That last post left a bad taste in my mouth. Californians are soooooooooooo stupid. Fortunately, somewhere in the world there are people who are clued into fire and know how to prevent it. That somewhere is Eastern Oregon.
Not that they can do much about it. Most of E. OR is owned by the Federal Gummit, and the boneheads in DC are hellbent to burn, baby burn. But at least Eastern Oregonians see the big picture and are trying to knock some sense into the the DC bosses before the next megafire holocaust hits.
From the Baker City Herald last week [here]:
Farm Bill’s forest fix falls short
By ED MERRIMAN, Baker City Herald, May 29, 2008
The 2008 Farm Bill includes new programs and funding for private forests, but woodland owners and forest managers in Baker County and across the state deem the dollars a “drip in the bucket” considering the scope of the nation’s forest health crisis.
“There is so much fuel buildup that we are going to have more and more catastrophic fires. It’s just such a tragedy to waste that natural resource,” said Lyle Defrees, who owns forested land near Sumpter and is a former president of the Baker County Private Woodlands Association.
The Food Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, commonly referred to as the Farm Bill, includes $39 million in new funding to be distributed over 10 years under the Healthy Forest Reserve Fund, which helps private forestland owners protect endangered species and provides funding to restore forestland damaged by natural disasters through the Emergency Forestry Conservation Program. …
Defrees said he has participated in forest thinning projects with 75 percent funding distributed by the Oregon Department of Forestry through the federal National Fire Plan. That federal program helps landowners thin overstocked, fuel-loaded forests in urban interface areas where the risk of catastrophic fire threatens homes and entire communities located in or near forests.
Defrees said the program is making dramatic improvements on private forestland in the urban interface zones. But he contends that what’s really needed — and is not included in the Farm Bill — is a federally funded program to carry out that type of thinning on a broad scale to restore healthy forests on private and public lands across the country.
June 3, 2008 | 3 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
For critical thinking about California’s forest resources, it’s hard to beat the California Forestry Association. Their latest issue (Summer 2008, Vol 12 No. 1) of California Forests is entitled “To Log or Not to Log,” and it’s all about… water!
As David Bischel, President of the CFA puts it:
Forests are water factories for our thirsty state.
Today, water is at stake in a way it never has been before. Roughly 75 percent of California’s water originates in forested watersheds. How we manage those watersheds has a great implication on the quality and quantity of water we deliver downstream for fish, farms and families. …
We’ve also learned that forests left alone will burn, sometimes catastrophically and often placing communities at risk. When that happens, water gets choked with silt and debris, and fish habitat and municipal water systems are damaged.
We know that on some public forestland, two to three times as many trees are growing as the land can adequately support. When too many trees compete for water, less is left to deliver downstream and the entire system is disrupted.
The entire issue is available online [here] (3.1 MB). Articles include “Conserve Water at the Source — What We Do, or Don’t Do, in Forests Has a Tremendous Impact on Our Water” by Norman Pillsbury, Ph.D., professor of forest hydrology and watershed management at Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo:
The trend of restricting forest management, often in the name of protecting water quality for salmon and other aquatic species, is having serious, negative consequences on California’s water quality. …
Well-managed forests play a critical role in assuring that Californians have abundant, clean water. Sustainable forest management can reduce the cost of providing clean drinking water, provide spawning gravels and cool temperatures fish need, and mitigate the affects of storm flooding and mudslides.
Forests where “hands-off” management prevails, conversely, are more prone to overcrowding, wildfire and mudslides that can degrade water quality for years. …
High-intensity fires do more than scorch the surface; they create a crust-like hydrophobic layer below the surface, an oilbased film that greatly slows the penetration of water. When rain follows catastrophic fire, water quickly saturates the exposed topsoil and hits the hydrophobic layer about two inches underground. Since the water cannot seep into the ground any further, the topsoil, ash and debris gets washed away. Mud fills nearby watercourses, devastating wildlife habitat and polluting drinking water.
June 1, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests
Part 3 — Restoring Old-Growth Forests
Most North American forests arose during millennia of frequent, human-set fires, i.e. anthropogenic fire. For millennia, anthropogenic fires were so frequent that they engendered open, park-like forests wherein individual trees grew to great ages.
