WOOD 2 Forest log
11/17 age of trump
includes trees in general
see wood/ paper for earlier
deforestation for int'l
-=-=
===
gmail 9 24 26
For season one of the HEATED podcast, Tracy and I threw a lot of ideas and formats at the wall. Over 20 episodes in five months, we covered everything from fracking waste to fossil fuel ads to fashion greenwashing to attacks on weather science. We were figuring it all out as we went.
But in the end, one episode outperformed all the others: our myth-busting episode about electric vehicles. As of today, it’s gotten more than 90,000 downloads, whereas the rest of our free episodes averaged about 6,400 downloads. Pretty crazy, right?
Fortunately, we really liked doing that episode! So for season two, Tracy and I decided to just do a lot more of that—and way less of everything else. Instead of 20 episodes about anything we can think of, we’ll be doing just 6 episodes, audio-only, each taking on a bad climate idea th at’s becoming harder to escape.
First up: the idea that “forest management” can solve the wildfire crisis. We hear this one all the time, particularly from Republican politicians amid devastating fires.
I’ll be honest: I thought this one would be pretty straightforward. I’ve talked to enough scientists over the years to know that, while taking better care of forests can help reduce wildfire risk, it can’t solve the problem by itself. We also have to tackle climate change—and the reason Republican politicians never mention that is because they’re self-muzzled by fossil fuel industry money. I figured I’d explain that and be done.
But then I started talking to a scientist who challenged the first part of that assumption; the idea that forest management is even part of the solution to wildfires. He argued that most of the work politicians call “forest management” is just industrial logging, and that this practice is not just ineffective, but actively making wildfires worse. I’d never really heard that argument before. And the more I tried to figure out whether he and scientists like him were right, the deeper I got into a fierce scientific debate I hadn’t even known existed.
Fortunately, as I was deep in this rabbit hole thinking I’d never get out, I got a call from Miranda Green, the host of the *Los Angeles Times*’ *Boiling Point* podcast, asking if I might like to collaborate on an episode. I told her about the predicament I was in, and a reporting partnership was born.
For the first episode of season two, Miranda and I dive into a debate you almost never hear in the political conversation about wildfires. We don’t come close to settling it, or even covering every part of it. But we do learn that the myth of “forest management” is bigger than I thought: It’s the idea that this vague phrase describes one reliable fix for every forest—and that any amount of work in the woods can make up for a warming climate.
I’m sure this episode will ruffle some feathers. Listen to it above, or on your favorite podcast app by searching “HEATED.”
-=-=
---
4 20 26
shut labs --> slc
3 ppl blm hq colo
Trump Admin Aims to "Break the Forest Service," Nearly 200 Million Acres at Stake
54,758 views Apr 20, 2026 Latest Shows
Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de...The Trump administration in late March announced an extensive reorganization of the Forest Service, the federal agency responsible for managing 193 million acres of public lands across 43 states, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. As part of the changes, 57 of 77 research stations across the country will be shuttered, with the headquarters relocating from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City.
While the overhaul is billed as an effort to improve efficiency, conservationist Jim Pattiz says it will effectively destroy the agency. “This is a critically important agency,” says Pattiz, co-author of the newsletter More Than Just Parks that tracks threats to public lands across the country. “The intent here is obvious. It’s to hollow out this agency and hand it to the resource extraction industry and prepare it for, potentially, the eventual transfer of our public lands to states.”
Trump Admin Aims to "Break the Forest Service," Nearly 200 Million Acres at Stake - YouTube
...
then the regional offices, that's another big one. They're shuttering all
3:29
3 minutes, 29 seconds
nine Forest Service regional offices. Um the this is really where the institutional knowledge of the Forest
3:37
3 minutes, 37 seconds
Service is housed. And when you get rid of those offices, you know, the goal here is to make the agency um
3:44
3 minutes, 44 seconds
subservient to the resource extraction industry that the Trump administration is aligned with.
3:52
3 minutes, 52 seconds
Um can you talk about who you think the Forest Service is
4:00
4 minutes
being given over to? I mean, first of all, obviously sending from Washington DC the Forest Service to Salt Lake City,
4:10
4 minutes, 10 seconds
you're going to lose a massive amount of experience for people who cannot move.
4:15
4 minutes, 15 seconds
Um, but then talk about who it's in the hands of, who's in charge now.
4:23
4 minutes, 23 seconds
Yeah. I think something um people need to understand is the Trump administration has done this before on a
4:30
4 minutes, 30 seconds
much smaller scale. Um in Trump's first term, they moved the Bureau of Land Management another very large um public
4:38
4 minutes, 38 seconds
land management agency um from Washington DC, the headquarters from DC to uh Grand Junction, Colorado. Um that resulted in 87%
4:49
4 minutes, 49 seconds
of the affected staff walking out the door. Um only three people showed up to the new office at Grand Junction. Um,
4:58
4 minutes, 58 seconds
and you know, you can talk to uh people who work at the Bureau of Land Management now and did under the Biden administration. President Biden moved it
5:06
5 minutes, 6 seconds
back to DC, but the agency has never recovered. I mean, you're talking about so much institutional knowledge um and
5:13
5 minutes, 13 seconds
key people leaving out the door because they simply can't uproot their lives and their families um to move to this far-flung, you know, new headquarters.
