Region Archives: US West

Steve Daines

Montana Senator Steve Daines is introducing a bill that would remove management restrictions on three Wilderness Study Areas, saying the change would increase public access and improve management to cut wildfire risk. The three WSAs included in the “Montana Sportsmen Conservation Act” are the Middle Fork of the Judith, and the Hoodoo Mountain WSA and the Wales Creek WSA, both in Powell County. Wilderness Study Areas were originally proposed decades ago to allow for consideration of additional wilderness areas on federal lands, with some being deemed “unsuitable” for wilderness. But critics have said the tracts, which are often on Bureau of Land Management acreage, prevent access by sportsmen and other public lands users, and create “de facto” wilderness. Environmental interests have argued the WSAs should be protected by being finalized as wilderness areas, a step which requires Congressional approval.

Practice what you preach. In their op-ed in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Wild Montana, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Montana Wildlife Federation preach that Montana’s Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) should be protected. These groups preach protection for WSAs but in practice they are actually part of the “measly 6%.” They justify this by saying it’s okay to drop protections for some of “Montana’s wildest places” as long as it’s done by “locally-driven collaborative process.” They are wrong. These National Public Lands belong to all Americans and not just a few self-appointed collaborators using a top-down approach embodied in legislation. …Wild Montana and GYC are only telling people the parts they want you to hear. Everybody is free to be for whatever they want and we should respect other opinions, but we should also insist on getting all the information. Otherwise, we might get soaked by a “wild green-washing machine.”

Approximately 1,800 years after popping out of the ground as seedlings, live bristlecone pines are still talking to us nearly 2 millennia later. They offer warnings and insight into long-term drought in the West, according to researchers from the University of Arizona. Rings from trees that were alive in the west’s Great Basin in the second century A.D. show a devastating 24-year drought back then that makes our current 22-year Western drought look positively moist. The tree rings and other evidence from caves and bogs show the drought cut 32% from the average flow of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, in northern Arizona near the beginning of the Grand Canyon. The drought we’re living through? It’s bad, forcing changes to water use in seven Western states. But by comparison the current drought has cut “only” 16% from recent average flows at Lees Ferry. 

Arizona’s first modern megafire raged through ponderosa pines 20 years ago this month, burning deep scars that still reveal themselves on the landscape atop the Mogollon Rim. How the forest recovers — if it does — will depend on the actions of forest and land managers two decades later and the effects of a changing climate in the future. To a forester who hadn’t witnessed the radical changes that warming temperatures and lengthening fire seasons have imposed on northern Arizona, the regrowth in the 468,638-acre burn scar of the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire might look like it’s proceeding on schedule. …There’s a forest in the making, but one waiting to be unmade once more by fire. The problem, according to the director of Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute, is that the forest rising from Rodeo-Chediski’s ashes lives on borrowed time.

Two weeks after the Thurston County Board of Commissioners wrote the Department of Natural Resources opposing a 16-acre cut near Summit Lake, another letter has made its way to the state. On June 16, the county commissioners wrote the board and Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz to ask that they consider saving 3,100 acres of forest in Thurston County. This move would protect what they and other advocacy groups believe to be the last of the county’s Legacy Forests, which are scheduled to be cut by 2026. Stephen Kropp with the Center for Responsible Forestry has defined Legacy Forests as mature forest stands that were logged in the late 1800s and early 1900s then left to grow back on their own. Currently, the DNR dates old-growth forests to 1850. …DNR communications manager Kenny Ocker said … there’s still room for changes to be made and for trees to be saved.

The U.S. Forest Service failed to account for the effects of climate change when it conducted a controlled burn in April that prompted the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history, the agency said in a report. The agency depended on multiple miscalculations, poor weather data and underestimated how dry conditions were in the Southwest when crews ignited a prescribed burn that led to the ongoing Calf Canyon/Hermits Creek fire, according to the agency’s 80-page review. The blaze, which has burned more than 341,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of homes, comes amid a prolonged drought and extreme temperatures in the region. …Drought, extreme weather, wind conditions and unpredictable weather changes have become significant challenges for the Forest Service, which uses prescribed burns as a way to lower the risk of a destructive fire. …The review discovered that “numerous details regarding situational awareness of weather in the fire environment were overlooked or misrepresented”

…A broad-tailed hummingbird buzzes a feeder perched on the steel lattice tower, the food supplied by a U.S. Forest Service fire sentinel. Down the dirt road, but obscured by the dense tree cover, a band of spike-antlered and cow elk shuffle and munch in the warmth of a May afternoon.  It’s a peaceful, pine-scented scene that cloaks the constant threat embodied by the watchtower and its staff. Out of view to the east, a 700-square-mile expanse of forest still struggles to recover from the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire.  …Rodeo-Chediski’s severe burn, whipping from one tightly packed tree to the next and killing every one of them in huge patches, sounded the alarm that set foresters and hydrologists on a course to mechanically thin and sometimes burn off excess trees to protect a Salt River Project reservoir’s supply before the next megafire.