During the last 150 years (more than that in eastern regions) anthropogenic fire has been eliminated (along with most of the humans who set them). The absence of anthropogenic fire has allowed our forests to accumulate an abundance of fuel in the form of young trees, duff, debris, litter, dead trees, etc.
When fires enter modern forests, they combust hugely and decimate the forests. Vast tracts formerly covered with trees are converted to brushfields because the intense heat, fueled by extreme fuel accumulations, kills everything–heritage old growth trees included.
Stand-replacement fire is not the historical development pathway that led to our old-growth forests. Old-growth forests of today are strongly multi-cohort, and the older trees arose under a different ecological pathway, one of regular, frequent, seasonal anthropogenic fire.
Formerly forests were open and park-like with widely spaced trees. Because frequent, light-burning fires in open, park-like forests did not kill all the trees, individual trees lived for incredibly long lifespans. Those conditions gave rise to ancient trees. Modern forest conditions preclude the opportunity for trees to attain great ages.
To save our old-growth, and to restore the development pathways that lead to old trees, we must also restore the appropriate forest conditions and disturbances.
Read more
May 27, 2008 | 7 Comments | Topic: Forestry education, Saving Forests
Part 2 — Open, Park-like Forests
Throughout the Holocene human beings have significantly altered Western Hemisphere landscapes in purposeful ways; i.e., people burned the land to make it human-friendly, generally-speaking. Frequent, regular, seasonal, fire aided hunting, gathering, agriculture, and other human endeavors.
Evidence of frequent fire can be seen in fire scars and the structure and composition of old-growth forests of today. Most are dense thickets of mostly young trees with a a few emergent old-growth trees, but 150 years ago they were open and park-like forests. Forests stands can be backdated by counting rings and compiling age distributions. Extensive evidence indicates that 150 to 200 years ago in forests across the western US there were only 5 to 20 ancient and giant trees per acre, of different ages, widely-spaced, crowns not touching, except in occasional groupings, trees otherwise often singular and separated by 40 or 50 feet or more from their nearest neighbors. The understory was grassy, nearly devoid of shrubs, although small pockets of low-growing bushes and younger trees appeared here and there.
The old forests were not a continuous blanket across the landscape. Indeed, ancients forests occurred in widely dispersed pockets, more like islands of trees in an ocean of praire. Even in the cool, moist Pacific Northwest, forests were fragmented. Treed areas were found along streams in dendritic (finger-like) patterns. In between were grassy slopes, vast berry fields, and veldts with wild food crops, such as tarweed (Madia) tracts, bracken fern brakes, and camas meadows.
Early Euro-American explorers reported this same open, park-like condition in forests from Mexico to Canada, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Western pioneers spoke of forests so clear of brush and thickets that they could drive wagons for miles through avenues of towering trees.
The structure of open, park-like forests (OPLF’s) was similar across much of western North America, but the species composition varied. That is, regardless of tree species, forests were open with tall, widely-spaced trees and grasses or prairie type-plants underneath. Pre-Columbian forests were more savanna-like, except in fire refugia.
Read more
May 24, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Forestry education, Saving Forests
Iain Murray, the author of the preceding post, is not a forester or forest scientist. Yet his understanding of the development of our American forests is remarkably cogent and perceptive:
With wildfires burning, it is useful to turn to the wisdom of the ancients. When the pioneers first entered the great forests of America, they found that the Native Americans had managed the forests for centuries. Their woodlands contained very few big trees—maybe fifty such trees per acre.
Apparently the Indians had set regular, low intensity fires which burned away accumulations of undergrowth, deadwood, dying trees and particularly small trees growing between the big trees. The larger trees were unharmed, because of their thick fire-resistant bark.
That in a nut shell is the way our old-growth forests developed. Frequent anthropogenic fire gave rise to open, park-like forests, largely uneven-aged at large-area scales. Forest scientists refer to such trees as “older cohort” because they are quite different than the even-aged thickets of trees (younger cohort) that arose following elimination of anthropogenic fire (aka “Indian burning”).
True old-growth forests contain older cohort trees. Those trees are remnants of the the former open, park-like forests that covered much of forested North America, and they may also be viewed as relics of our ancient culturally-modified landscapes.
In this 3-part series, I discuss in greater detail how our old-growth forests came to be here. The issue is important, because we must understand how old-growth forests arose in order to protect, maintain, and perpetuate them. If we value old-growth, and that seems to be a widely-shared value, then it is vital to understand their development.
