Healthy Forest Bill | Beaver Park Legislation | Fire Debate Fallacies | Allegorical Smokescreen
Healthy
Forests bill would help ease Black Hills’ wildfires
Published
6/2/03
by Aaron
Everett
Forest
Programs Manager
Black
Hills Forest Resource Association
The US
House of Representatives recently inked a piece of legislation which, should it
survive the Senate, will greatly benefit your favorite vacation spot - the Black
Hills National Forest. The Healthy
Forests Restoration Act (HR 1904), seeks to help stem the growing tide of
catastrophic wildfires on national forests by allowing the US Forest Service to
conduct more projects that reduce what are called ‘hazardous fuels’ for such
conflagrations.
Across
the national forests of the West, 7 million acres - an area larger than the
State of Maryland - burned in 2002 alone. The
Black Hills has experienced its own share of such episodes.
Since the summer of 2000, over 280,000 acres have either been scorched by
wildfire or seriously infested with forest insects.
Despite
their efforts to address the situation, the Forest Service finds itself
hamstrung in a state of ‘paralysis by analysis.’ They estimate that 40% of their time is spent fulfilling
mundane procedural requirements, many associated with challenges brought by
environmental interest groups. On
the Black Hills, 100 percent of the significant forest management projects that
are proposed receive at least one appeal. The
realization of this ‘paralysis’ is that, on average, forest projects take at
least two years and $150,000-$1 million worth of analysis before work can even
begin.
The
Forest Service is doing too little, too slowly, to get ahead of the problem.
HR 1904
is the right first-step down the road to a solution.
The
bill:
·
Creates a new
type of project category for the Forest Service - hazardous fuels reductions -
and place these projects apart from some of the red tape straight-jacketing the
agency. The intent is to recognize
that these projects require timely completion, while maintaining their
compliance with safeguarding environmental laws.
·
Prioritizes
‘hazardous fuels treatments’ in proximity to communities and homes, without
entirely limiting their application to these areas. This averts the dangers of a one-size-fits-all approach.
Wildfire and forest health issues exist at a forest-wide level, and any
solution to them that does not itself exist on the same level is doomed to
inefficacy.
·
Makes
dissenters play fair. Often,
appeals are filed on projects at the last-minute and in shotgun fashion; HR 1904
would require appellants to have meaningfully participated from start to finish.
Fat would be trimmed, too, from the legal means often pursued against
forest projects. Lawsuits can drag
on long enough to attain victory by attrition, but under the Healthy Forests
bill, limited timelines on these deliberations are imposed.
While
the bill received a significant bipartisan vote in the House, it has been the
subject of some fiery criticism as well. Allegations
seem to range from ‘there is no problem’, to ‘the bill doesn’t solve the
right problem’, to ‘it’s just an excuse to allow more logging’.
Suffice
it to say, these are perfidious red herrings to the last.
The problem is real, the losses of human life, private property, wildlife
habitat, key watersheds, and other resource values are real, and the solution
ought to be crafted using the best expertise of on-the-ground professional
resource managers - not in the paper chase and not in the Courtroom.
One half
of Congress has made an important step toward protecting the Black Hills and all
other national forests. Given the
benefits to the Black Hills National Forest and to South Dakota, I hope the
Senate issues the bill its full approval and does so swiftly - time runs short.
Beaver
Park Legislation: A Teachable Moment
Published
11/26/03; 730 words
by Aaron
Everett
Everett
is forest programs manager for the Black Hills Forest Resource Association.
It’s
over now. The legal rigmarole has
run its obligatory course. On
November 26th we all got an early Christmas gift when District Judge Nottingham
dismissed the baseless legal claim brought against the well-supported,
well-intentioned (and well, exhausting, if I do say so myself) “Black Hills
Fire Prevention Agreement.” Time
for the Forest Service to get on with their business - doing what’s right for
the people and the environment.
But
let us not, as we so often do, hasten on without first looking back through our
20/20 hindsight binoculars. The
issues of bugs, fire, and forest health will not soon go away - never, in fact -
and as changes in forest policies are proposed in response, we’re
better-equipped, having learned our lessons, to make sound decisions.
The
overlying and critically important moral of our story is this: we shouldn’t
have needed special legislation to begin with.