The American Forest Resource Council’s Tom Partin let the cat out of the bag in his June 5 opinion piece in the Missoulian.  …He starts with the fire threat and then moves on to say the Bitterroot Front Project is needed to conduct commercial timber harvest on more than 55,000 acres and “will greatly help sustain the existing milling infrastructure. Without the raw material sold by the Forest Service…the industry would not be able to run their mills at capacities.”  Advocates of commercial logging like to say that all of our forests are overgrown.  …A team of scientists concluded that areas of thick forest have always been part of the normal landscape condition (Odion et al. 2014. “Examining Historical and Current Mixed-Severity Fire Regimes in Ponderosa Pine and Mixed-Conifer Forests of Western North America”). …The Forest Service routinely cherry-picks the scientific literature, conveniently ignoring science that doesn’t promote its commercial logging-heavy agenda. 

Christy Brigham began working as the chief of resources management and science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in 2015. …The one type of tree Brigham was told she didn’t have to worry about was Sequoiadendron giganteum. “I was told that nothing kills sequoias,” Brigham says. ..One of Brigham’s priorities was restoring fire to areas that had become dangerously overgrown. Tony Caprio, a fire ecologist for Sequoia and Kings Canyon, estimates that about 30,000 acres need controlled burns each year to keep wildfires relatively mild; if a fire doesn’t get high enough to burn through the crown of a sequoia, that tree has a good chance of surviving. …But each year, Caprio has been able to burn only about 1,000 acres. …In 2017, researchers noticed that some sequoia were infested with cedar bark beetles—native insects that had never been known to attack the trees before.

John Mellgren

Oregon-based conservation organizations Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild challenged the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Siuslaw Field Office’s plan to log public lands west of Eugene across seven watersheds. The agency’s “N126 Late Successional Reserve Landscape Plan Project” is one of the largest logging proposals on public lands in Oregon in decades. The targeted forests are home to at least three federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) listed species: northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, and Oregon Coast coho salmon, along with the red tree vole, which is currently a candidate for ESA listing. The agency failed entirely to consider impacts to these species, amongst other errors. “BLM has purposely hidden the specifics about this massive logging project from public review,” said John Mellgren, General Counsel at the Western Environmental Law Center. 

A secluded area of woods and prairie southeast of Brownsville is targeted for a habitat restoration project by the Bureau of Land Management, which could include cutting down conifers in a commercial timber sale to protect its endangered butterfly population.  From now until July 13, BLM is seeking the public’s input on the proposed project, and on Friday hosted a public meeting at Brownsville City Hall, where local residents could discuss the plan and raise any concerns or questions.  …The butterfly is only found in the Willamette Valley, and the Oak Basin Prairies are one of three known areas with them east of Interstate 5; there are 13 known locations total in Oregon. The Oak Basin Prairies’ population of the butterfly dropped to 12 in 2017, but has since risen to between 30 and 40, according to BLM’s presentation.

Deb Haaland

The U.S. is adding $103 million this year for wildfire risk reduction and burned-area rehabilitation throughout the country as well as establishing an interagency wildland firefighter health and well-being program, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced Friday.  Haaland made the announcement following a briefing on this year’s wildfire season at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, which coordinates the nation’s wildland firefighting efforts.  The U.S. is having one of its worst starts to the wildfire season with more than 30,000 wildfires that have scorched 4,600 square miles. That’s well above the 10-year average for the same period, about 23,500 wildfires and 1,800 square miles burned.  About $80 million will be used to speed up work removing potential wildfire hazards on more than 3,000 square miles of Interior Department lands, a 30% increase over last year. Another $20 million will be used to bolster post-wildfire landscape recovery.

