Some Thoughts On the England Decision
November 3rd, 2007
In the previous post we called “landmark” the recent decision issued by Judge Morrison C. England of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California, regarding forest thinnings on the Plumas National Forest. By landmark we mean the decision establishes new precedents (long overdue) in our legal system.
Judge England’s logic is impeccable. He found that catastrophic fires destroy endangered species habitat and endanger human habitat, too. He also found that thinning forests in the right way helps make forests resilient to fire and fires easier to control. Judge England wrote in his decision:
DFPZs [Defensible Fuel Profile Zones, i.e. properly thinned areas] have hence been proven effective in reducing fire intensity, controlling fire spread, and protecting ecological resources like habitat…
Fire protection through vegetation management in these areas is therefore important both from the standpoint of wildlife and humans. For wildlife, unchecked wildfire may completely destroy habitat. For humans, both lives and property are at stake…
On the evidence of the evidence before it, the Court believes that a greater danger of irreparable harm exists in not vigorously addressing the over-forested conditions that are present within the Plumas National Forest. This danger is not speculative but very real, as evidenced by the large wildfires that ravaged the Plumas this very summer…
The long-term benefit of preventing stand replacing fires which completely destroy habitat is preferable over any short term benefits derived from retaining dense forest structure preferred by old growth species…
The England Decision establishes the legal doctrine that saving a forest from catastrophic destruction is better for wildlife (and people) than incinerating said forest, even if actual, human, forest stewardship is required to save it.
To the average lay person this sounds like ordinary common sense, and so it is. Our legal system, however and sad to say, does not normally run on common sense, at least in regards to forests. Hence the England Decision is a major breakthrough.
The defendants in the case were the US Forest Service. This is a very good sign, because the USFS has been otherwise promoting catastrophic fire across the West in the name of “forest health.” In this case, the agency wishes to do some significant restoration forestry, which requires fairly heavy thinning in some locales on the Plumas NF.
That is a far cry from the marginal, diameter-limited fooling around that the Eldorado NF did in the Angora watershed and the Deschutes NF did in the Metolious watershed. Those forests remained dense enough to subsequently erupt into canopy fire/firestorms.
The 3,100 acre Angora Fire ignited June 24, 2007, and destroyed 254 homes in South Lake Tahoe. The day before the community of Calpine was threatened by another wildfire, the Calpine Fire. The high wind conditions were identical to those at Lake Tahoe 50 miles to the south, but the Calpine Fire encountered the defensible fuel profile zone around Calpine and was contained at 50 acres. The fire dropped to the ground and behaved like an underburn (see here).
We hope the stark contrast between the two fires does not go unnoticed by the (victorious) Defendants. The Plumas thinnings were specifically mandated by Congress in the 1998 Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act. However, they are good idea on many National Forests, and the England Decision will legally underpin similar projects in Region 5 and elsewhere.
The England Decision also established that professional foresters know what they are doing, and know what to remove and what to take to save the habitat. The ridiculous micro-management screens desired by the (losing) Plaintiffs (eco-wackos of some repute) were rejected by Judge England. Diameter limits, riparian buffers, and other handicaps placed on forestry serve only to sabotage forests by rendering restoration treatments inefficient and ineffective.
Imagine having a group of political activists oversee your surgeon as he removes your infected appendix. They are not doctors but tell the guy or gal cutting you open where to cut and how deep, in the hopes he or she messes up and you die.
That’s what it’s like to perform professional restoration forestry while self-described monkey wrenchers who advocate holocaust are suing with gusto. If they win, the forest gets incinerated.
In this case they lost, and our forests of the Plumas are much closer to being saved because of it.
Much of the credit for encouraging Judge England towards common sense forestry belongs to the Quincy Library Group. They were not a party to the suit, but the thinnings were the product of a decade or more of QLG involvement with forest issues in their local Feather River watershed.
We present below an example of local influence. In late 2004 the Feather Publishing newspapers published a series of opinions and perspectives from local citizens in their Opinion and Editorial sections (see here). One of those letters stands out as a testament to good forestry and a remarkably cogent statement about saving forests. We admire professional forester Keith Crummer’s letter so much that we repost it here in full:
Perspective: “The return of the ecofrauds”
D. Keith Crummer, Registered Professional Forester, Chester (11/24/04)
Here we go again. Recently, there was an opinion piece in Where I Stand by another pseudo-environmentalist representing one of the myriads of emotionally attractive forest savior groups. The gist of the article was that there was no need to cut trees larger than 12 inches in diameter in the development of effective shaded fuel breaks (defensible fuel profiles) or to achieve forest health objectives. The idea seemed to be that if you clean up the forest floor around homes and along roads, there would no longer be crown fires to threaten communities. Some names of scientists were mentioned who were, at least self-proclaimed, experts on the subject.
