Is USFS World’s Most Expensive Wildland Firefighting Agency?

At least in the U.S., no one even comes close.

The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres with a wildland fire management budget of about $2 billion. That’s $10.36/acre.

The Department of Interior manages 500 million acres with a wildland fire budget of $856 million. That’s $1.71/acre.

By the way, DOI enjoys a 98% initial attack success rate (defined as % of fires kept smaller than 300 acres) — same as the Forest Service.

Monangahela National Forest/Park

Monangahela National Forest Park

Would the public interest be better served if parts of the Monongahela National Fores were administered by the National Park Service instead of the Forest Service? As Sharon mentions in her introduction to Chris Topik’s guest post, the Nature Conservancy has acquired and protected thousands of acres with the Monongahela.

Can the Park Service do a better job of managing them?

Meanwhile in Maine, State, Federal, and local governments have objected loudly to any suggestion that the Park Service conduct a feasibility study for a new National Park in Northern Maine to be created from land to be donated by Burt’s Bee’s magnate Roaxanne Quimby.

According to the Columbus, IN Republic

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Two state parks and other lands within the Monongahela National Forest could become a national park.

The National Park Service plans to begin conducting a survey in December to determine whether historic, natural and recreational resources in the targeted area would meet criteria required by Congress for a national park.

Friends of Blackwater Canyon executive director Judy Rodd tells the Charleston Gazette (http://bit.ly/uMIztk ) that the proposed High Alleghany National Park would include federal land in the forest’s northern area, Blackwater Falls and Canaan Valley state parks.

Rodd says the proposed park also would include lands improved during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.

The survey is scheduled to be completed by September 2012. It was requested by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin.

___

Information from: The Charleston Gazette, http://www.wvgazette.com

Speaking up for America’s Forests

orest trail at Dolly Sods Wilderness South. The Dolly Sods Wilderness is a U.S. Wilderness Area in the Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia and part of the Monongahela National Forest The Nature Conservancy has acquired and protected thousands of acres in the Monongahela forest. The northeast end of the Federal land at Dolly Sods is bordered by the Bear Rocks Nature Preserve, owned by The Nature Conservancy. Dolly Sods and Bear Rocks Preserve are adjoining areas of incomparable beauty that are comprised of high plateaus above 4000 ft. and steep-walled stream valleys. The area was originally covered with a thick spruce forest but was aggressively logged in the early 20th century. Today the area is dominated by broad plains covered with heath and grasses, with many bogs. Hardwoods dominate the lower elevations but the spruce forest is coming back at higher elevations. PHOTO CREDIT: © Kent Mason

This is from the TNC blog here.

The following is a guest post written by Chris Topik. Chris has spent his entire career working to restore America’s forests. Today he serves as director of The Nature Conservancy’s Restoring America’s Forests program. Previously he worked as staff for the House Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, and also as a 16-year-employee for the Forest Service in Oregon, Washington and Washington, DC.

“A people without children would face a hopeless future;
a country without trees is almost as helpless.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

The stock market has plunged to half its value. Unemployment has doubled. And the President struggles to rebuild the economy of a politically divided country.

The scene may feel familiar to us today, but this was the world of President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt in 1907.

Yet by the end of his presidency President Roosevelt could reflect back on a recovered economy, an assertive global presence, markets freed from monopolies and more lands and waters conserved than any President before or since.

Of those herculean accomplishments won during tough economic times, none has forwarded greater benefits to us today than Roosevelt’s attention to the nation’s outdoors. Through the creation of the U.S. Forest Service and other conservation initiatives, Roosevelt established a natural framework that continues to provide life-giving benefits to America.

For example, this year we celebrate the centennial of one of Roosevelt’s signature outdoor legacies, the Weeks Act of 1911. This Act, sponsored by Representative John Wingate Weeks of Massachusetts, created 52 National Forests east of the Mississippi and set a precedent for collaboration on all Forest Service lands throughout the nation.

The greatest gift of the Weeks Act, however, may be it proved we can accomplish epic improvements to the health of our lands for generations to come — if the will still exists to realize them.

With an estimated 120 million acres of American forests in need of immediate restoration today (the size of California and Maine combined), a stalling economy and perhaps an even more stagnant political environment — the question is, do we still own that epic will?

Thankfully, a new report released today (pdf) suggests the answer is “yes!” This first-year analysis of the new Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) further offers tangible results backing up that sentiment.