Part 1 — Historical Forest Development Pathways
Fifteen thousand years ago the Wisconsin Glaciation reached its maximum extent. Continental ice sheets and tundra covered much of North America. The forests of today did not exist at that time, except in refugia in southern regions, coastal strips, and isolated mountain tops. Most of the acres covered by forest today were not forests 15,000 years ago.
Then, in accord with variations in the Earth’s orbit known as Milankovich Cycles, the planet warmed and the ice retreated. Over time, forests developed where they did not exist before (at least not for the previous 100,000 years or so). The progressions of vegetation change (from ice/tundra to forest) that actually occurred are called the historical forest development pathways.
Historical forest development pathways are not theoretical; they are the actual changes in vegetation types and species that actually occurred in actual landscapes. Since we have no time machines, we must reconstruct and deduce historical forest development pathways from empirical evidence of the past.
Read more
May 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Forestry education, Saving Forests
by Iain Murray
This guest article is adapted from Chapter Four of “The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Won’t Tell You About - Because They Helped Cause Them,” published by Regnery [here]. Iain Murray also writes regularly at www.openmarket.org.
With wildfires burning, it is useful to turn to the wisdom of the ancients. When the pioneers first entered the great forests of America, they found that the Native Americans had managed the forests for centuries. Their woodlands contained very few big trees—maybe fifty such trees per acre.
Apparently the Indians had set regular, low intensity fires which burned away accumulations of undergrowth, deadwood, dying trees and particularly small trees growing between the big trees. The larger trees were unharmed, because of their thick fire-resistant bark. These fires kept the forest healthy by providing a barrier to disease.
The pioneers, however, used much more wood in their civilization than the Native Americans. They needed it for housing, for boats and river ships, for railroad sleepers, for carriages, and for town infrastructure.
To them, fire was an enemy. Quick growth of new trees was important. Policies were put in place that suppressed all fire. This culminated in the creation of Smokey Bear in 1945. Three years later, his catchphrase was born: “Remember — only you can prevent forest fires.”
The price was a degradation of the health of American forests. Private logging firms continued to keep forests healthy where they operated, by clearing out the underbrush and deadwood and harvesting trees to clear spaces between other trees. Where loggers did not operate, undergrowth and deadwood began to accumulate.
These are dangerous, because small trees, for example, provide ladders for the fire to climb to reach the crown of mature trees, where the fires can take hold instead of being shrugged off by the thick bark below.
Meanwhile, more and more land came to be controlled by the federal government, and therefore came under the control of an under-funded bureaucracy.
In the 1970s, the birth of the environmental movement made American forest policies worse. Environmentalists are dogmatically opposed to man’s interference with nature. They objected to the “unnatural” control of forest fires created by natural means—by lightning strike, for example.
A new policy replaced the previous one of suppression of all fires. Natural fires were to be allowed to burn until they burned themselves out - a return to a natural cycle of death and regrowth. One environmental activist put it succinctly: “Save a forest; let it burn.”
Environmental dogma combined with bureaucratic collectivism to create disaster.
May 21, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Saving Forests
US Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell has been collaborating with the Wilderness Society in order to undermine and sabotage the USFS and to incinerate America’s public forests. Kimbell’s subversive actions are not secret but overt and arrogant, and the rank-and-file of the agency are well-aware of it.
While the field operations of the Outfit (as the USFS is fondly referred to by dedicated life-long employees) have been severely constrained by forced adherence to Byzantine environmental laws, NEPA processes, and endless planning, Gail Kimbell has ordered Let It Burn fires, at the behest of the Wilderness Society, with no planning, no NEPA, and no adherence to any environmental laws or regulations.
Case in point: after eight years of a planning exercise called the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment [here], one that involved thousands of people, hundreds of meeting, and tens of thousands of documents, studies, reviews, rehashes, monitoring, and re-monitoring, a Federal judge last week enjoined a fire-preventative thinning created under SNFPA guidance with the judgment that the planning was not “rigorous” enough to satisfy him [here].
That suit was brought by the Wilderness Society, and in effect destroyed eight years of effort by USFS employees to comply with the law.
Yet the Wilderness Society sits on the highest planning body of the USFS, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, and has ordered, via Gail Kimbell, the USFS to conduct Let It Burn fires (termed Wildland Fire Use fires of WFU’s) with no planning, no hearings, no studies, no NEPA process, and no adherence to any U.S. environmental law, such as the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, or the Clean Water Act.