With the Beaver Park problem so glaring, the danger to people and the
environment so evident, a remedy so obvious, and support for implementing it so
deafeningly loud - needing an Act of Congress to bring about what is really a
small drop in the Black Hills’ forest health bucket is just plain ridiculous.
To
the credit of the parties involved with crafting that legislation, all of us
worked long and hard, wearing a lot of enamel from our teeth in fashioning an
agreeable solution. But we must
realize that it shouldn’t have had to be that way.
More than anything else, the “Black Hills Fire Prevention Agreement”
was an acknowledgement, direct or indirect, by all participants that the Forest
Service’s legal and regulatory processes are simply broken.
The
day after the Judge’s Beaver Park ruling, that same theme of brokenness echoed
even louder as the US Forest Service released a draft revision of their forest
planning regulations for public comment. The
special interest uproar was ear-splitting. Every false accusation from ‘gutting bedrock environmental
laws’ to ‘eliminating all protections for wildlife’ to (the inevitable)
‘destroying forests to feed the timber industry’ was tossed about like
apocalyptic confetti.
Well,
let’s cut the crap. Our system of
government is designed to ensure that everyone has a voice.
It’s also supposed to bring about the greatest good for the majority in
the long run; to prevent the whim of the few from governing the best interests
of the many. Beaver Park is only
one close-to-home example of the situation that confounds the Forest Service
every single day, on every single National Forest.
The
environmental laws that frame the management of our National Forests were
visionary pieces of legislation. In
the thirty years since their passage, however, nobody can deny that times have
changed. Public interests have
changed. Biological concerns have
changed. Advocacy groups have
emerged. Bureaucracy has ballooned.
The
law’s principles - foresighted planning, safeguarding of wildlife habitat,
provision of public benefits and services, and an over-arching mandate of
sustainable management - remain cornerstone principles, as unimpeachably
venerable now as they were the day of its passage. So be absolutely clear; this latest reform proposal has
nothing to do with changing the law. Instead
proposed for face-lifting - mercifully - is the manner in which the Forest
Service goes about ensuring and implementing those same principles.
One
vehicle for this implementation is called a Forest Plan.
Forest Plans serve as programmatic frameworks of management goals and
parameters for the long-term - not to be confused (as some have tried to do)
with individual on-the-ground projects. Every
Forest has a plan; by legal mandate, they are revised every 10 to 15 years. The Black Hills National Forest has, because of the current
system’s faults, been continuously working on their Forest Plan Revision for
14 years. Yes, that’s right - 14
years working on a 15-year plan. The
reality has come to be that plans are obsolete before they’re even finished.
See
the problem? The at-all-cost
opponents of forest management obviously do not; it’s called victory by
attrition. Hence, all the
sanctimonious outcry about new regulations that would actually enable the Forest
Service to do its job. So which
version of the Forest Service would you prefer?
Your choices are: one bound from progress in procedural shackles and
chains, or one empowered by your support to protect and manage our forest. Your opportunity to comment on these new rules ends in 90
days; let yourself be heard.
Top
Three Fire Debate Fallacies
Published
7/13/02; 838 Words
by Aaron
Everett
Aaron
Everett has a Bachelor of Science in Forestry and serves as forest programs
manager for the Black Hills Forest Resource Association.
The BHFRA is an association of forest products manufacturers in the Black
Hills.
I’ve
listened intently to the forest management debate surrounding wildland fire.
Notice I said “listened”, as in, refrained from speaking to this
point. As much as I’d like to
keep it that way, some consistently stated falsities have arisen that do nothing
more than cloud the search for a solution.
There are many, but here’s my top three.
Drum roll, please…
3.
The timber industry should stop playing the vicious “blame-game” against
environmental groups for opposing management projects that would reduce fire
risk.
You
all obviously read this paper. Can
you remember reading anyone from the ever-vilified local forest industry saying
such things in the press? The last
time I remember being in print personally was back in January.
Our
elected officials and the Forest Service leadership seem to be the ones offering
the most pointed remarks. Why, oh
why, would elected officials say such “hateful” things?
Perhaps their constituencies have identified a problem and are a little
upset!
These
issues really transcend the profit vs. environmental purism context in which
they are so typically framed. The
forest isn’t healthy in a lot of regards, and the public doesn’t like what
they see, period.
2. The timber industry loots the forest of its fire-resistant
trees and leaves flammable slash behind, making fire risk worse after commercial
harvest.
