of fire zones. The Empire Project will treat 2,500 acres immediately adjacent to five communities at risk: Quincy, Massack, Greenhorn, Keddie and Butterfly Valley. The 35,00 acre Slapjack Project is near the communities of Brownsville, Challenge, Clipper Mills, Dobbins, Feather Fall, Forbestown, and Strawberry Valley, which collectively are home to between 5,000 and 7,0000 people. The Basin Project is 1,300 acres of similar selective thinning.

Judge England’s logic was impeccable. He found that catastrophic fires destroy endangered species habitat and endanger human habitat, too. He also found that thinning forests in the right way helps make forests resilient to fire and fires easier to control [here]. Judge England wrote in his decision:

DFPZs [Defensible Fuel Profile Zones, i.e. properly thinned areas] have hence been proven effective in reducing fire intensity, controlling fire spread, and protecting ecological resources like habitat…

Fire protection through vegetation management in these areas is therefore important both from the standpoint of wildlife and humans. For wildlife, unchecked wildfire may completely destroy habitat. For humans, both lives and property are at stake…

On the evidence of the evidence before it, the Court believes that a greater danger of irreparable harm exists in not vigorously addressing the over-forested conditions that are present within the Plumas National Forest. This danger is not speculative but very real, as evidenced by the large wildfires that ravaged the Plumas this very summer…

The long-term benefit of preventing stand replacing fires which completely destroy habitat is preferable over any short term benefits derived from retaining dense forest structure preferred by old growth species…

The Plaintiffs appealed, and in March arguments were heard before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco [here].

Various points were raised. The Plaintiff’s attorney, David Edelson of Berkeley, California, argued that 20 inch trees are perforce old-growth based on their diameter. However, true old-growth trees are rarely that small. I have a Douglas-fir next my driveway that is 24 inches in diameter and 26 years old. Determining the age of trees is fairly simple. Why nobody involved bothered to do that in this case is beyond me. Perhaps if a real forester were hired, that kind of confusion could be ameliorated.

The judges seemed concerned that merchantable-sized trees would be harvested. I am aware of no law that limits the USFS to sub-merchantable size classes. However, there are numerous laws that require the US Government to supply timber to the national economy from federal lands. Why none of those laws were mentioned is again a mystery to me.

The Plaintiff’s attorney claimed irreparable harm would be done to martens and fishers that do not exist within 200 miles of the treatment areas. That seemed like a stretch of the truth. He also argued that thinning would impair spotted owl habitat, again a falsehood.

The Defendant’s attorney, Jennifer Scheller of Washington D.C., seemed to know nothing whatsoever about forestry, or forests, or wildlife habitat, or much else. She was nervous, confused, and ill-prepared. The US Attorney who chose the Defendant’s attorney apparently thought the issue was a joke or a practice game for greenhorns.

Sure enough, the 9th Circuit Court’s opinion this week centered on those very issues. The judges were Stephen Reinhardt, Raymond C. Fisher, and John T. Noonan. Noonan wrote the opinion [here].

By the way, the Attorney General of California, Edmund G. Brown, Jr. (Moonbeam Medfly Brown), filed an amicus brief in support of the Plaintiffs.

Intervening on behalf of the Defendants were Tuolumne County Alliance For Resources & Environment, California Forest Counties Schools Coalition, Regional Council Of Rural Counties, Western Council Of Industrial Workers, Klamath Alliance For Resources & Environment, Coarse Gold Resource Conservation District/Eastern Madera County Fire Safe Council; Tulare County Resource Conservation District, Sierra Resource Conservation District, Strawberry Property Owners’ Association, Huntington Lake Association, Huntington Lake Big Creek Historical Conservancy, California Equestrian Trails & Lands Coalition, California Forestry Association, California Licensed Foresters Association, California/Nevada Snowmobile Association, American Forest & Paper Association, American Forest Resource Council, Blueribbon Coalition, California Ski Industry Association, California Cattlemen’s Association, Quincy Library Group, and Plumas County.

Reinhardt, Fisher, and Noonan held that the district court (Judge England) had abused its discretion. They reversed and remanded. From their decision:

There is no disagreement that USFS is authorized to take action to prevent the occurrence of forest fires. One necessary step is the clearing of brush, including the removal of small trees. Doing so involves the expenditure of funds. The USFS does not assert, however, that it is necessary as a preventive measure to cut down the larger trees that provide the habitat in which various species thrive. These trees constitute a desirable prize for loggers who seek to convert them into lumber for commercial purposes. The USFS acknowledges that its reason for selling the forest trees to commercial loggers is to raise funds to carry on its fire prevention duties.

The lawyer for the USFS failed to assert that it is the trees that are LEFT BEHIND and NOT CUT which render the forest both fire resilient and ecologically whole. It is not what is removed that matters, but what is left. Jennifer Scheller fumbled those questions badly, most likely because she knows absolutely nothing about forestry.

Even so, the “desirable prize” language is pusillanimous. Loggers don’t care what trees they cut. They do the job they are hired to do. Commercial loggers don’t buy trees, wood product manufacturers do.

Loggers are the new Jews. It is oh so easy for lefty propagandists to spit on loggers. The 9th Circuit Court jabbers the same nazi rhetoric without a clue in the world who does the woods work and who buys harvested material.