5:21
5 minutes, 21 seconds
Same thing's playing out here with the Forest Service, but on a much larger scale. Um, this decision will impact up to 5,000 employees. And this is an
5:30
5 minutes, 30 seconds
agency that is already lost over a fourth of its entire staff since Trump Trump took office last January. And then
5:40
5 minutes, 40 seconds
you ask me about, you know, what who this hands it to. I mean, I think, you know, look no further than the state of Utah and the anti-public lands movement.
5:50
5 minutes, 50 seconds
Um you can look throughout the Trump administration up and down in positions of leadership um in land management
5:56
5 minutes, 56 seconds
agencies. Um these are people who are avowed um proponents of transferring our
6:03
6 minutes, 3 seconds
federal public lands to states and private interests. The sitting chief of the United States Forest Service, his
6:11
6 minutes, 11 seconds
previous job was as the executive of a logging company. That's unprecedented in the history of the Forest Service to have the chief as a logging executive.
6:21
6 minutes, 21 seconds
And so, you know, the current nominee for the Bureau of Land Management is uh former Congressman Steve Pierce from New Mexico. And this is a man who said
6:30
6 minutes, 30 seconds
Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to create national parks and national forests. So,
6:34
6 minutes, 34 seconds
the intent here is obvious. It's to hand hollow out this agency and hand it to the resource extraction industry and
6:43
6 minutes, 43 seconds
prepare it for potentially um the eventual transfer of our public lands to states.
6:51
6 minutes, 51 seconds
You've called it asset stripping and you say it's illegal. Explain, Jim.
6:59
6 minutes, 59 seconds
Well, you know, asset stripping is a
---
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/owl-habitat-cuts-trump-appointees-faulty-science-81056783
no lnx
'Faulty' science used by Trump appointees to cut owl habitat
U.S. wildlife officials say political appointees in President Donald Trump's administration relied on faulty science to justify stripping habitat protections for the imperiled northern spotted owl
By MATTHEW BROWN and GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press
November 9, 2021,
:{
}:
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Political appointees in the Trump administration relied on faulty science to justify stripping habitat protections for the imperiled northern spotted owl, U.S. wildlife officials said Tuesday as they struck down a rule that would have opened millions of acres of West Coast forest to potential logging.
:{
}:
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reversed a decision made five days before President Donald Trump left office to drastically shrink so-called critical habitat for the spotted owl. The small, reclusive bird has been in decline for decades as old-growth forests were cut in Oregon, Washington and California.
Government biologists objected to the changes under Trump and warned they would put the spotted owl on a path to extinction, documents show.
But Trump's Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and former Fish and Wildlife Service Director Aurelia Skipwith dismissed those concerns — instead adopting a plan to lift restrictions on more land than even the timber industry had sought.
In documents disclosed to The Associated Press prior to their public release, wildlife officials said Bernhardt and Skipwith underestimated the threat of extinction and relied on a faulty interpretation of the science to reach their decision.
Bernhardt defended his handling of the matter, telling AP in an email that Congress gave the interior secretary authority to exclude areas from protection.
Bernhardt said the agency’s “reasonable certainty” the owl would go extinct did not match the law’s requirement that habitat be protected lest a species “will” go extinct.
:{
}:
If wildlife officials want to change that standard, he said, “they should seek a change from Congress.”
“Any future Secretary can weigh the benefit factors differently, but they can not change the law or the legal standard,” he wrote.
Officials twice delayed the changes after President Joe Biden took office and they never went into effect. That puts them among numerous Trump-era policies reversed or struck down by the Interior Department in recent months, on issues from oil and gas drilling on some public lands, to protections for birds from power line and wind turbine collisions.
Democratic lawmakers from Oregon, Washington and California in February called for an investigation into the removal of spotted owl protections, citing potential scientific meddling by Trump appointees.
Wildlife advocates, government agencies and the timber industry have sparred for decades over the northern spotted owl, which officials said Tuesday is in “precipitous decline” and getting close to disappearing from parts of Washington and Oregon.
Federal habitat protections imposed in 2012 were meant to avert the bird's extinction. They've also been blamed for a logging slowdown that's devastated some rural communities.
Of 9.6 million protected acres (3.9 million hectares), federal officials proposed in August 2020 to remove protections for about 2%.
The timber industry said the plan didn't go far enough and called for removal of more than 28%. On January 7, Skipwith changed her agency's recommendation and went even further, telling Bernhardt more than one-third of the protected land, or 3.5 million acres (1.4 million hectares), should be excluded from protection.
The land has huge swaths of timber and includes 2 million acres (809,000 hectares) spread in a checkerboard pattern across western Oregon.
Logging those lands might not have immediately killed off the owls immediately — they live up to 20 years on individual territories that can stretch across 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) —yet eventually they would have gone extinct, said Paul Henson, the wildlife service's Oregon supervisor.
When Henson brought his concerns to superiors last December, Skipwith overrode them.
“You can’t remove over a third of an endangered species’ habitat and not expect it to go extinct,” Henson said in an interview. “There wasn't much disagreement about the science. The disagreement was how much that risk constrains the secretary's authority" to remove habitat protections.