First,
the holistic fire-resistance of a forest is just a tad more complicated than the
thickness or thinness of tree bark. The
forest itself, leaves, limbs, litter, and all, is potential fuel for a wildfire.
Ask
yourself: what overriding characteristics of these fires do we consistently hear
described as making them so uncontrollable? Answer: they’re “crown” fires that burn with unnatural
intensity over unnaturally large areas with unnatural fuel loads and low
moisture conditions.
Break
that statement down. “Crown”
fires; meaning that such a fire requires substantial amounts of fuel in the form
of a contiguous, dense canopy of trees to spread across the landscape.
But how can this be? I
thought the timber trolls came and took all our big trees away in the night!
We
also hear a lot about “ladder” fuels, and how they make it easier for fire
to climb into the crowns of trees. The
problem with this analogy is that trying to take away the “ladder” will not
eradicate fire potential.
The
Forest Service cannot, and for ecological reasons should not, take away the
“ladder” on every acre of forest. So,
fire is inevitably going find a “ladder” to climb somewhere.
While
we need to address how often it has a “ladder” to climb, we also need to
address what it sees when it gets to the top.
Right now, it sees a big green buffet.
We ought to use management to put some stuff on the menu that it has a
hard time choking down.
A
word about logging slash -- when a mill successfully bids upon and purchases a
timber sale from the Forest Service, the purchaser signs a contract.
This contract, which is typically a couple hundred pages, stipulates
everything imaginable about how the timber sale is to be conducted; from price,
to which trees are harvested and which are left, to roads, and everything in
between, including slash treatment.
These
requirements are based upon the Forest Service’s analysis of the area, not
upon what aspect of the forest the evil timber empire prefers to
“burglarize”. Depending on the
machinery used, a finished timber sale is so clean that the purchaser is
actually instructed to put slash back on the forest floor for wildlife purposes. These aren’t your father’s timber sales, folks.
1. And the number-one Fire Fallacy: Science will tell us how to
manage our forests.
Science
doesn’t really go out and do anything of its own accord.
Looking for the “truth” about forest management in Science is, as
anthropologist Matt Cartmill put it, “like becoming an archbishop to meet
girls.” Truth is subjective;
Science is not.
Don’t
misunderstand; I am a scientist and I love pursuing knowledge about the natural
world. The fact remains that we
must ask questions of Science so it can tell us the consequences of doing or not
doing certain things, not ask it what is “right” and what is “wrong”.
National
Forests are an unknown destination, and we’re riding shotgun in a car with our
policy makers at the wheel. Science
is like one of those AAA tour guide books that tells us the attractions,
distances, and likely costs (subject to rate change, of course) of visiting
somewhere.
The
public needs to decide where we want to go and what we’re willing to pay for
it. We’re also the ones who tell
the politicians and the Forest Service it’s OK to get on the gas, and if we
don’t like where we are at the moment, we had better empower them to step on
it.
National
Forests: Cutting through the allegorical smokescreen
Published
1/22/02; 999 words
by Aaron
Everett
Black
Hills Forest Resource Association
Much
escalation has taken place on the editorial scene throughout past months
regarding what course should most wisely be set for the management of our Black
Hills. Upon closer examination of
the debate, one is assailed by bewildering accusatory assortments, too numerous
(and ridiculous) to recount here. While
I find these falsified indictments thoroughly insulting to the last, one cannot
hope to address the depths of their abstruse misconstruction in a single
sitting. Therefore, permit me to
examine what is the most personally spiteful of them; an infuriatingly regular
assertion that we of the “insatiable and bloated ” Black Hills forest
products industry have historically perpetrated no uncertain amount of wanton
resource pillaging. Malevolent and
slanderous incriminations of this sort are simply defiant of all measured
reasoning; in making this determination one need only look to the astounding
body of existing evidence:
Firstly,
the oft-spun tale depicting the Black Hills’ presettlement state as some sort
of resplendent “old growth” utopia, while imaginative, is far detached from
reality. Upon his return from a
lengthy Black Hills expedition in 1875, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Irving Dodge
reported that, “The very large mass of these pine forests…are yet composed
of trees the very large majority of which are less than eight inches in
diameter,” proceeding to clarify the point that, “There is scarcely to be
found in the Black Hills a forest of old trees.”