As to the USFS selling material they harvest in forest practice operations, that is what they have been charged to do by the Organic Act, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, the National Forest Management Act, and various other Federal laws. What do the judges think the USFS is supposed to do, give the logs away? Burn them in heap?

Do the judges serve for FREE? Do they give away their services, and the court room furniture, too? Of course not. They demand money, and rightfully so. Similarly, the USFS has been mandated to provide raw wood materials to American industry on a willing seller/willing buyer highest bid basis. That’s their mandate, by law, and something the USFS has been doing for over 100 years.

The 9th Circuit Court found a USFS document that stated:

Timber sale contracts provide a mechanism for the efficient removal of commercially-valuable sawtimber. Contracts that have sufficient value offer capabilities for funding the accomplishment of additional resource management goals. Records from recent timber offerings indicate that sales with higher volumes per acre attract higher bids. Sales yielding an average 4.5 mbf/acre provide approximately $112/mbf, compared to only $38/mbf for 1.5 mbf/acre.

For those of you not familiar with log lingo, 4.5 mbf is 4,500 board feet, an amount roughly equivalent to one log truck load. Most forested acres in the Plumas NF hold 25,000 board feet or, so they proposed to thin about a quarter of the standing volume. That’s a very gentle thinning, and probably insufficient to fully accomplish the goals of forest resiliency and restoration forestry.

The judges had a cow about that, though. They found that removing 1,500 boartd feet per acre (less than 10 percent of the volume) was highly inefficient, would definitely not provide fire safety, and so was imminently preferable, in their nutty opinion. In their defense, the Defense attorney was so ignorant of forestry that she failed to point any of that out.

The judges (Noonan) wrote:

Two for one always has an attractive ring. But are there no alternative ways of getting money to do the clearing that is imperative? Obviously, there may be. First of all, there is the USFS’s own budget. Does that budget contain any funds that could be devoted to fuel removal? Is every one of its activities so necessary and so tightly allocated that no money could be shifted? We do not know the answer because this alternative has not been explored.

The depth of what the judges do not know is profound. Their ignorance dips to extreme lows. Noonan also wrote:

The legal merits of the Sierra Forest’s case, at this stage of the litigation, are strong. To justify a preliminary halt to the projects the real possibility of irreparable harm is still required. It is not necessary to canvass all the species that may be affected and all the environmental harm that might ensue. It suffices in this case to take account of the status of the spotted owl whose range relates to the affected forests. True, the species exists in southern California as well as in the northwest; but the species as a whole has been classified as “sensitive” by the Forest Service. The proposed logging will not destroy the species. What it will do is reduce its established habitat. The possibility that this reduction in its range will irreparably damage the sensitive species cannot be dismissed.

That’s pure poppycock. The thinning will SAVE the habitat from catastrophic destruction by holocaust fire. Duh. The judges are painfully dumb and made it up as they went along. More of Noonan’s folly:

The question we address here is whether USFS’s choice of funding for fire reduction – rather than fire reduction itself – outweighs California’s preservation interests. We conclude that it does not, given that “special solicitude” should be afforded California’s stake in its natural resources and that the Forest Service did not consider alternatives to its choice of funding.

Translation: the State of California (in the person of Moonbeam Medfly Brown) deserves special solicitude because they would rather have California forests incinerated than permit a log to be sold.

The dimbulbs would burn the place down, want to burn the state down, hate forests, despise “loggers,” and revel in their ability to monkey wrench entire communities. That attitude is so nazi-like that is it vomitorious.

Noonan was so taken by his own opinion that he added the following “concurring” statements:

That judges cannot supplement their salaries, however inadequate they may be, by imposing fines provided by law on those convicted of lawbreaking seems to be a pretty elementary principle of justice. …

The financial incentive of the Forest Service in implementing the forest plan is as operative, as tangible, and as troublesome as it would be if instead of an impartial agency decision the agency was the paid accomplice of the loggers. …

That the difference between judicial and legislative functions makes a difference as to the impropriety of monetary benefit to the decision-makers is a fallacy. The bribery of a congressman is a crime. …

Noonan first compares Federally-mandated timber sales to extortion. Then he calls them collusion. Then he calls them bribery.

What has Noonan been smoking? When he goes down to the lumber yard and buys a board, with real money, is that extortion, collusion, bribery? Are all market transactions extortion, collusion, and bribery in the eyes of Noonan, the Communist?

Is that what he’s been smoking, the Communist Manifesto?

The painful truth is that 9th Circuit judges are in fact Communists, anti-American, and anti-human. It is the 9th Circuit judges that should be pariahs and run out of the country on a rail, not hard-working American loggers.

One saving grace to all this malarkey is that the case has been remanded. That means the USFS has the opportunity to a proper EIS and show it to Judge England again. This time the USFS should employ foresters who know how to do restoration forestry, know about spotted owls and their habitat needs, know how to define and describe the desired future forest condition, know how to determine the ages of trees, know how to write plans, know how to tend forests, etc.

Put some pros on the job, not greenhorn know nothings. Otherwise, the USFS will shoot itself in the foot again, the final outcome will be holocaust.