The logging industry says more thinning and management of protected forests is necessary to prevent wildfires, which devastated 560 square miles (1,450 square kilometers) of spotted owl habitat last fall. Most of that area is no longer considered viable for the birds.
Timber interests say much of the land set aside under Tuesday's announcement isn't actually spotted owl habitat or is broken up into parcels too small to support the owl. As such, the smaller habitat designation issued under Trump was “legally and scientifically valid,” said Nick Smith, a spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council. The group represents about 100 manufacturing and logging operations in five western U.S. states.
“The federal government cannot set aside critical habitat unless it is habitat for the species,” Smith said.
The logging industry says the larger, non-native barred owl is a much greater threat than cutting trees. Skipwith echoed that contention when she said the most effective way to preserve spotted owls was to control barred owl numbers.
"The main threats faced by the northern spotted owl are the barred owl and the devastating forest fires," Skipwith said, adding that she used sound science to reach her conclusion. "It’s not an issue of acreage; it’s an issue of the management of the land."
The barred owls, native to the eastern U.S., began affecting spotted owl numbers in Washington and Oregon about a decade ago as they expanded west and south. The incursion accelerated in recent years, putting spotted owls on a downward trajectory that could prompt them to disappear from some areas within ten years, said U.S. Department of Agriculture research biologist Alan Franklin.
Biologists beginning in 2009 studied whether removing barred owls in areas of northern California, Oregon and Washington would help the spotted owl. A pilot program that wrapped up in August showed spotted owl numbers stabilized when barred owl numbers were reduced. They continued to decline in areas without the removals.
:{
}:
Study authors cautioned that the results show habitat protections also are critical to the spotted owl's survival.
In rejecting the Trump rule, federal officials said the dual threat of wildfires and competition from the barred owl underscore why more forest needs protection — to make sure there's enough “redundancy” of habitat that a large fire won't doom the species.
A large-scale barred owl removal program is not in place. Wildlife officials said the best science shows protecting older forests — where owls nest, roost and hunt — is crucial.
Owl expert R. J. Gutiérrez from the University of Minnesota agreed. He said setting aside forest habitat and naming the northern spotted owl as a threatened species in 1990 briefly boosted it before barred owls arrived.
Until barred owls are dealt with, “all habitat is critical” so spotted owls can find refuge from the aggressive newcomers, said Gutiérrez who has spent several decades studying spotted owls along the West Coast.
Environmental groups cheered Tuesday's move but expressed frustration that about 200,000 acres (about 81,000 hectares) of previously protected habitat were excluded under a replacement rule signed by Martha Williams, Biden's nominee to lead the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“In the past 20 years, there’s been accelerated loss of old-growth forest on state and private landsso it’s continued to lose habitat,” said Noah Greenwald with the Center for Biological Diversity. Climate change adds to the threats, he said.
In December, federal officials determined that northern spotted owl's continued decline means it merits a more critical listing as “endangered."
The agency refused to do so immediately, saying other species took priority. That decision is facing a legal challenge.
820
what Happened When a Public Institute Became a De Facto Lobbying Arm of the Timber Industry
Internal emails show a tax-funded agency created to educate people about forestry has acted as a public-relations agency and lobbying arm for Oregon’s timber industry, in some cases skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so.
by Rob Davis, The Oregonian/OregonLive, and Tony Schick, OPB
https://www.ecowatch.com/national-forest-trump-logging-tongass-2645476974.html
A federal judge in Alaska ruled late Wednesday against a Trump administration plan to open 1.8 million acres of America's largest national forest to logging.
The Forest Service plan targeted part of the Tongass National Forest on Prince of Wales Island. It would have been the largest sale of national forest timber in 30 years, Earthjustice pointed out, permitting 164 miles of new roads and clearing an area of forest three times the size of Manhattan, more than half of it old growth. But U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled that the plan violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because the agency did not take all of its potential impacts into account, The Hill reported.
"The magnificent, ancient forests of the Tongass just got a reprieve from the chain saws," Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in the Earthjustice press release. "We're thrilled the court agreed that the Trump administration broke the law when it approved cutting thousands of acres of old-growth trees. It's critical to protect our remaining old-growth forests to have any chance of stopping the extinction crisis and slowing climate change."
CBD was one of eight conservation groups that challenged the plan with representation from Earthjustice, according to fellow plaintiff the National Audubon Society. The groups, also including Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Alaska Rainforest Defenders, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, Alaska Wilderness League and the Natural Resources Defense Council, argued that it violated NEPA, which allows people to weigh in on major infrastructure projects that will impact their community. Prince of Wales Island is an important location for subsistence hunting and fishing, but the Forest Service did not say in its plans where logging would take place, which meant it was impossible for the local community to meaningfully respond to the plans.
Judge Gleason agreedwith this assessment of the project, arguing that the service did not state where logging and road building would occur, according to Courthouse News Service.
"By not developing actual site-specific information, the Forest Service limited its ability to make informed decisions regarding impacts to subsistence uses and presented local communities with vague, hypothetical, and over-inclusive representations of the project's effects over a 15-year period," Gleason wrote.
Gleason also ruled that the plan violated the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which requires federal agencies to determine how projects on public lands will impact those who use the lands for subsistence, according to The Audubon Society.