In just one year, from just 10 National Forest projects, CFLRP achieved the following:

Created and maintained 1,550 jobs;
Produced 107 million board feet of timber;
Generated nearly $59 million of labor income;
Removed fuel for destructive mega-fires on 90,000 acres near communities;
Reduced mega-fire on an additional 64,000 acres;
Improved 66,000 acres of wildlife habitat;
Restored 28 miles of fish habitat;
Enhanced clean water supplies by remediating 163 miles of eroding roads.

Perhaps even more encouraging is that all of this was achieved in a collaborative, bipartisan manner with just an initial $10 million of federal investment. Folks who were once at loggerheads over the management of our forests — industries, environmentalists, recreationists, sportsmen — have put those conflicts aside and worked collaboratively to achieve real, everyday benefits in their own communities with CFLRP.

In fact, CFLRP is seemingly one of the few programs Congress can agree on, with a bipartisan “Dear Colleague” letter now circulating in the Senate that supports increasing that seed money to $40 million in the 2012 budget, so even more communities can share in the jobs, forest, water, and wildlife successes of CFLRP. The sponsors of that letter are Senators Bingaman (D-NM), Crapo (R-ID), and Risch (R-ID).

Yet, by itself, CFLRP cannot solve the problems our American forests face: overgrown forests, a plague of pests, sprawl, climate change and the record mega-fires that result from this “perfect storm” of threats. But CFLRP is a step in the right direction that deserves more support, so that the lessons learned on these landscapes can spread further in our nation’s forests.

As a child, Theodore Roosevelt was notoriously sickly and myopic. In the belief he could heal his body through physical exertions, he prescribed himself a childhood spent outdoors and in the boxing ring. The prescription worked, and that sickly boy grew into a pugnacious collegiate boxing champion, a rugged cowboy, a leader of Rough Riders and ultimately, a farsighted president.

In doing so he made a lifetime out of answering the bell. Now it’s our turn.

Please ask your Congressional representatives now to help spread the success of CFLRP by sending them a message today. With 26 applicants to this program in 2011, you may be supporting a project in your own community!

—–
Top 10 Weeks Act States by Acres:
Virginia 1,609,489
Arkansas 1,502,571
Michigan 1,491,673
Missouri 1,435,445
Wisconsin 1,187,062
Minnesota 1,146,664
North Carolina 1,091,377
West Virginia 1,023,768
Mississippi 878,218
Georgia 850,928

Top 10 Weeks Act National Forests by State:
Virginia George Washington and Jefferson National Forest 1,609,489
Missouri Mark Twain National Forest 1,435,445
Wisconsin Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest 1,187,062
North Carolina National Forests in North Carolina 1,091,057
West Virginia Monongahela National Forest 900,105
Mississippi National Forests In Mississippi 878,218
Georgia Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests 850,928
Minnesota Superior National Forest 830,130
Arkansas Ozark-St. Francis National Forest 823,770
Michigan Ottawa National Forest 741,080

Bugs, fire, politics threaten western Montana forests: from the Missoulian

Here’s the link.

