Congressional Bait and Switch Wilderness Holocaust Games
Last March Congress passed and President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Act of 2009 (S.22 was attached to H.R.146).
Over 100 bills were bundled together that designated more than 2 million acres new wildernesses in nine states, 1,000 more miles of wild and scenic rivers, national monuments, national conservation areas, trail systems, historic parks, and more national heritage areas in 8 states.
The Omnibus Public Lands Act was no sooner signed than proponents began clamoring for more wilderness. The 58 million-acre Clinton/Dombeck Roadless Rule was enjoined by Judge Brimmer [here] precisely because it designated, in a defacto manner, all those acres as wilderness — without the requisite act of Congress. Wilderness proponents wish that Rule to be reinstated by the Obama Administration. They also desire more Congressional designations.
Sen. Jon Tester’s new proposed bill [here, here, here] is on behalf of wilderness proponents, and it will result in catastrophic fires that are large and severe. Damages from those fires to the environment and to the local community and region will be long-lasting.
Unbeknownst to many, hidden in the package of 170 or so bills that made up the Omnibus Public Lands Act is Title IV - Forest Landscape Restoration [here], which authorizes landscape-scale “ecosystem restoration of priority forest landscapes”. Each project must be:
(i) at least 50,000 acres;
(ii) comprised primarily of forested National Forest System land, but may also include land under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, land under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or other Federal, State, tribal, or private land;
The good points are these:
* The purpose is to encourage the collaborative, science-based ecosystem restoration of priority forest landscapes
* Title IV adopts a landscape restoration strategy that identifies and prioritizes ecological restoration treatments within landscapes that are least 50,000 acres in size
* It includes restoration of the structure and composition of old growth stands according to the pre-fire suppression old growth conditions characteristic of the forest type, maximizing the retention of large trees, as appropriate for the forest type, to the extent that the trees promote fire-resilient stands
* Treatments must be in accordance with the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (no poison pill “categorical exclusions”)
* It calls for reducing the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire, improving fish and wildlife habitat, including for endangered, threatened, and sensitive species, and maintaining or improving water quality and watershed function
* It benefits local economies by providing local employment and training opportunities and the production of forest products including biomass for energy generation
* It is collaborative and (supposed to be) well-funded.
The funding ($40,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2009 through 2019) has been authorized but not allocated. That means the stated intent of Congress is to fund Title IV, but they haven’t gotten around to actually sending the dollars to the USFS.
Congress, wittingly or otherwise, has determined that forest restoration is desirable to reduce the costs and damages that result from wildfire. They also hope that forest restoration will encourage “ecological, economic, and social sustainability” and utilize “forest restoration byproducts” to benefit local rural economies and improve forest health.
Important point: restoration is not rehabilitation — restoration is the treatment of forests BEFORE they burn whereas rehabilitation is the attempt to repair former forests AFTER they have been incinerated.
All thing considered, Title IV is a surprisingly advanced and even ground-breaking change in Federal forest policy. It promotes a new mission for the US Forest Service: restoration forestry.
Title IV allows and even encourages the treatment of old-growth stands at risk from catastrophic fire:
[A] collaborative forest landscape restoration proposal shall… be based on a landscape restoration strategy that… fully maintains, or contributes toward the restoration of, the structure and composition of old growth stands according to the pre-fire suppression old growth conditions characteristic of the forest type, taking into account the contribution of the stand to landscape fire adaptation and watershed health and retaining the large trees contributing to old growth structure.
Implicit but not directly stated is that restoration requires some previous reference condition as a target. That means that analysis of historical forest conditions and influences (including historical anthropogenic fire) is necessary to describe the reference condition. Title IV does not specify historical analyses, but it is impossible to proceed with a “landscape restoration strategy that… is complete or substantially complete” without them.
But… no funding!!!! The current Congress has squandered $trillions; of that there is little argument. But they have neglected to fund Title IV. They voted for it, the President signed it, it is the law — but they have not put up the $40 million to get the program going.
Tester’s duplicitous bill was presented as “requiring” the Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Kootenai NF’s to harvest 100,000 acres over the next ten years. That’s a trade-off of 10 acres of wilderness for each acre of alleged harvest. To make matters worse, Tester’s bill (mis)uses some of the language from Title IV, revising, obfuscating, and undermining that law.