The ruling comes as the Trump administration is proposing changes to NEPA that would drastically weaken the landmark environmental law by, among other things, limiting the length of the review process, exempting certain projects from any review and allowing federal agencies to ignore a project's climate impacts.
Alaska Wilderness League conservation director Kristen Miller said that Wednesday's ruling showed the importance of NEPA.
"The Prince of Wales project would've been the largest logging project that we have seen anywhere in our national forests in decades, and it would have destroyed thousands of acres of irreplaceable old-growth forest in the Tongass National Forest," Miller said in the Earthjustice release. "Today's ruling is a win for Southeast Alaska's billion-dollar fishing and tourism industries, and a reminder as the Trump administration tries to significantly weaken the National Environmental Policy Act of the critical role NEPA plays in allowing the public to meaningfully weigh in on issues impacting their public lands."
The ultimate fate of the Forest Service project is not yet known, as Judge Gleason did not yet decide on a legal remedy for the plaintiffs' suit. The service did not respond to requests for comment from either Courthouse News Service or The Hill.
ew 220
Two men connected to a famous monarch butterfly reserve in Mexico have been found dead within a week of each other, raising concerns for the safety of environmental activists in the country.
Homero Gómez González, 50, who managed a butterfly reserve in Mexico's Michoacán state and campaigned against illegal logging in the butterflies' winter habitat, was found dead in a well on Jan. 29, BBC News reported. Three days later, part-time reserve tour guide Raúl Hernández Romero, 44, was also found dead on top of a hill in the El Campanario monarch butterfly sanctuary.
"How can you protect the butterflies if Homero Gómez or other people are not protected?" poet and environmental activist Homero Aridjis asked NPR.
Gómez González managed the El Rosario sanctuary, which is part of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The site, located in forested mountains around 100 kilometers (approximately 62 miles) northwest of Mexico City, is where more than half of eastern monarch butterfly colonies spend their winters. The butterflies travel all the way to Canada each spring and then back again in the fall. Because four generations of butterflies are born and die during this time, it is unclear how they know to find their way back, but they do.
"Every autumn, millions, perhaps a billion, butterflies from wide areas of North America return to the site and cluster on small areas of the forest reserve, coloring its trees orange and literally bending their branches under their collective weight," UNESCO described.
But the butterflies' winter home is threatened by logging and the planting of avocado farms, according to NPR. Between 2005 and 2006, loggers felled 461 hectares in the area, The Washington Post reported.
Gómez González, a former logger himself, campaigned to protect the reserve and argued that tourism from the butterfly migration was worth more to the region than illegal logging. The El Rosario sanctuary he managed opened in November to help prevent logging, BBC News reported, and his family said he received threats before he disappeared Jan. 13.
His funeral on Friday was widely attended.
"I offer my condolences to Mr. Gómez González's family, his colleagues and all of those who, in Mexico and elsewhere, sometimes at the risk of their lives, work every day to protect this natural heritage which is shared by all of humanity," Director of the World Heritage Centre Mechtild Rössler said in a statement.
Gómez González was found to have received a blow to the head before drowning in a well, BBC News reported. His death was apparently not a robbery, since he was found with the equivalent of more than $500 in pesos, according to NPR.
Hernández Romero worked showing tourists around the El Rosario sanctuary, according to The Washington Post.
He was last seen Jan. 27 leaving his home, and then found dead Saturday after having been badly beaten with a sharp object.
Authorities are unclear if the deaths are connected to each other or to both men's work protecting the butterflies. However, The Guardian pointed out that there is a trend of environmental defenders being murdered in Mexico in conflicts with developers or criminal groups. Mexico's murder rate is also generally on the rise, BBC News reported. In 2019, the country saw its highest murder rate ever with 34,582 reported killed.
- Environmental Defender Murdered in Mexico Days Before Vote on ... ›
- Illegal Loggers Murder Amazon Forest Guardian - EcoWatch ›
- Homero Gómez González, Mexico's monarch butterfly defender ... ›
- Environmental Activists, Heroes, and Martyrs - Markkula Center for ... ›
- The Monarch Butterfly Crime: Who Murdered Homer Gomez and Why? ›
- 53 police investigated in disappearance of monarch butterfly activist ›
-
activismlogginginsectsanimalswildlifeconservation
==
Planting Billions of Trees Is the 'Best Climate Change Solution Available Today,' Study Finds
==
intercept 919
https://theintercept.com/2019/09/21/environmental-activists-logging-trees/
NEW GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS PUT THEIR BODIES ON THE LINE TO DEFEND CALIFORNIA’S FORESTS
Leighton Akio Woodhouse, Pedro Armando Aparicio
DEFORESTATION OF the Amazon is recognized around the world as a catastrophe for global climate change. Far less recognized is the threat of deforestation of temperate rainforests, such as the enormous coastal forest that stretches from Northern California to Alaska. By some estimates, temperate rainforests sequester from 2 to 7 times as much carbon per acre as tropical rainforests like the Amazon. Keeping these ecosystems healthy and intact is an imperative part of avoiding a future of cataclysmic global warming.