I have worked with some of the true fire scientists and have tried to keep up on the scientific literature on wildfire behavior, at least with regard to California forests, but have never run across any of these names. Perhaps these scientists came from some other field of investigation, such as the spread of tooth decay. No credentials were offered so I doubly suspect their credibility.
I have a degree in Forestry and Forest Ecology from UC-Berkeley and have personally spent more than 30 years in wildfire suppression. I rose through the ranks to achieving Incident Commander certification before I retired as Ecosystem Manager for the Lassen National Forest. I have been on more than 100 wildland fires ranging from small lightning fires to the holocausts of Yellowstone in size.
I have also been involved in the planning and conduct of numerous underburns and prescribed fires, both practical and experimental. These are my credentials. I would like to see the credentials of the save-the-forest through inaction piece.
One thing that is commonly observed by firefighters on crown fires, those spreading through the upper forest canopy, is that winds or steep slopes will drive these fires past the ground fire beneath. In fact, the crown fire is often independent of surface fuels and drops down through the forest canopy to ground level as it sweeps over.
This is because, in the case of wind driven fires, that the gradient wind velocity normally decreases from the tree tops to the forest floor. Anyone who has spent any time working or hiking through the woods has experienced this. The wind lays the advancing fire down over canopy, and heat conduction does the rest.
The upshot is that simply cleaning up and thinning in the lower canopy will not prevent a crown fire from passing through the upper canopy when a wildfire enters from outside the treated area. The canopy density must be reduced and the tree crowns spaced out such that crown fires do not have the continuity necessary to carry them. Incidentally, this will result in more sunlight to the forest floor, which is essential for species diversity and ecological health.
Thinning of the large trees is, therefore, a necessary tool in the fire-safe toolbox. Ground fuels cleanup, thinning and pruning are, however, very important to keeping ground fires from becoming crown fires. If a house is burning, it may help reduce its spread to neighboring houses. Likewise, fires originating along roads may be slowed from spreading into the wildlands or your neighborhood.
The true interest of the ecosavior group was revealed in the concern that trees larger than 12 inches in diameter not be removed. This prevents lumber mills from utilizing valuable material and helping offset the cost of forest protection.
Those of us who pay taxes must cover the entire cost and the results will still be ineffective. This is why I consider this group in the ecofraud category. They espouse concern for the environment, but their true concern appears to be anti business — especially anti timber industry. To this end, they are willing to sacrifice the forest environment and your homes, along with our local jobs and economy.
Rather than utilizing industry to do the planned work and return funds for other ecologically beneficial activities, they would rather import raw materials from other countries and let ours burn.
What a legacy to ignorance!
November 4th, 2007 at 10:07 am
A “Landmark Decision” like this will only last until the plaintiffs take it to the 9th Circuit Court, where judges hate all kinds of logging and feel that the Forest Service is always deceptive. I’ve been working on the next group of timber projects on the Plumas, and I see the QLG for what it is. It’s a sustainable compromise to have a dependable local timber supply, and the jobs that go along with it. The two acre “virtual clearcuts” (a new eco-term describing the practice of cutting all the trees that the current stringent rules allow) have very little basis in science. I’ll tell you right now, that this is a VERY expensive way to “manage” our lands. Two acre cable units?!?!?!
But, the QLG Ranger Districts certainly aren’t going to turn away those extra dollars that show up, every year.
November 4th, 2007 at 11:18 am
Backcut — Thanks for the on-site analysis.
I have never seen the Plumas thinnings. The photos look good, as if the stands were thinned throughout, not just with pocket openings. Whatever was done, it seems to cause fires to go to ground.
Your “lttle basis in science” charge is rather specious. Modern forest science seems to believe that catastrophic holocaust is the only acceptable means of altering forests. Some of us reject that notion as horribly unscientific and destructive.
The Judge seems to agree with our point of view, and not that of the holocausters. But you might be right about the trash-canning of the Congressionally mandated program. The rest of the US federal judiciary are hot to burn, baby, burn.