Three things will combine to radically transform Montana forests in the next 50 years: bugs, fire and politics.
Mountain pine beetles have killed millions of acres of lodgepole pine trees. Those dead stands, combined with a progressively drier climate, will likely burn in wilder, more intense fashion. The biological aftermath should bring a wider mix of tree species, open areas and wildlife habitat, according to new computer models.
How humans tinker with that progression remains a wildcard. During this month’s Society for Conservation Biology research symposium at the University of Montana, several scientists demonstrated a technique called landscape simulation modeling. They’ve built software that juggles invasive weeds, weather patterns, logging plans, road removal and a lot of other factors to see how a forest will change over time.
“We see more of a natural sequence of events that could result in a more normal habitat distribution,” Michael Hillis of Missoula’s Ecosystem Research Group said of his model for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. “But the forest will look much different.”
The “B-bar-D” forest covers 3.4 million acres of southwest Montana, bigger than Glacier and Yellowstone national parks combined. Hillis said most of its spruce and Douglas fir stands were logged a century ago for the state’s mining industry. The resulting lodgepole stands grew up and matured at the same time, producing what Hillis called the “forest demographics of a rest home” at the perfect age for a beetle epidemic.
Many of those dead trees will then fuel forest fires. While the research is mixed whether a beetle-killed stand burns more dangerously than a green canopy, Hillis said the certain result is more fire scars on the landscape. Those scars in turn will eventually hobble later fires with a matrix of burned and unburned patches. Burned areas may return as new lodgepole stands, which regenerate best after a fire. But the unburned zones could see a return of fir, spruce and other tree species that get a chance to grow without the lodgepoles’ choking shade.
Assuming that model is correct, what do humans do with the information? Hillis, a Forest Service researcher before he moved to private practice, said his analysis helped inspire the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership, a coalition of conservationists and loggers who proposed a new way of managing the national forest. Their plan eventually became a cornerstone of Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act.
That legislation has also drawn critics who warn that tinkering with the forest’s natural process could produce bad results.
“I’ve read a lot of the stories and research on climate change coming out, and one constant is we’re constantly being surprised by the results,” said George Nikas, director of Wilderness Watch and an opponent of Tester’s bill. “Changes are occurring more rapidly than expected, and how they’re expressing themselves on the landscape is different than we expect. If you think you’ve struck on a model or scenario that looks likely today and start acting on it, I’m almost certain in a couple years it will look very different.”
***
Tester’s bill would designate about 1 million acres of new wilderness and recreation areas in Montana. It would also require the Forest Service to open at least 100,000 acres of timber over 15 years to logging, thinning or other mechanical treatment in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge, Lolo and Kootenai national forests. Last month, the senator successfully got it inserted in the Interior Department’s spending bill, which is awaiting congressional action.
Nikas and other opponents have objected to the bill’s mixing of land protections and land management orders. The forest treatment requirements “devolve public lands into local fiefdoms, allowing individual senators to write management plans into law for national forests,” he said.
But Nikas further argued actions like thinning hazardous fuels around the edges of communities is a waste of taxpayer dollars at the forest’s expense.
“If the problem is a risk of fire on the wildland-urban interface, then we need to put zoning restrictions on building, or adopt policies that say if you want to do it, good luck,” Nikas said. “You can’t manipulate forests because of decisions people are making to build in the forest. It’s just like not encouraging people to build in the floodplain.”
John Gatchell of the Montana Wilderness Association is one of Nikas’ regular debating partners. His organization was one of the founding members of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership. He said the Forest Service’s inability to get either logging or habitat work done helped form the compromise.
“There were 106 watershed projects backlogged on the B-D that were not happening,” Gatchell said. “When you look at the landscapes and the condition they should be in, you start seeing all the work that needs to be done.”

Hillis’ research looked into some of the treatments, such as fuels thinning and prescribed burns. His conclusion was that where work took place, the result was better habitat connectivity, a more varied mix of trees and a 50 percent reduction in fire incidence and severity.

“Opponents who don’t like selling trees say this is wrong,” Hillis said. “But the objective research shows thinning provides long-term benefits for forest health.”

Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com

************

Note from Sharon: I thought this paragraph was particularly interesting..there are different ways of dealing with uncertainty. Some are arguing for managing based on down-scaled model results (the “best available science”?), and some admitting we just don’t know. Admitting we don’t know can also lead us down a number of different paths, though, at least partially depending on our previous predilictions.

“I’ve read a lot of the stories and research on climate change coming out, and one constant is we’re constantly being surprised by the results,” said George Nikas, director of Wilderness Watch and an opponent of Tester’s bill. “Changes are occurring more rapidly than expected, and how they’re expressing themselves on the landscape is different than we expect. If you think you’ve struck on a model or scenario that looks likely today and start acting on it, I’m almost certain in a couple years it will look very different.”

A Tale of Two Watershed Assessments

This weekend, I ran across two news stories that reflect two different watershed assessments. Since both stories came out at the same time, it might be confusing. Forests to Faucets is one, and Watershed Condition Assessment is the other. F2F is about drinking water, and WCA is based on a broad range of indicators found here.

This news story is about the Forests to Faucets map here.
Excerpt:

SAN ANDREAS – New maps posted online this month by the U.S. Forest Service pinpoint where the nation’s drinking water is most jeopardized by wildfires and other threats to high-country forests.

One of the hot spots, according to the maps, is the headwaters of the Mokelumne River in the high Sierra east of Stockton.

The new mapping effort is called Forests to Faucets. The data behind it is why water utilities in some western cities now help pay to maintain portions of nearby national forests.

While this article, about the Helena National Forest, I think is about the watershed condition assessments found here. Here’s the user’s guide.

Excerpt:

HELENA, Mont. — A U.S. Forest Service report identifies the Helena National Forest as having the worst watershed conditions of all national forests and grasslands in a region that includes Montana and parts of Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota.