In Humboldt County, California, activists have been fighting for decades to preserve the forests and have embraced direct action tactics aimed at physically preventing logging companies from felling redwoods, Douglas firs, madrones, and other trees by using their own bodies as blockades. They have built platforms 100 feet in the air in the canopies of trees and lived on them for weeks, months, or even years at a time. They have erected tripods to block logging roads and sat atop them, so that if the tripods were dismantled, they would face injury or death. They have chained themselves to bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment.
The tradition in the region stretches back to the legendary activism of Judi Bari, Julia “Butterfly” Hill, and many less well-known but no less committed radical environmental activists. Today, a new generation of activists has taken up the cause, using direct action tactics to confront logging companies such as Sierra Pacific Industries, Green Diamond Resource Company, and the Humboldt Redwood Company (the latter is the company that used to be Pacific Lumber, which was the target of Earth First!’s activism in the “Timber Wars” of the 1980s and ’90s). Our short documentary, produced by Adamant Media, tells their story....
With Amazon in flames, Trump moves to open 16.7 million-acre Alaskan Rainforest to corporate exploitation
“If the planet could talk, it would be screaming in agony or weeping in despair. Maybe both.”
==
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/forest-service-weighs-plan-to-lay-waste-to-tens-of-thousands-of-acres-of-old-growth-trees/
no lnx
Forest Service weighs plan to lay waste to tens of thousands of acres of old-growth trees
Written by David Cay Johnston / DC Report August 15, 2019
The evil genius of the people Donald Trump brought into our government so America could become a polluter’s paradise is really something to behold.
The latest Team Trump move would turn our national forests into polluter playgrounds. Companies that want to mow down old-growth trees so they can get at pockets of oil, coal or uranium are about to get pretty much everything they’ve always dreamed about. And roadless areas are marked for new roads extending miles into wilderness areas.
The way it’s being done is, in a perverse sort of way, admirably clever.
They call their plan to re-interpret how the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act applies to our national forests “streamlining” to make government more efficient. Their abuse of language is working, too. Many of the more than 29,000 people and organizations that have filed comments on the proposal embrace the Trumpian language.
Few of the comments I reviewed pushed back on “streamlining.” The proposal is better described as “steamrolling” the National Environmental Policy Act, the first federal law to require consideration of Earth and its bounty in governmental decisions.
Forestry, farming and other groups that favor the new policy refer to it as a plan to “modernize how” government complies with the law.
Powerful is the advantage of setting the agenda and with it the language of debate.
You, fellow citizens and owners of our government, now have until Aug. 26 to tell our hired help in the White House and the Forest Service what you think or forever suffer the consequences of idly standing by. Stand up for America’s natural resources.
Virtually No Public Review
The Trump administration, by its own estimate, wants to exempt 93% of forest service decisions from public review.
Currently, about 60% or perhaps 70% of these decisions are left to the discretion of agency professionals and managers without public comment for review. That’s entirely reasonable. A well-functioning government agency can’t be running off to get public input every time its managers want to put up a new sign for a parking lot, replace the toilets at a trailhead or change the color and fabric of ranger uniforms.
The issue is where to draw the line. Let’s look at the clear-cutting of forests, which has a devastating effect on birds, mammals and other wildlife, can cause severe soil erosion that may wipe out salmon runs and even bury houses in mudslides.
Using agency discretion should the Forest Service be allowed to let loggers clear cut a small hillside before pests ruin the wood? What about 500 acres? How about 7,300 acres?
What the Trumpers want is freedom to clear up to 7,300 acres of our forest lands under rules that could hide the action from the public until the deed is done or at least well underway. That is 11.4 square miles or half the size of Manhattan.
That’s just one example of the mischief that would be allowed under the proposed new rules.
One-Day Notice
There would still have to be notices published in the Forest Service’s quarterly Schedule of Proposed Action or SOPA reports. Under the proposed rules, however, officials could authorize logging the day after SOPA comes out, giving loggers three months to cut before anyone not in the forest or noticing an increase in logging trucks would be clued in.
SOPA reports have long been designed to help hide Forest Service plans, a subtle but valuable benefit of the timber industry. Team Trump wants to tilt the existing rules almost entirely to the benefit of its industrial allies.
Go to the SOPA web page and notice that it is not a single report you could breeze through, perhaps using a Control F search for a keyword.
Instead you must click one-by-one on each of 176 forests, grasslands, prairies or recreational areas. Then you must navigate your way through 10 quarterly SOPA reports since Trump took office, each of which may go on for page after page in dense bureaucratese.
Just look at the SOPAs for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which lists numerous actions like those here.
Rube Goldberg may be dead, but his progeny seem to have found plenty of related work helping make ridiculously complex what should be simple interactions between us and our government.
What happens to forests and the like matters because they provide us with a rich bounty of life and wealth. Natural forests have many kinds of trees and other plants providing food and shelter to a robust array of animals. Clear cut lands are deserts with little life. When Farmer McGregor levels a woodlot to grow carrots he’s not helping Peter Rabbit, he’s killing whole families of rabbits by destroying their natural food sources.
What of wetlands? They are nature’s filters, storm barriers and nurseries and crucial to some forests. Fill marshes and swamps in and the populations of birds, fish and amphibians decline. When there are not enough wetlands to harbor young life that grows up to move on to rivers, lakes and the ocean there are other consequences. Sharks, for example, finding too few fish to sustain their numbers start looking at beachgoers as their next dinner.