Hardly the “old, fire-proof forest” free from its alleged present-day
logging-induced plague of “neoteny” that some groups seem to believe is an
accurate characterization.
A
second preposterous sub-claim alludes to conventional timber harvest as the
unbridled removal of large, mature trees. Later
in his report Dodge recorded that within the area he explored, estimated at
“something over four thousand square miles” (2,559,990 acres),
“…four-tenths are entirely without timber.
Another four-tenths is composed of young forests…not yet fit for the
sawmill. One-tenth is wind-shaken,
or injured by lightning or fire, and one tenth is good lumber.”
Present-day Forest Service data indicate,
however, that there grow 795,887 acres of “mature” (dominated by trees
greater than 9” in diameter ) pine and spruce on the Hills today.
Let’s do the math; Dodge’s estimate of “pristine” Black Hills
conditions placed mature forested acres at 255,990, where more than triple that
amount of comparably structured forest stands today.
The photographic record of Custer’s expedition further illustrates that
far more trees fill the modern Hills than ever stood historically.
There you have it; truly a landscape bearing the hideous scars of a
century’s “on-demand logging”… Don’t be ridiculous.
Since
the creation of the “Black Hills Forest Reserve” in 1887, the Forest Service
has sold five billion board-feet of timber.
Some form of harvest limit, now referred to as a decadal “allowable
sale quantity”, has governed harvest volume since the reserve’s very
inception6. A cornerstone principle
within the practice of forestry is not harvesting at levels above annual growth;
it just doesn’t make ecological or business sense to do so.
This amount includes harvesting some of the natural tree mortality that
would ordinarily occur from things like bugs, fire, and over-crowding before it
actually happens. At no point
subsequent to the establishment of the Black Hills National Forest has practice
been made of leaving harvest sites denuded of vegetation, and all harvests are
overridingly premised upon leaving good trees in place to disperse healthy seeds
and promote regeneration.
Black
Hills forest management successes are most resoundingly evidenced by the simple
act of driving from Hot Springs to Spearfish – the most healthy and
aesthetically pleasing places on the forest are the very same which have
received sufficient management. Conversely,
should one venture into the Norbeck Wildlife Preserve, Black Elk Wilderness, or
Beaver Park, where a “let the resource wither, die, and incinerate itself”
management agenda has been allowed to fester, you will discover such wondrous
outcomes as unnaturally high fuel loading and wildfire risk, stagnant growth,
massive insect-induced mortality, and conspicuously lacking wildlife abundance.
Within
the grand scheme, harvesting has manufactured a forestwide increase in tree
growth. As I intently type, across
my desk sits a mounting of two tree “cookies”.
One 45 year-old tree slice from a thinned stand measures 14 inches in
diameter, a same-aged sample from a nearby unthinned stand measures 6 inches.
When the harvesting cycle is halted by, for example, a concerted
filibuster of frivolous appeals and litigation (which ultimately circumvents the
public input process), over-crowding and decreased vigor ensue across the forest
because too many trees are competing for resources in finite supply.
Trees
are physiologically weakened under these conditions, increasing susceptibility
to attack from beetles and other diseases.
Research and observation have lent an understanding of the role beetle
populations would ordinarily fulfill in a “natural” system.
We’ve learned that preventing the issue from reaching epidemic
proportions is as rudimentary an operation as keeping the forest adequately
thinned. Beetle-kill plainly
increases fire risk; to infer otherwise is just silly.
Also plain is the simplicity of reaching into the management toolbox and
fixing unnatural beetle problems (those outside the range of normal
variability), thereby decreasing current and potential fire risk.
The forest products industry, which is among the most efficient and
effective management tools, has been forced to stand behind the regulatory fence
and listen while ‘the Hills are alive, with the sound of chewing.’ If interest groups genuinely want to champion the
preservation of our National Forests, dare I suggest the following: stop
appealing timber sales.
From
forestry’s very genesis as a scientific discipline in the United States,
people like Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot, and yes, John Muir (Sierra Club
founder) professed such visionary concepts of balanced management as the
following:
“The forests, like
perennial fountains, may be made to yield a sure harvest of timber, while at the
same time all of their far reaching beneficent uses may be maintained
unimpaired.” (John Muir, 1895)
John
Muir knew it in 1895; no greater truth could be spoken of natural resource
management today.