“We knew we had issues because of the history of the Helena forest,” said Meredith Webster, a soil scientist for Forest Service Region 1, which produced the report. “When the Forest Service acquired those lands, there had been a lot of heavy use on them. So while the results weren’t surprising, it certainly got our attention.”

The heavy use includes a century of mining, logging, fire suppression and other human activities.

The report looked at forest watersheds and classified findings such as water quality and quantity, aquatic life, roads, trees, vegetation and soils. From that a watershed received a rating of Condition Class 1, 2, or 3. A CC rating of 1 meant the watershed was fully functioning, while a CC rating of 3 meant a watershed that needed serious help.

The report found the Helena National Forest had 28 watersheds in need of serious help. Most other forests had zero to six. Most other national forests in Region 1 had from 57 to 158 watersheds in the category 1 rating. The Helena National Forest had 15.

Guest Post from Derek Weidensee on the 2011 Cut and Sold Report

The FY 2011 USFS “cut and sold” report just came out. At the risk of sounding to “Rain Man” like, here’s a couple stats some may find interesting.

–In Colorado, in 2011, the total “commercial timber harvest” was TWICE that of 2005. 2011= 69-MMBB vs. 2005=33-MMBF. Who would have expected that in the great recession!(The USFS includes “personal use firewood permits” in total volume sold. I arrived at “commercial” by subtracting the firewood volume from total).For being bankrupt, Intermountain must be cutting a lot of timber. I do believe I read that Intermountain doubled their capacity in that time. Without that mill(and the two pellet mills) no fuels treatments would have occured on either public OR private lands.
–In 2003, which was the low point in the Colorado timber sale program, the USFS sold a “total” of 32MMBF. In 2007, when the MPB alarm bells went off, the USFS sold 100 MMBF. That level has held steady with a five year average of 98 MMBF sold/year. Firewood permits went from 10 MMBF in 2003 to 20 MMBF in 2011.

–In Colorado, the average price for Lodgepole pine stumpage was $6.00/MBF. In Montana it was $50.00/MBF. In Montana somewhere aroud 50% of the “sold volume” was classified as “non-sawtimber”. That’s trees 7″-9″ diameter. “Sawtimber” is trees greater than 9″. In Colorado, around 85% of the sold volume was sawtimber. The above comparison tell me a couple things. First, Montana still has a timber industry that competes by “bidding up” timber sale prices. Second, the fact that Colorado offers so much “sawtimber” tells me the USFS is desperate to keep the last sawmill open and is desperate to reopen the mill at Saratoga. It’s intriguing to ponder what dire straights Colorado would be in now if Intermountain would have closed 6 years ago for lack of USFS timber like the mill in Saratoga.

Note from Sharon.. I think that many fuel treatments are done by service contract and not actually sold to mills, therefore not on this report. Anyone that knows more is encouraged to add their knowledge on this.

Another Confusing Roadless Story: Aspens, Intervention, and Upper Tier

Scott Fitzwilliams, left, and Glenn Adams discuss the health of an aspen grove in the White River National Forest near Silt, Colorado. Photo by Michael Brands.

Thanks again to Terry Seyden for this catch!

It’s a bit hard to tell in this news story, but the story is about a couple of different things that if you weren’t following this story closely, might be confusing. I will try to help.

Chain saw environmentalism at cutting edge of forest fight

Aspen, Colo. • Here is the next front in America’s fight for its Western forests.

Too late to head off a wave of climate-fueled beetles that have altered the evergreen landscape for generations — if not forever — foresters still believe they can rejuvenate this resort town’s namesake. They say the white bark and fluttering yellow heart-shaped leaves that announce fall in the Rocky Mountains are due for a pruning.

It’s chain saw environmentalism, and some of the West’s most ardent wilderness lovers have signed on. They face strong opposition from groups that believe Mother Nature can best repair her own, and their struggle over how best to legally protect untrammeled wild lands will profoundly shape the future of these hills.

“It’s no longer as easy as just saying wilderness is good and everything else is bad,” said John Bennett, a former Aspen mayor and current executive director of the advocacy group For the Forest.

Will aspen shoots — food to elk and other cherished Rocky Mountain wildlife — keep springing from the slopes in a warming and drying region? Can they without human help?

Government foresters want to start cutting down swaths of century-old aspens in hopes that young “suckers” will sprout from the roots to build a new forest. It’s how many of the aspens would have reproduced naturally during the 1900s had Americans allowed fire to scour more of the old trees from the land.