The proposed new Forest Service “regulations are designed to dramatically reduce public involvement in federal land management decisions,” Susan Jane Brown of the Western Environmental Law Center in Oregon wrote in a memo detailing the issues.
Logging and mining will likely increase, but “without the benefit of scientific input.”
Team Trump justifies reducing disclosures and radically reducing when the American people can comment to increase efficiency. Since it’s our government – we own it – this is really a ploy to make government a power unto itself, part of the overall Trump desire to replace a government that derives its powers from the consent of the people to a power onto itself.
He has mused at least six times in public about being “president for life” and he often refers to how he wants to rule over what Trump calls “my people.”
==
===
bad: forest agency proposes to “streamline” environmental rules
- The U.S. Forest Service (part of the Dept. of Agriculture) has proposed new rules to speed up permits for logging, mining, and road-building projects on public lands.
- Read the proposed changes here, at the USFS website.
- Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the changes are needed to fast-track “treatment” for millions of acres of federal forest, reports Reuters via U.S. News and World Report.
- “Years of costly analysis and delays are not an acceptable solution,” said Perdue, to lowering the risks of catastrophic wildfires in western forests.
- These risks exist in part because of climate-change-driven rising temperatures, along with many years of drought in western states.
- The other major factor is decades of fire suppression, a scientifically-outmoded practice dating from the early 20th century (to preserve forests for commercial logging), that has left forests loaded with fuel: thick brush, dead trees, downed wood on forest floors.
- Some projects that would be fast-tracked under the reworked rules are unremarkable, like clearing brush from roadsides, or doing prescribed burns to lower forest fuel loads.
- But the revised rules would also fast-track some mining and commercial logging projects, by exempting them from the comprehensive environmental reviews required by a keystone environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act.
- Going around NEPA would also give the public less chance to weigh in, pro or con, on these projects, because some public comment periods are timed to the release of those environmental reviews.
- This move “comes after other efforts to loosen forest management regulations fell flat in Congress last year,” notes the Sacramento Bee.
- Federal agencies and some industries complain about “analysis paralysis” when it comes to environmental studies, but as NPR reports, “a bigger holdup is budget cuts, particularly in the Forest Service, where money has been diverted away from wildlife, habitat and forestry programs to pay for the skyrocketing costs of wildfire suppression.”
==
https://www.ecowatch.com/forest-service-logging-plan-2638830051.html
Forest Service Wants to Fast-Track Logging Without Environmental Review
==
World's Alarming Rate of Forest Loss Threatens a Crucial Climate Solution
BY: GEORGINA GUSTIN
More corporations and countries are committing to preserve forests, yet new global data show tree loss rates are still dangerously high — with severe climate consequences.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032019/forest-wildfire-climate-change-tipping-point-study-douglas-fir-ponderosa-pines-west
Climate change in the American West may be crossing an ominous threshold, making parts of the region inhospitable for some native pine and fir forests to regrow after wildfires, new research suggests.
As temperatures rise, the hotter, drier air and drier soil conditions are increasingly unsuitable for young Douglas firs and ponderosa pines to take root and thrive in some of the region's low-elevation forests, scientists write in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wildfiresin these areas could lead to abrupt ecosystem changes, from forest to non-forest, that would otherwise take decades to centuries, the study says.
"Once a certain threshold was crossed, then the probability of tree establishment decreased rapidly," said Kimberley Davis, a researcher at the University of Montana and lead author of the study. "The climate conditions are just a lot less suitable for regeneration."
The two iconic species are important to both the region's forest ecology and its economy, particularly its timber industry.
Davis and her colleagues looked at growth rings of nearly 3,000 young trees in 33 fire-damaged areas of California, Colorado, the Northern Rockies and the southwestern United States to see when the forests recovered after fires over the past 30 years. Analyzing climate data over the same period, they found certain thresholds involving summer humidity for ponderosa pine, surface temperature for Douglas fir, and soil moisture for both species, beyond which there was a sharp decline in forest regrowth.
The warmer, drier air isn't harming mature trees, but it is preventing future generations from growing, Davis said.
"There could be a lot of areas where there is currently forest but if we have a fire we might not see regeneration," she said.
Thresholds 'Show How Much Is at Stake'
Davis and her colleagues found that most of the sites they looked at had crossed the temperature and humidity threshold at some point in the last 20 years.
They targeted the driest and warmest sites in the region to see if climate change was already beginning to affect forests. The researchers now plan to assess the extent to which regeneration is affected in relatively cooler, wetter sites in the region.
Several factors influence a forest's regrowth after a wildfire, such as the severity of the fire, regional drought and how the trees produce seeds. The researchers noted that as the region sees fewer years with climate conditions suitable for seedlings to grow, the nature of the trees' seed production, with heavy crops of cones only every few years, will further limit new growth.
Last year, wildfires burned more than 8.7 million acres nationwide, 32 percent higher than the 10-year average according to an annual report by the National Interagency Coordination Center released last week. More than 1.8 million of those acres were in California, the highest in recorded state history, according to state fire officials.
