Monthly Archives: February 2018

Exasperated members of Congress say they came close last week to ending the longtime stalemate over legislation aimed at reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires. But they say last minute roadblocks kept a tentative deal from being included in the budget bill Congress passed last week to keep the federal government open. …As Western wildfires have grown in intensity, Congress has struggled over what to do. There’s broad agreement that the U.S. Forest Service needs relief from the rising cost of firefighting, which now consumes more than half of the agency’s budget. But there’s been controversy over how how to manage federal lands that are increasingly prone to wildfire  — and the wildfire and forest management issues are now tightly linked.

Who “owns” wildfire? Montana saw 1.4 million acres burn in 2017. No year since 1910 left such a scar. And that’s likely to get worse until Americans take ownership of fire the same way they own responsibility for their personal health, according to research forester Mark Finney of the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula. “If you think of it like health care, it’s like we get rid of all the doctors’ and dentists’ offices and only use emergency rooms and ambulances,” Finney told the Missoula County commissioners last week. “If we did that, the general state of our health would be terrible. Yet that’s what our fire management program essentially is. …“But nobody owns wildfire,” Finney said. “It’s a natural disaster — an act of God. Then everybody gets to claim to be a victim.” But what would happen if someone did “own” wildfire? 

The Marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird that nests in old-growth forests throughout the Pacific Northwest, is officially an endangered species in Oregon. …The vote also puts Oregon on the same page as neighboring California and Washington, which both uplisted the seabird from threatened to endangered in recent years. It’s unclear what the decision would mean for the timber industry, though large and small interests lobbied against the vote Friday. …Bob Sallinger, conservation director for the Audubon Society of Portland, seemed stunned by the decision which came after commissioners were initially deadlocked at a 3-3. …Sara Duncan, director of public affairs for the Oregon Forest & Industries Council, issued a statement saying the group was disappointed. …Much of the concern centers around logging activity on state and private land. …Wildfires also play a role.

TRIANGLE LAKE, Ore. — Jenn and James Ruppert [have a] 3-acre farm. Most of their neighbors are small-farmers [in] … the rural Lake Creek Valley. …The timber companies’ intermittent use of helicopters to spray herbicides onto clear-cuts to kill brush and let planted Douglas fir seedlings survive has long been a flash point in this community, and in other parts of rural Lane County where homes abut large private forests. …Community Rights Lane County and the Lane County Freedom From Aerial Herbicides Alliance turned in about 15,000 signatures to the Lane County Clerk’s Office in September, more than enough to place a measure on the ballot in the May 15 election. …But timber advocates say banning helicopter sprays would dent an industry that supports thousands of direct and related forest sector jobs and billions of dollars in annual payroll in Lane County.

On Friday morning, President Donald Trump signed into a law a budget deal that ended the second short-lived government shutdown the nation has seen in the past three weeks. Among other things, the deal includes around $90 billion for disaster relief funding—a response to the brutal hurricanes and wildfires of 2017. But U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) says the new budget agreement does not do enough to address wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. “Communities across the West, including my home state of Washington, are being torn apart by these disasters,” Cantwell said in a statement, adding that an area two-thirds the size of Rhode Island has been burned in Washington in the last two years

MONTANA — Strange bedfellows are the logger and the conservationist, the motorist and the cyclist, yet here in the Flathead Valley those typically bifurcated corners of public forest planning have joined forces in an effort to change the way federal lands are managed. Five years ago, a coalition of stakeholder groups with competing interests convened a working group to discuss the Whitefish Range within the Flathead National Forest. …What emerged in the final plan was less a compromise than a proposal in which everyone gathered at the table gained something without losing anything of substance. They agreed to increase the timber harvest on suitable lands while expanding the minimum area of suggested wilderness. They increased the amount of available terrain to snowmobiles and other motorized uses and found mountain bikers new opportunities to expand trail systems.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Oregon environmental officials on Friday increased protections for the marbled murrelet, a rare diving seabird known as the “enigma of the Pacific” because it lives and hunts in the ocean but nests far inland in the high canopy of mossy, old-growth forests. The 4-2 vote by the Oregon Commission on Fish and Wildlife to boost the relative of the puffin from threatened to endangered status under state law was the latest development in a long-running debate about how to manage a secretive species that breeds in dense Pacific rainforests that are also prime logging grounds. State environmental officials must now draft guidelines for ways to maintain bird population numbers, including possibly limiting logging in nesting areas owned, managed or leased by the state. Logging interests reacted with dismay, calling the move premature and a further blow to their industry.

The Big Snowy Mountains wilderness study area in Montana represents 91,000 acres of the wildest land left in America. …If a US senator’s bill passes, this tranquility could be shattered by the buzz of snowmobiles or the roar of excavators. In early December, Senator Steve Daines, a Republican, introduced a bill that would eliminate wilderness protection from the Big Snowies as well as from another 358,500 acres in Montana that have been shielded from development since the 1970s. They are known as wilderness study areas because the government is considering them for permanent protections… The five landscapes in Daines’s bill represent over a third of the wilderness study acreage on US national forests, and their loss would mark the biggest reduction of protected public lands in Montana history.