Today, there is some urgency because a widespread collapse that accelerated during a 2004-08 drought foreshadowed dire predictions of climate-linked losses over the next 50 years. The die-off blighted nearly a fifth of Colorado’s aspen stands, researchers say, thinning about a quarter of the forest crown in most of them with precious little regrowth.

Cutting aspens now, in the absence of drought, could regrow vigorous young trees before the next dry spell strikes.

“We certainly don’t have any silver bullets,” said Jim Worrall, a U.S. Forest Service Forest Health Protection pathologist in Gunnison, Colo., who studied the past decade’s so-called Sudden Aspen Decline syndrome. “But we do know that aspen stands less than about 40 years old were not really affected by Sudden Aspen Decline.”

Thus, cutting for regrowth is a prescription that’s taken firm root with foresters and opened a divide among environmentalists who might have unified against logging — if not for the wild card of climate change.

“Nature knows best,” said Sloan Shoemaker, executive director of Colorado’s Wilderness Workshop and a skeptic of the rush into forest interventions. He supports efforts to clear beetle-killed pines posing fire hazards and watershed threats around communities, but believes the aspens and other trees deep in the woods should adapt on their own.

“History is writ with many examples of humans monkeying in natural systems that have gone awry.”

OK, so the above is a question about cutting aspen for the purpose of trying to regenerate them.

That’s why Shoemaker and others with a more traditional wilderness ethic favor a hotly debated revision of Colorado’s roadless forest rule. The state and U.S. Forest Service are considering local changes to a nationwide 2001 rule protecting pristine forests from road construction, and one of several proposals under review would tighten restrictions considerably. It would generally ban tree cutting on 2.6 million acres of “upper-tier” protection zones — two-thirds of the state’s roadless areas.

Millions of acres of dead pines and spruces naturally give aspens new areas to colonize, Shoemaker said, while foresters seem fixated on old aspen stands in areas that aren’t likely to support them in the future. They want to prevent oak brush and other dryland species from taking over slopes that he believes are becoming ill-suited to aspens.

This next section is related to the aspen question because the “upper tier” acreage in the Proposed Colorado Rule does not allow tree cutting for wildlife habitat improvement, or restoration of endangered or sensitive species (fyi, aspen isn’t endangered or sensitive but it is good for wildlife). Note, this is not road building, it is tree cutting.. so people would have to walk in with chainsaws (or ride in on OHV’s) and drop the trees.

This aspect of the Upper Tier designation is of concern to some wildlife-oriented individuals as they may see the need for some cutting and burning to restore wildlife habitat in key corridors so animals can move (and also migrate based on future climate change).
Below is a quote from Colorado Roadless Q&A’s here.

“The Upper Tier designation was added based on public concern that exceptions found in the previous proposal would allow roads and tree cutting anywhere within CRAs. On Upper Tier acres, requirements are more restrictive than under the 2001 rule. The exceptions allow only road construction and reconstruction as allowed by statutes or treaties, and reserved or outstanding rights; and tree-cutting incidental to an activity not prohibited by the Colorado Roadless Rule and for personal or administrative use. “

So now back to the news story.

“Trying to freeze an aspen stand in time,” he said, “is fighting nature.”

Sitting pretty

Others who love wilderness, and indeed moved here to live among it, point to the bark-beetle infestation — which stripped more than 6 million acres of Colorado evergreens — as evidence such hard-line protections are outdated.

“I’m a total wilderness advocate,” said Tom Cardamone, who moved here to work on a student-led wilderness campaign in 1972 and now directs the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies [ACES]. “Also, I recognize the increasing importance of hands-on forest management.”

ACES has a staff of naturalists whose mission statement seeks to nurture lifelong commitments to the Earth while “restoring the balance of natural communities.” Defining and championing proper balance can be difficult in a resort community where most residents moved because they liked things just the way they were — a problem Cardamone calls “the challenge of the perception of the pristine.”

If a place looks nice and attracts hikers and mountain bikers, he said, they don’t necessarily weigh whether its ecology is out of whack. Locals have battled the center’s efforts to restore a stretch of the Roaring Fork River from gravel mining and an alpine bog from peat removal, he said, because the areas remained pretty. Both projects went forward, and now both are hailed as ecological successes.

So it is with struggling forests, Cardamone believes. Residents don’t like the idea of roads and heavy equipment trudging through pristine wilderness, but “I’m also concerned about the damage of climate change to pristine wilderness.”