The inability of forests to bounce back from such fires is cause for concern, said Joe Fargione, science director for the Nature Conservancy's North America region.
"The thresholds identified here show how much is at stake—losing forests because trees can't grow back—if we don't accelerate the switch to clean energy and invest more in natural climate solutions," Fargione said. "This study will help land managers identify forests at the greatest risk of not regenerating post-fire."
Fargione said such high-risk forests can be targeted for selective thinning to reduce the risk of forest fires and for restoration efforts to improve the success of forest regeneration.
Trees Play a Critical Climate Role
Protecting forests is important for slowing climate change because of their ability to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots.
A study Fargione and others published last fall found better forest, farm and land management practices offer natural climate solutions that could mitigate 21 percent of the United States' annual greenhouse gas emissions.
"It really highlights the fact that we need to begin a national and international conversation about how we can enhance the resiliency of our global forests," Anthony Swift, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Canada Project, said of the current study.
Swift said intensive logging, road building and cutting trees to make room for transmission lines weakens the ability of forests to deal with added stressors like climate change.
"We don't need to stop all activity in global forests, but it does raise the need to reconsider how and where we extract timber and engage in other industrial activities in forests," he said.
A report last month by NRDC looked at how clear cutting boreal forests in Canada by some U.S. toilet paper manufacturersimperils forests and could hasten climate change.The report called for alternatives, like using recycled paper, that don't lead to the fragmentation and clear cutting of intact forests. Leaving forests more intact could also help protect Douglas fir and ponderosa pine forests in the American West, Swift said.
"Whether we are looking at wildfires or industrial activities, concerns that in a changing climate regeneration is going to be more difficult to achieve is an issue that we all need to be looking at more carefully because of the roll our forests have to play for the global climate," he said.
PUBLISHED UNDER:
==
predictably, no tree left behind, healthy forest redux? ocean and forest are carbon sinks, so death spiral?
https://www.ecowatch.com/zinke-wildfires-logging-2596682044.html
Zinke Announces Plan to Fight Wildfires With More Logging
The Trump administration announced a new plan Thursday to fight ongoing wildfires with more logging, and with no mention of additional funding or climate change.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke stated in a
that the fires are so intense because the forests have "been held hostage by environmental groups" to prevent proper management via logging, and that climate change is "irrelevant."
But when asked later by Weijia Jang of CBS, Zinke said "of course" climate change is part of the science explaining the wildfires. Then, at a cabinet meeting Thursday afternoon, President Trump asked Zinke to repeat his assertion that "it's not a global warming thing."
"Zinke, like Trump, continues to deny the obvious," Kirin Kennedy, associate legislative director for lands and wildlife for the Sierra Club, said in an email, Bloomberg reported. "It is climate change that is exacerbating wildfire season in the West."
As reported by The Sacramento Bee:
The plan, which emphasizes state and local collaboration, was short on details, however. It does not address politically sensitive issues like climate change, which Democrats and scientists argue is at the root of the problem, or the role of environmental reviews for logging projects, which conservatives want to sidestep. And it did not address the possibility of additional funding, suggesting the burden to pay for the new efforts could fall to the states.
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-forest-ecosystem-2564720055.html
Climate Change Threatens Unique West Coast Forest Region
The Klamath is a unique region in Northern California and Southwest Oregon. In addition to being a haven for biodiversity— hosting plants that only live in its mountainous landscape and 29 different species of conifers—it also stores carbon in its diverse array of tall trees.
But those iconic trees, and their carbon-storing power, are under threat from climate change, a study published Monday in Scientific Reports found.
Using a landscape simulation model, researchers at Harvard University, Portland State University and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute looked at five different potential climate change scenarios and found that, even under a continuation of current climate conditions, up to one third of the conifer landscape could be replaced by less-carbon-absorbing shrubs and hardwood this century.
This change in vegetation is largely driven by the impact of climate change on wildfires. Conifers are adapted to withstand fires, but climate change reduces the time between fires, called the "fire rotation period," and increases their size and severity.
Researchers found that every climate change scenario also increased drought in the summers, which made it harder for all plant species to re-establish themselves after fires. This effect was worse for conifers, whose ability to regrow decreased from 26 to 39 percent depending on the climate scenario, while shrubs declined by 7 to 20 percent.
"If the fire-free interval is too short or if the growing conditions are too dry, the shrubs can persist indefinitely, and the iconic conifers are squeezed out," study co-author and Harvard senior ecologist Jonathan Thompson said in a Harvard press release published by Phys.org.
While the conifer-dominated area was reduced even under current climate conditions, that area further decreased in the climate change scenarios.
"As the climate continues to warm, big severe wildfires will be more frequent, and the dry conditions that follow will increasingly favor shrubs over conifers. The combination will mean less of the conifer forest that make the Klamath so distinct," Thompson said.
The findings corresponded with other studies that have observed larger fires in Western forests due to climate change. The two warmest climate scenarios predicted forest fires that would break the record for largest fire in the area, currently held by the Biscuit Fire of 2002.
The researchers hypothesized that vegetation shifted from conifers to shrubs even under current climate conditions in part because climate change has already begun and in part because of 20th-century fire suppression that gave conifers an advantage.