Title IV is written with authorization of $40 million a year to jump start landscape-scale restoration forestry, but Congress has dragged it’s heels on appropriating the money. Tester’s bill will sabotage it utterly, gutting Title IV before it is ever implemented.
It would be a far better thing if Congress funded a program they have already enacted than to sabotage it before it gets going. Bait and switch is not desirable Congressional behavior. Title IV should be given a chance to work. Tester and others who voted for Title IV should be held to their words and actions. Landscape-scale restoration forestry should be implemented before any more new wilderness is designated (defacto or otherwise).
I encourage Montanans to put the question to Tester: why did you vote for Title IV if you wish to withhold the funding and sabotage it with your new bill?
by Foo Furb
Interior has USFWS and BurRec under its administrative roof. USFWS is supposed to protect salmon from the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds. BurRec won’t give up an acre foot of water for salmon. So, really, what is the ESA about? I understand the use of surrogate critters to control land use. Spotted owls, marbled murrelets, ad nauseum. But Oregon commercial and sport salmon fishermen can’t fish for chinook salmon off Oregon in order to provide protection for threatened Sacramento-San Joaquin River chinook, which has dwindled from a million fish a year to less than 100,000, and all that has take place in the last three years while a drought has reduced stream flows for salmon, but not hardly interrupted irrigation diversions for farmers by the Bureau of Reclamation.
So, when you get down to it, it is politics. Big AGriculture in California is more powerful than logs and lumber. Pure and simple. ESA does not mean squat…and no water from those rivers now goes to sea. Like the Colorado, the Central Valley Project now gets ALL the water from Sierra Nevada runoff, salmon get none (on, Cal fish and wildlife is in negotiations to get some water to fun their fish hatcheries—in frigging negotiations to get water!!!! for hatcheries. How in the hell are the fish supposed to get to those hatcheries? They don’t!!! The Irrigation districts are powerful enough to take the water that allows a salmon to swim from the ocean to a hatchery!!! And they have and they do…no water for fish….
And all the while, the Columbia is under constant court orders to do something about the paltry million and a half fish returns. All the while, 200 million acre feet of water flow past Astoria each year. Enough water to cover Oregon with more than three feet of water…the whole state. Every acre…which is 200 million acre feet more than gets to the ocean from California or the Colorado Basin.
So the fisheries experts tell us global warming is making the ocean acid. Maybe the base chemistry to maintain ph in the ocean comes from runoff, which is lacking on the lee shore of the Pacific because the water never gets there!!!! The whole of this year’s albacore season was at the edges of the Columbia River plume in 60 degree water…few fish caught south of 44 degrees north, and few caught above Puget Sound…And even fewer caught off the whole of California and southern Oregon. The food chain begins with sun, wind and oxygen, all within a stew of nutrients stirred up by currents and tide, and that place is, has been, and should always be the Columbia River plume. Like the plume that no longer exists off the previously fecund and productive San Francisco Bay….
So, when it comes to natural resource issues on the West Coast, you have to have the blessing of California Mega Ag to get any thing done. Hell, they even take two and one half million acre feet of water out of the Klamath watershed for irrigation in the Central Valley, and evidently that is subject is taboo when it comes to the discussion of Klamath River temperatures, water flow, volumes, and fish returns.
Ask Cal Mega Ag why. Don’t ask anyone in Oregon, because the super majority left doesn’t want to talk about it. Not when they can beat up on the ag minority in urban Oregon. Piss on all of ‘em.
Is anyone following the Douglas County Wilderness land-grab centering on Crater Lake?
I am no NPS fan (actually, I like the National Parks, I just don’t trust the quality of their scientists or resource managers), but Crater Lake is the only National Park we have in Oregon.
Here is an attempt to weld National Park to existing Wilderness to roadless Forest Service Lands to form a giant “monument” of some sort or another. The concept seems to be intended to elevate the incidence of unemployment in Douglas County, insure the continued artificial reduction in County revenues, and increase the likelihood of landscape-scale catastrophic wildfires.
I think the promoters have other stated “goals” for this project, but they seem to just be part of the scam. Someone needs to find out who they are, what they actually do for a living, and why they’re (really) trying to pull this off.