Confusing, because now we are not talking about Colorado Roadless nor upper tier. No one is proposing building roads for aspen treatments in roadless.

The bark beetles that have munched through at least 40 million acres of Western evergreens since 1997 served a warning. Aided by warming winters and lengthening summers, they attacked forests that were effectively overpopulated. Individual trees competed for soil moisture and daylight to steel themselves against the onslaught, and when it was too late for people to react on a landscape level, foresters started thinning trees in an effort to save favored recreation spots or reduce fire hazards.

The question now is whether active management would avoid a similar collapse among another key forest species, or whether it’s futile to play God. Which lesson should be taken?

Dangers of drought

Aspens host their own species of native bark beetles, and those can find heightened success during droughts. But it is the drought itself — heat coupled with drying soils — that scientists believe threatens to shrink aspen range, currently stretching along the Rockies from Mexico to Alaska.

The Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station has used greenhouse-gas projections to estimate that up to half the suitable aspen range in the central Rockies will vanish under something like permanent drought by 2060, eliminating low-elevation stands.

Some ecologists believe aspens are resilient, though, and argue that something besides logging could help them thrive.

“The prime culprits are the rising elk populations in the West and, in some cases, livestock,” said Paul Rogers, director of Utah State University’s Western Aspen Alliance. Hunting more elk, restoring wolves to push them around and better managing livestock, he said, would help aspen sprouts survive in many places.

Rogers doubts Sudden Aspen Decline is as widespread as others say. He doesn’t question that, for instance, 17 percent of Colorado’s aspen stands suffered in the past drought, but he doesn’t believe the roots are dead in most of those. Protect the areas from overgrazing and browsing, he said, and many would spring back. Aspens have expanded and contracted with previous climate shifts.

Logging trees, as the Forest Service wants, would stimulate new growth, Rogers said. But none of the sprouts would climb past “mouth-high” if wildlife and livestock aren’t managed accordingly.

“Don’t do anything,” he warned, “unless you have a way to protect [new growth] afterward.”

I’m not an expert on aspen decline, but it seems like it should be pretty clear if “sprouts are not coming up” or “sprouts are coming up and being eaten.” Certainly if you are successful at “sprouts coming up” you would have to manage “sprouts being eaten.” Not sure how this relates, unless it is impossible to manage “sprouts being eaten” so why spend money to help “sprouts come up?”

But to be relevant to the Upper Tier Roadless question, you would have to say that there are no situations for wildlife for any tree species that could be helped by tree falling -ever. Again, going from the specific to the general is a bit confusing.

Buying time

If fire suppression has built aspen forests that are unnaturally old and uniform in age, shaking them up makes sense to Cardamone. Doing so might stimulate young aspens and buy the forest time for humans to slow climate change.

Roadless protections for their own sake, he said, aren’t the ultimate goal anymore.

“Road or no road, if all the trees are dead because we didn’t do something wise,” Cardamone said, “we may regret that.”

That’s the plea echoing around the White River National Forest, which surrounds Aspen and shelters the nation’s largest elk herd. District rangers and Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams fear that if public pressure leads their agency bosses to choose the most restrictive alternative for their new roadless rule, the forest will shrivel. It’s not even about roads, he said, because the agency could cut trees without building any — if the roadless rule allows.

“We’re losing our aspen pretty quickly in this part of the world,” Fitzwilliams said on a recent drive into the Divide Creek Basin. And more than half the forest there is aspen, mostly tall, stout, old.

Eighty percent are mature to “overmature,” he said.

Fitzwilliams drove up dirt roads past elaborate hunting camps of tents and buses — even one big rig hauled into the woods to outfit enthusiasts — showing what draws elk hunters here, and what he believes is at stake.

Elk thrive among aspens, but here and there along Divide Creek, century-old trees are toppling under their own weight, with nothing but grass growing under them. Eventually, without active management, he believes spruces and firs will fill in some of these gaps, squeezing out elk and deer. Oak brush will creep up other slopes.

And Divide Creek, it turns out, is among those zones that his crews couldn’t touch if the Forest Service designates 2.6 million acres for full roadless protections. Step off the existing roads, Fitzwilliams said, and you couldn’t cut a tree in the name of forest health. “If this all becomes upper-tier roadless, I’m out of business.”

Those stricter protections are what the Pitkin County Commission, based in Aspen, requested in its official comments to the agency, and it’s a popular stand among lots of politicians in ski country. But Fitzwilliams has been trying to change minds.