When the Plumas does burn to the ground in a raging megafire, all the holocaisters will be happy, the USFS will be happy, the environment will be roasted, and the residents of Quincy will very screwed. That’s an undesirable future condition in my book.
So if you can do something to save that forest, that would be much better than snide second-guessing, whining about harvesting commercial-sized trees, and back-stabbing sabotage that leads to raging holocausts, in my opinion.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
An acre of soil with sunlight above it also requires a water budget to grow trees. There is a finite amount of energy, nutrition, and water on an annual basis. The true issue with forest density, with canopy and tree numbers, is how many trees can the site adequately provide water for. That is where we someday want to be. Thin, trim, remove, log, do whatever to have spatially separated trees of good form, vigor, and vitality. The bonus: you will reduce the fire effects every time
Trees are always producing seed, and there is water every year (more in some years as well as much less in others). But trees grow every year, no matter their size. The habitat and people are better served with larger trees with widely-spaced crowns. The Willamette Valley was described by an early explorer as having the characteristics of “a well tended orchard.” Large trees, well spaced, just how the Native Americans wanted them, and what they managed for. Stand removal fires across broad landscapes did the residents no good, and were not in their best interests for survival in a hard world.
Somehow, by the dint of will, we have to get there again. It is possible but will take a long time. Before the goal can be reached, conflagration will claim some partially completed projects. Restoration Forestry is what the world is looking for, though. Because of massive ignorance and perpetural misinformation spewed by those who would rather control people than landscapes, we are a long ways from even recognizing what is possible, what can work, and what would meet the needs of the majority of people and species.
That is the end game in this whole discourse. We have to get there from here, and the obstacles are legion. If I sometimes sound intolerant and harpish, it is because I am old, tired and fearing that I will see no steps to sanity in the forest issues during the life I have left.
I think the first, best step to preserving old growth is to remove the understory as soon as possible. Small logs are the mothers milk of sawmilling today. Leave the large trees and take the understory, and you have left the “old growth” for another session of aforestation of the understory, which can be logged every five to ten decades, and never touch the old guys. They will be better for less competition for water, and light, and to not have that tinder growing at their feet.
I know that no one, nobody, in the green eco community will give one iota of thought to what I just wrote. Just lockstep disapproval. Reactionary dismay. Loud wails that normally would be heard at a drunken wake for a ne’er-do-well with a cute smile. But I won’t give up trying.
November 4th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Yes, the Plumas ALSO does thinning projects that aren’t associated (or funded) by the QLG. Even some of the QLG projects have thinning units embedded within the sea of 2 acre “group cuts”.
I always enjoy marking timber, and I do respect the power that exists in my right hand to alter the landscape for maybe hundreds of years. I prefer to call myself a “forest sculptor”, using a mix of art and science to manage our forests back to health and function.
The Plumas is also having us do canopy cover plots within the thinning units. I did several of them and found that all were within the limits of the prescription for the Pacific Fisher. We’re always eager to mark a tree growing under a bigger one because it has no effect on canopy cover. We also run into clumps of red fir and white fir, where we can take a pair or two of joined trees. We’re shooting for a 200-220 basal area and 40-50% canopy cover.
To bear bait: There’s too much money in litigation against forestry for Berkeley to pay any notice to science.
November 4th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
*smirk*
Sorry…LOL
November 4th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Basal area has nothing to do with forests; it’s a tree farm measure. The inability to tell the difference between forests and tree farms is a big reason our forests are in the mess they are in.
We need a new terminology for forestry, one unique to that endeavor, and a completely different one for tree farming.
Canopy cover is another misplaced measure. It can’t actually be measured with any precision, or defined, really. At best it is a two-dimensional simplification of a three-dimensional phenomenon. Furthermore, canopy cover has absolutely nothing to do with spotted owl habitat, the putative purpose of the reg.
Ninety-nine percent of all forests today have more than 40 perecent crown cover. There is no correlation between crown cover and spotted owl use because owls are found across the entire spectrum of existing crown covers. It is a totally BS regulation with zero scientific basis.
The canopy cover regs are profoundly unscientific, as are basal area regs, diameter limit regs, riparian buffer regs, and site potential tree height regs. They are all junk science based and they all serve to prevent good stewardship and ensure holocaust.