...
Congress, Trump Exploit Fire Tragedy to Promote Logging Agenda
By Chad Hanson
In the wake of the October 2017 fires in Northern California, which resulted in the loss of so many lives and homes, people affected by the tragedy are grieving and bewildered. Many people are searching for answers about what caused the fires, and a way forward to prevent similar loss of life and property.
It's frustrating, then, to watch Republican leaders in Congress and the Trump administration politicizing the recent tragedy as they push for a sweeping elimination of environmental laws on our national forests and other federal public lands to increase logging and backcountry fire suppression under the guise of community protection. On Nov. 1, the House voted 232-188 to allow for more "salvage logging" and other forms of tree-cutting on federal properties. According to the Associated Press, House Speaker Paul Ryan said the bill was needed to protect the nation's federal forests "from the kind of devastation that California experienced."
Wrong. Even a cursory examination of the science of forest ecology reveals that this plan would not only destroy vast acreages of public forests, but would also put communities at even greater risk.
The fires that occurred last month in California were in low-elevation foothill ecosystems dominated by oak woodlands and grasslands. The fires were far away from any national forests or other federal public lands. Eviscerating environmental laws on federal forestlands would do nothing whatsoever to help the affected communities now or in the future. Instead, what the tens of millions of Americans living in rural communities within fire-adapted ecosystems really need is for federal and state lawmakers to focus on directly protecting homes and lives from wildland fire.
The science is clear on how best to do this, and it involves a few basic steps. Most important, we need to help homeowners make their homes far more fire-safe. This includes measures such as using fire-resistant roofing and siding, installing rain gutter guards (to prevent flaming embers from landing in a dry bed of pine needles and leaves accumulating in rain gutters); using a fine-wire mesh on exterior vents to prevent embers from floating into interior spaces like attics; and replacing wood decks with fire-resistant composites. Homeowners also need assistance to create "defensible space" within 60 to 100 feet around their homes, which involves removing most small trees and shrubs, removing lower limbs on mature trees, and annually raking up and removing small twigs, needles and leaves from the ground. (Clearing vegetation away from larger distances from homes offers no added benefit for home protection, research shows.)
Further, we need to create an infrastructure to notify communities when wildland fires occur so that people and their animals can evacuate quickly. When these steps are properly implemented, the vast majority of homes can and do survive wildland fire, and lives are saved. Finally, we must focus wildland fire suppression and management activities around homes and communities, rather than in backcountry forests.
But the current leadership in Congress appears more interested in trying to find some kind of cover for allowing for increased logging. The recently passed bill—deceptively named the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017, and which was sponsored by one of the biggest recipients of logging-industry campaign contributions in Congress, Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican—would divert more resources away from protecting communities in order to give a windfall to logging corporations.
If the Senate passes this bill and it becomes law, the legislation would eliminate most logging regulations in national forests, and severely curtail public participation in federal forest management decisions, allowing clearcuts thousands of acres in size. What's more, the bill would prohibit federal judges from issuing temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions against illegal logging projects on our public lands, which means giant logging projects would be completed before any judge could enforce existing laws.
Unfortunately, Senate passage could happen. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) has introduced S. 2068, the so-called Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation Act. Similar to HR 2936, this bill would exempt massive logging projects from environmental laws and public participation on our national forests, and would prevent federal judges from being able to enforce environmental laws. Barrasso issued a statement misleadingly claiming that this massive rollback of environmental protections was needed to "remove excess brush" from federal forests.
Environmental leaders in Congress, including Representative Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) who is the Ranking Member on the House Natural Resources Committee, are calling HR 2936 a shameful "giveaway" to the logging industry. "The Americans across the West whose homes burned to the ground this year aren't interested in whether Congress can make timber companies a few extra bucks," Grijalva said.
These logging bills represent both an attack on our public lands and an assault on science. Both pieces of legislation are predicated on a political tale known as the "catastrophic wildfire" narrative, which is a classic example of the politics of fear. The basic premise of this narrative is that wildland fires are "destroying" our forests—and that more intensive and widespread logging will "save" them. But the notion that fire "destroys" forests has been refuted by hundreds of scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies. The current science tells us, for instance, that even in the same forest types, the forests with the fewest environmental protections and the most logging burn more intensely, not less.
There is now a broad consensus among forest scientists that we have considerably less fire in our forests today compared to the natural levels that occurred prior to fire-suppression policies. And, though it may seem counterintuitive, hundreds of scientific studies have concluded that, in the patches where forest fires burn more intensely and kill most of the trees, the resultant "snag forest habitat" is actually some of the best and most important wildlife habitat in the western U.S.—comparable to old-growth forest in terms of native biodiversity and wildlife abundance.
We also need our public forests to help mitigate climate change, since protected forests absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in growing trees and shrubs. In fact, if we protected our national forests from logging, it would be like taking 13 to 24 million cars off the road.
But the Trump administration and its allies in Congress don't really care about science. They live in a world of "alternative facts" in which clearcuts the size of cities are promoted as fire management, ecological restoration, and climate-resilience measures. Their proposed solution to the risks of wildfire is to destroy the forest in order to save it.
Reposted with permission from our media associate SIERRA magazine.
==
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2936