“I’ve joked with the Town Council that they need to change [Aspen’s] name to Spruce-Fir,” he said.

‘Hidden gems’

Beyond ecology, Fitzwilliams said, there’s an economy and a people at stake.

West central Colorado’s wilds are interwoven with a string of ski resorts, highways, electric lines and forested homes. Further limitations on tree thinning would risk catastrophic fire.

Those are fears that many wilderness lovers share, and they accept logging around the edges to improve safety. But many also push not just for more roadless protections, but also for new congressionally designated wilderness areas to limit most man-made disturbances.

They’re pushing a campaign called “Hidden Gems” to expand wilderness areas by 342,000 acres in this part of Colorado, effectively moving the protected zones farther downhill into areas considered important winter range for wildlife.

Outdoor photographer Steven DeWitt, of Eagle County, Colo., is a hiking and snowboarding enthusiast who holds wildlands dear. He sees the need for action near towns and highways, he said, but “what we’ve got for wilderness now is all we’ve got left.”

The pine forest’s rapid decline saddened DeWitt to the point that he has been shooting photos since 2007 for a planned online essay that he hopes will motivate Americans to deal with climate change. But in the backcountry, he prefers to see forests regenerate on their own.

Chain saw environmentalism isn’t for him. Rooting around in wild places sets a precedent.

“It’s a bad cocktail,” he said of Forest Service hopes for logging the roadless areas. “Everybody’s good intentions before anything is cut are great, but a road in a wilderness is a bad idea.”

It seems like Scott Fitzwilliams valiantly keeps saying “we are not talking about roads, we are only talking about the ability to cut trees” but then others are quoted as “roads are bad and you shouldn’t have them.”

I think it would be really hard to understand what the issue is from reading this story. It would also have been a better story if the author had quoted someone from the wildlife community who are concerned about the prohibitions in the Upper Tier.
Some people might say that the Upper Tier acres are “more protective than the 2001″ because they don’t allow tree cutting for wildlife habitat or endangered species.. yet what are you really “protecting” by not allowing those actions? Certainly not wildlife, nor endangered species. It’s all rather ideological, and not very real, IMHO.

Further, I don’t think it’s accurate to say you are “logging”, when the material is not removed (because there are no roads). You may be “cutting” but using that darn dictionary again (Merriam Webster online):

“log
verb
transitive verb
1 a : to cut (trees) for lumber b : to clear (land) of trees in lumbering.”

It’s also interesting everyone quoted in the story agrees on a need for tree cutting around towns and highways.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am grateful for many things, including our legacy of public lands and the many and diverse people who care about them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Wood Products, Bioenergy and Climate: Lippke et al. Study

Here’s a link to the new paper Sustainable Biofuel Contributions to Carbon Mitigation and Energy Independence

Here’s the UW news release.

Proposals to remove the carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuel from the atmosphere include letting commercially managed forests grow longer between harvests or not cutting them at all.

An article (http://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/2/4/861/) published in the journal Forests says, however, that Pacific Northwest trees grown and harvested sustainably, such as every 45 years, can both remove existing carbon dioxide from the air and help keep the gas from entering the atmosphere in the first place. That’s provided wood is used primarily for such things as building materials instead of cement and steel – which require more fossil fuels in their manufacture – and secondarily that wood wastes are used for biofuels to displace the use of fossil fuels.

“When it comes to keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, it makes more sense to use trees to recycle as much carbon as we can and offset the burning of fossil fuel than it does to store carbon in standing forests and continuing burning fossil fuels,” said Bruce Lippke (http://www.cfr.washington.edu/SFRPublic/People/FacultyProfile.aspx?PID=11), University of Washington professor emeritus of forest resources. (http://www.cfr.washington.edu/)

Lippke is one of eight co-authors of the article in Forests. It is the first to comprehensively calculate using woody biomass for bioenergy in addition to using wood for long-lived products. The article focuses on the extra carbon savings that can be squeezed from harvesting trees if bioenergy is generated using wood not suitable for long-term building materials. Such wood can come from the branches and other debris left after harvesting, materials thinned from stands or from plantations of fast-growing trees like willow.

For the article, the co-authors looked at selected bioenergy scenarios using wood from the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Southeast and Northeast.

They considered two ways of producing ethanol from woody biomass – gasification and fermentation – and used what’s called life cycle analysis to tally all the environmental effects of gathering, processing and using the resulting fuels. Considering everything that goes into it and how it burns when used as fuel, the researchers found ethanol from woody biomass emits 70 percent to slightly more than 100 percent less greenhouse gases than producing and using the equivalent energy from gasoline.