SAN FRANCISCO — A timber company’s proposal to fell redwoods in a Northern California old-growth redwood forest won’t put endangered frogs and salmon species in harms way, a federal judge said Friday in declining to issue an order that would temporarily halt the project while conservationists pursue a legal challenge. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection approved the plan in September 2021, spurring a lawsuit from the Friends of Gualala River (FOGR) …U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria delivered his ruling following a lengthy hearing last week, where FOGR argued that California Red-Legged frogs and salmon would be imperiled by falling trees and heavy machinery… Chhabria, who visited the site with the parties ahead of the hearing, said Friday that FOGR and its experts had presented only speculative evidence to show that the animals would be harmed. For one thing, he said, the record suggests few Red-Legged frogs are in the area.

BOISE, Idaho — The Nez Perce Tribe and U.S. Forest Service have signed an agreement allowing the two to team up on projects in the 6,250-square-mile Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests in north-central Idaho. The Forest Service said Wednesday that the agreement through the Good Neighbor Authority will initially focus on fuels reduction projects to reduce wildfire threats. Plans include heritage surveys and other projects important to the federally-recognized tribe on lands it ceded to the U.S. in the 1800s. Tribal members retain hunting, fishing and gathering rights on the ceded lands. …The Nez Perce agreement is the first tribal agreement in the Forest Service’s Northern Region, which includes national forests in northern Idaho, Montana and northeastern Washington.

Wyoming’s mountain pine beetle epidemic has finally subsided – but now another insect is causing “great concern” in the state, forest officials said this month. The Western Spruce Budworm is a “defoliator that attacks the needles of Douglas fir,” putting the tree under “extreme stress” and even killing the tree “in a lot of instances,” state forester Bill Crapser told the Joint Agriculture, State, and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee. The budworm is “really prevalent” in the southern Bighorns, he said – but it’s also been spotted in the Wind River Mountains. …Now that the mountain pine beetle epidemic … has subsided, Crapser said forest officials are working on a plan to revitalize lodgepole and ponderosa pine forests across the state. “We’re really looking at more of a forest recovery,” he said. “(We’re deciding) what do we do next – what type of management do we do in those forests.”

MOSCOW – Three new shortened degree programs offered this fall at University of Idaho seek to address growing workforce needs. The College of Natural Resources programs prepare students for jobs in fire mitigation, forestry operations and nursery management after two years of education, rather than four. The offerings, approved by the State Board of Education in April, are the first associate degrees at University of Idaho. Students develop essential skills through flexible coursework and hands-on training while forming partnerships with real-world private and public forests, nurseries and enterprise. “These new associate of science degrees are critical to meeting our land-grant mission,” said Charles Goebel, department head of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences at U of I. “Students in these programs utilize our unique resources and expertise to help meet the workforce demands of the growing forestry and wildland fire industries.” 

Six conservation groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Forest Service over a decision to weaken protections for old and mature forests east of the Cascades.  Just days before President Trump left office last year, the Forest Service approved amendments to the Eastside Screens, a plan managing about 8 million forested acres of Oregon and Washington.  The amendments scrapped the “21-inch rule,” which prohibited cutting trees larger than 21 inches in diameter. … “The 21-inch rule has been a bedrock of forest law in Eastern Oregon,” said Meriel Darzen, a staff attorney with Crag Law Center, which filed the legal challenge on the conservation groups’ behalf. “And removing it without a transparent process is not only contrary to environmental law but truly damaged the public’s trust in an agency like the Forest Service.”

…To Jerry Franklin, long-considered one of the foremost authorities on old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, this landscape of mature Douglas-fir and western hemlock is thriving and, most significantly, removing ever-more carbon from the atmosphere. That is not what the Forest Service sees. Too many trees in this corner of the Williamette National Forest are competing for water and sunlight, and some are dying, agency officials say. Now, the service is preparing to auction off these woodlands as early as next year as part of a timber sale, called Flat Country, that targets nearly 4,500 acres. Conservation groups that have analyzed the project say the vast majority of the lumber the agency intends to cut would come from stands of trees ranging in age from 80 to 150 years old.  

One of us (DellaSala) is a rainforest researcher, the other (Furnish), Deputy Chief of the Forest Service under Chief Mike Dombeck. We keep coming back to the Tongass National Forest because of its world-class fisheries, wildlife and relatively intact landscapes. …We encourage the Forest Service to seize this “carpe diem” moment for the Tongass by implementing a three-pronged strategy. First, the Tongass must protect all remaining old growth, roadless areas and the Tongass 77 watersheds, where carbon, fish and wildlife values are exceptional. …Second, the transition into logging young growth near the existing open roads needs to speed up along with milling and infrastructure upgrades to process small logs. …Third, the Biden administration needs to increase its congressional appropriations request to further support Southeast Alaska’s sustainable development strategy, giving preference to Alaskan tribes.