Don’t you feel stupid doing forestry by the BS book instead of using your own expert judgment? Don’t you feel like a peon technician instead of a true forest steward? That kind of genuflecting before the Altar of Idiocy is too humiliating for me, degrading to my profession, and tragic mismanagement of real forests.
So smirk all you want. Some of us would like to save our forests, and we see a huge need to assert professional forestry to do it.
November 4th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
The real deficiency in the QLG inspired thinnings is the overall lack of attention, awareness, and/or perception that the Feather River watershed is a cultural landscape, and has been a cultural landscape for thousands of years. So-called “wildlands” were not wild but were inhabited and maintained by human beings.
The vegetation has been hugely affected by resident humanity over millennia. The standard ecological theories of natural fire regimes and natural forest succession cannot explain the forests, savannas, and prairies that existed there 200 years ago. The vegetation is an anomaly, inexplicable to the old paradigm.
The old-growth conifer cohort in the Sierra Nevada was induced and maintained by anthropogenic fire. When that fact is considered, the entire paradigm of forest ecology and forest management must necessarily shift.
The “historical range of variation” was human-induced, and to achieve that goal, human inducements must be reapplied. The “desired future condition” is more than a fire-safe landscape. The vision must include stewardship interactions, tending the garden.
November 5th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Hey, until you (the citizen) gets the lawmakers and the judges to change the rules, laws, policies and documents that affect our National Forest lands, we MUST follow the constraints laid out before us, as land managers. In this increasingly litigious society we live in, we either play by the rules or we don’t get to play at all.
Believe me, I relish in the small bit of decision-making I do out in the woods with the “blue death spray”.
November 5th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Roger that, Backcut. I, the Citizen, am all over it. With your help, I will repair the monkey wrencher regs so that we might be good stewards of our forests instead of murdering them.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:24 am
Backcut works on the Plumas and refers to group selection as “two acre virtual clearcuts” (a new eco-term describing the practice of cutting all the trees that the current stringent rules allow).
In reality group selection is a uneven-age silvicultural system that is described thoroughly in Silviculture textbooks. Group selection was also described as a method to be considered for a long-term strategy in the California Spotted Owl: A Technical Assessment of its Current Status (1992) See Chapter 13, page 271.
Furthermore Group Selection silviculture has been demonstrated at the UC Blodgett Forest in El Dorado County. What silvicultural system does Backcut suggest that would permit Ponderosa pine to regenerate?
The QLG experiment has only been in place for almost 10 years and the group selection strategy has only recently been implemented in CASPO suitable habitat for the past 3 years as a result of the mitigation measure included in the HFQLG EIS and then the Sierra Nevada Framework 2001, both of which precluded implementation of the QLG Community Stability Proposal.
November 20th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Deux — Backcut works on many forests, but he can tell you about that.
Group selection is often referred to as “silviculture” but it really isn’t. Group selection is a harvest system, and a poorly defined one at that. I have read all the textbooks, and never seen it described thoroughly.
Foresters and others need to pay attention to what is left, not what is removed (or how). When an artist carves a statue out of marble, what matters is the stone that didn’t get chipped away. The rubble removed is not important.
If you want your house painted or reroofed, or your kitchen remodeled, you must deal with the preparation, but in the end the finished product is of paramount importance.
Regulations that specify what is to be removed therefore miss the entire idea and purpose of silviculture.
November 21st, 2007 at 9:59 am
Unfortunately, many people have a view of what forests SHOULD look like, instead of what the land CAN support. “Sculpting” our forests is the way to save them, with site-specific science and a full “toolbox” of silvicultural techniques to choose from.
If it were up to the eco’s, they would “let” all our western forests “turn into” rainforests through some kind of natural “magic”. They’re convinced that more trees are ALWAYS better for the environment. Luckily, some people are seeing the light and forgetting about the forestry sins of the last millenium.
November 21st, 2007 at 10:10 am
Oops! Yep, Deux, I’m a hired gun who goes from Forest to Forest doing natural resource projects. It’s part of a government re-invention program that was ironically “invented” by Al Gore! We supplement National Forest’s with expertise when they’re temporarily overwhelmed with work, as in fire and beetle salvage. We also provide NEPA documents and “ologist” support.
We’re TEAMS Enterprise and we work like a contractor, bidding on jobs and having to turn a “profit”, because we receive no Congressional funding. Also, we are forbidden from competing with the private forestry industry.