Achieving slightly more than a 100 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is possible using fermentation during which ethanol is produced and enough electricity is generated to offset the fossil fuel used in the fermentation process.

In contrast, producing and using corn ethanol to displace gasoline reduces greenhouse gas emissions 22 percent on average, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s fact sheet (http://tinyurl.com/EPAFactSheetAltFuels) “Greenhouse Gas Impacts of Expanded Renewable and Alternative Fuels Use.”

While biofuels from woody biomass are carbon friendly, Lippke cautions that the U.S. should not use tax breaks or other incentives that inadvertently divert wood to bioenergy that is better used for long-lived building materials and furniture.

“Substituting wood for non-wood building materials can displace far more carbon emissions than using the wood for biofuel,” the article says. “This fact creates a hierarchy of wood uses that can provide the greatest carbon mitigation for each source of supply.”

Lippke said using wood for products and bioenergy can be considered carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide trees absorb while growing eventually goes back to the atmosphere when, for instance, wood rots after building demolition or cars burn ethanol made from woody debris. With sustainably managed forests, that carbon dioxide is then absorbed by the growing trees awaiting the next harvest.

The co-authors aren’t advocating that all forests be harvested, just the ones designated to help counter carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Older forests, for instance, provide ecological values even though they absorb less carbon dioxide as they age.

In the article the authors also urge policymakers and citizens to consider not just carbon mitigation but to also find ways to weigh the importance of energy independence from fossil fuels when considering how to use woody biomass for bioenergy.

“Simply burning woody biomass to generate heat or electricity makes sense for carbon mitigation, he says, but there’s no energy independence gained,” Lippke said.

Carbon efficiency is however only one part of the equation, the authors wrote. Transportation fuels depend heavily on imported oil and therefore biofuels that replace them make additional contributions to the domestic economy, including energy independence and rural economic development, the authors said.

Other co-authors are Richard Gustafson and Elaine Oneil with the UW, Richard Venditti with North Carolina State University, Timothy Volk with the State University of New York, Leonard Johnson with the University of Idaho, Maureen Puettmann of WoodLife Environmental Consultants and Phillip Steele with Mississippi State University.

The publication integrates findings across many previous reports generated by a consortium of 17 research institutions that have been involved in life cycle analysis of wood products for more than 15 years through the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (http://www.corrim.org/), based at the UW. The recent biofuel life cycle research was funded with a grant from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory.

Ethnobotany Interrupted

Thanks to Bob Zybach for this piece from the Eugene Weekly. It talks about “what is “restoration” and what is the role of Native Americans and their traditional management techniques.
Here’s an excerpt. the original story is here.

A Human Dilemma

Current restoration objectives for the West Eugene Wetlands tend to center around creating habitat for threatened and endangered species, such as Fender’s blue butterfly. This often involves removing invasive plants like blackberry and ivy, and introducing native plants that are beneficial to species at risk.

For the most part, land managers and restoration ecologists — including those who oversee the Wetlands — tend to focus on restoring natural functions, not so much on returning a landscape to any particular previous state. Ecologists study the relationships between natural elements such as native species, soil quality and the ability of nutrients to flow through a system, and attempt to restore as many of these elements as possible to ensure biodiversity.

“What you’re restoring a landscape to is a really important question,” says Emily Steele, a restoration ecologist with the city of Eugene. “And you’ll hear a lot of different things from different people. We’re trying to get the habitat back to a state where it can be self sufficient and resilient, so that it will require less management from people.”

But restoring land using traditional Native American methods involves preserving culturally important native plants with the intention of using them — for basketry, food or canoes.

Zybach, who is an expert in Indian burning patterns in the Willamette Valley, says that because ecosystems in the Willamette Valley evolved alongside human activity, they function best when people are using them.“Restoration doesn’t mean a return to natural functions; it means a return to a previous condition,” he says. “Natural to people often means no humans. But if we’re not interrelating with the environment, something’s wrong. You have to have people tending the land.”

“When you restore a landscape, that would include cultural use,” says Lewis. “There’s an assumption that plants, animals and humans are separate, but in ecology we know that they’re interrelated. That traditional landscape is almost gone, and you want to preserve what’s endangered. It’s a cultural landscape; people were involved in it, therefore, you want people to come back in.”