Monthly Archives: October 2017

MISSOULA – A new nonprofit journalism group is bringing a panel of fire managers and experts together to discuss lessons we learned about “living with fire” in the wake of Montana’s vicious 2017 fire season. While the just concluded fire season didn’t have the intensity of the fierce fires Montana experienced in 2000, it was still the most impactful in a decade, with more than a million acres torched statewide. Tuesday night, the new online magazine “Treesource” is assembling a panel of experts for a public forum to discuss this past fire season, and what it forecasts for the future. 

McKENZIE BRIDGE — Environmental activists blocked a U.S. Forest Service road near McKenzie Bridge for the second day Tuesday, preventing access to a controversial timber sale. A tree sitter remained high up in a tree on a suspended platform that would drop him to the ground if a rope affixed to the roadblock was freed. The platform hung more than 80 feet above the ground. The protester has been up there since Monday morning. …Throughout the day Tuesday, U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officers kept watch on the roadblock installed overnight Sunday by the Eugene-­based Cascadia Forest Defenders. … The group has held tree sits near McKenzie Bridge since this summer. The 2,452-acre project has been debated at public meetings and in court for more than five years. Currently, the Forest Service has a legal green light for the logging.

Lisa Murkowski

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday she could begin rolling back another of the Obama administration’s midnight regulations that sought to limit industrial activity and renewable energy development in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Murkowski, who is the Republican chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, had asked the Government Accountability Office, the government’s federal watchdog group, to determine if the Obama administration’s amendment to the Tongass federal management plan could be defined as a regulation and thereby subject to congressional repeal. The GAO confirmed to Murkowski late Monday that the amendment is indeed a rulemaking and subject to the Congressional Review Act. …”Every sector of the Southeast Alaska economy needs greater access to the Tongass, but this rule failed to provide it,” she said.

Dianne Feinstein

Ron Wyden

Over the last two weeks, the nation’s attention has been on California, which has suffered the most destructive series of wildfires in recent history. …While fires still blaze across the West, the immediate focus must be containing fires, evacuating communities at risk and providing temporary food and shelter.  …But once those immediate needs are addressed, we need to examine the long-term implications of this year’s horrendous fire season. Simply put, we need to change how Congress funds federal agencies in charge of forest health and wildfire suppression — the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management — so they can use their budgets to manage public lands more effectively. …Putting an end to fire borrowing will allow the Forest Service to use its fire prevention funds for their intended purpose: clearing hazardous fuels in our forests and completing other forest management activities, such as processing environmental reviews for areas impacted by insects and disease.

The four Democratic senators from Oregon and Washington have found common ground with Idaho’s two Republican senators in a bill to reduce wildfire risks near communities. The legislation directs federal land managers to focus tree-thinning and brush-removal projects in areas where wildfire would pose the most risk to people, homes and businesses. It also allocates $100 million to help local governments and tribes in high-hazard areas prepare for fires. …The legislation lands in the Senate at the tail end of a fierce Western wildfire season, which has put more pressure on Congress to curb some of the partisan battles over management of fire-prone public lands.

From Southern California, the redwood forest of Humboldt and Del Norte counties is a two-day drive. It might as well be another country. …At the time of statehood in 1850, something like 2 million acres of northwestern California were covered in redwood. By 2000, only 5 percent of this old growth remained, effectively all of it protected in public reserves. That’s the “redwood forest” famous around the world. There’s also a second, much larger “redwood forest”: cutover land regrown as plantations. …The 2×4 redwood boards you see at Home Depot come from the second-growth forest. Although young redwood is very good material, it’s not superlative like the old stuff. …For the building of California civilization, old-growth redwood “outranked all other natural resources.”

…As the northern Arizona program restoration manager for The Nature Conservancy, Neil Chapman is well-versed in the overgrown state of the region’s forests. The Four Forest Restoration Initiative, or 4FRI, aims to mechanically thin densely packed ponderosa forests like these, with a goal of completing 1 million acres over 20 years in northern Arizona. But so far, the Forest Service has struggled to get close to the initiative’s ambitious 50,000-acres-per-year goal. Over the past year, logging companies have thinned about 13,000 acres. Now, The Nature Conservancy and the Forest Service hope a new partnership, called the Future Forest program, will help accelerate that pace.