The Wilderness Society had every opportunity to participate in the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan planning exercise. That was an open process with public hearings and public involvement every step of the way. Indeed, the Wilderness Society was invited and even begged to participate, to become part of the process, to meet with local residents, to resolve differences in an amicable and collaborative fashion.
Instead the Wilderness Society chose to shun that process and instead to sue to kill it, in concert with the Sierra Club, the Center For Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign (who recently changed their name to Sierra Forest Legacy in a marketing/branding move).
The Wilderness Society conspired to sabotage the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan, not only in cahoots with other so-called “environmental” groups, but with the blessing and assistance of USFS Chief Gail Kimbell.
Read more
May 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
Half of all Oregon greenhouse gas emissions in 2007 came from forest fires. This information was revealed Thursday, May 15, at a Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) meeting in Portland.
The meeting was a public hearing held to gather comments regarding Governor Kulongoski’s proposed Greenhouse Gas Mandatory Reporting Rules now under consideration by the Environmental Quality Commission (EQC), the board that oversees the DEQ.
The DEQ began the meeting by presenting a pie chart and a graph that indicated total GHG emissions in 2005 were 62 million tons (U.S.). The pie chart broke those emissions down by the following sectors: Transportation (34%), Waste (3%), Residential (17%), Commercial (14%), Industrial (25%), and Agriculture (14%). No forest sector was listed.
Then Mike Dubrasich, Executive Director of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment headquartered in Lebanon, OR, presented an analysis of GHG emissions from forest fires. According to Mr. Dubrasich (that’s me), in 2007 approximately 56 teragrams of GHG’s (principally CO2) were emitted by the 750,000 mostly forested acres burned last year in the state. One teragram equals 1.1023 millions tons (U.S.), so after conversion 61.7 million tons of GHGs are estimated to have been released by fires.
Mr. Dubrasich (me) told the DEQ, “You are missing an entire pie!”
Read more
May 20, 2008 | 3 Comments | Topic: Climate and Weather, Forestry education, 2007 Fire Season, Saving Forests
Let us connect the dots. Pay attention now. I will do this carefully and slowly, because I don’t want your brain to explode.
The Wilderness Society lives in Washington DC. They are a corporation. They have assets: in 2006 they reported assets of $54,000,000. They have income: in 2006 they reported revenues of $37,000,000. They have a president. His name is William H. Meadows. They have members, because they are a kind of club. TWS (that’s their pet nickname for The Wilderness Society) claims 300,000 members.
TWS is what is generally known as a “special interest group.” They have special interests. They lobby Congress. They get involved in elections. They sue people, especially the Federal Government. They also sit on important boards and commissions.
We mentioned one of their lawsuits two posts ago. TWS sued the US Forest Service, specifically the Plumas national Forest, for an “improper” SEIS, which is the acronym for Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.
It seems the Plumas NF wanted to thin some forests, to make those forests less likely to burn up in catastrophic forest fires. They called that proposed thinning “creating Defensible Fuel Profile Zones” which are areas approximately 1/4 to 1/2 mile wide where fuel loadings are reduced, usually along roads. In order to do the thinnings properly and legally, the Plumas NF first did a plan and analysis, called an SEIS (see previous paragraph).
That involved making a plan, evaluating it, and presenting it to the public for the public’s input. It was all very “by the book.” The Plumas NF followed all the laws, such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Environmental Planning Act (NEPA), and even one you may not have heard of, the Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act. In the HFQLGFRA the U.S. Congress directed the Plumas NF to do exactly the the kind of forest thinnings they laid out.
That’s how closely the Plumas NF followed the law; they were told by Congress (and President Bill Clinton, who signed the HFQLGFRA) that they MUST do these thinnings and so they did, or tried to anyway.
But the Wilderness Society (TWS, remember them? see the beginning of this essay) did not like all that. TWS is very stuffy about the law. They felt that, somehow, the laws was not being followed just right, so they sued. TWS sued in Federal Court, but they lost at the trial level, so they appealed. TWS’s appeal was accepted by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, and last week that court ruled in favor of TWS [here].
Read more
May 19, 2008 | 6 Comments | Topic: Forestry education, Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
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.
Read more
May 16, 2008 | 5 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
