Unintended Consequences in Western Forests

Western US forests are in ecological collapse. Wildfire is sweeping through at unprecedented scale and intensity while native bark beetles destroy entire stands. Climate change is only making things worse. The good news is that the problem was largely created by our short-sighted management policies, so we can fix it. But we need to act soon, and at scale, to preserve our forests and our water supply.

Comstock-era firewood--cut by Abner Weed in
the late 1880’s for the Virginia City silver
mines and the logging locomotives--still sitting
in the Sagehen forest waiting for a spark, 130
years later.

Dead wood in dry western forests is essentially
immortal: that includes large-tree logging debris.
We need small fires to cycle nutrients, not big
fire that kills everything and starts the
dysfunction-clock all over again.

But first, we need to thin the forest of overgrown
small trees and woody debris, so that small fires
don't turn into big ones.

Traditional logging doesn't do that, so we need a
new kind of timber industry that does.

Imagine sincerely trying to prevent rain from landing anywhere on a forested landscape. This would be an insane proposition.

Now think about fire. Low intensity fire is as natural to western US forests as rain, yet for most of the past 100 years, we have done everything in our power to exclude even small fires from these landscapes. We are now reaping the consequences of that folly, with accumulated fuel loads and warming, drying weather feeding catastrophic firestorms that destroy entire stands, and even city neighborhoods. California alone spends over $1.5 billion annually on fire control to protect 15 million fire-endangered acres. In 2017 over 1,000,000-acres burned in California, with direct and indirect fire suppression costs exceeding $13 billion. Who planned that?

Obviously, no one intended for us to arrive at this crisis but now that we have, there is a lot of finger pointing and digging in of heels going on. Environmentalists point at loggers, and loggers at environmentalists, but both sides have some hard lessons they need to hear and take to heart if we are to find a way through this crisis, and back to healthy, productive forests and forestry again. 50 years of vitriol and litigation proves one thing: you can’t change someone’s values by arguing with them or by steam-rolling them. Winner-Takes-All is a horrible model for managing shared resources like forests. We need to find a new, better way…and we have.

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[CONT.]

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO HELP?

• Learn more. Be an informed citizen, not an unwitting pawn:
  New Yorker article | livingforests.org | sagehenforest.blogspot.com
  Watch our webisodes explaining the fire problem and the Sagehen Forest Project at tinyurl.com/y8ho2ckx
• Contact your elected representatives 
• Let them know there’s a better solution out there than a) just turning the traditional timber industry loose in our damaged forests to reset the dysfunction clock again, or b) ignoring the problem in the naive belief that Mother Nature will somehow deal with it: she is, and this is what it looks like. 
• Ask them to support the Sagehen Forest Project prescription, and changes to building codes to allow engineered wood buildings. 
• Resist “salvage logging” of dead trees: these trees are not a serious fire problem, and this activity reduces our capacity to do what needs to be done to save our remaining living forests.
• Request local wood, and buy it where available! If retailers keep hearing this demand, they will force the industry to respond.
• Use (hopefully local) biochar in your garden to improve your soil, and bank wood carbon for thousands of years. sagehenforest.blogspot.com/2018/04/biochar.html
• Have other ideas? Get in touch! sagehen.ucnrs.org/faculty-staff/ 
• Artists: sagehen-art.blogspot.com
• We need financial support, too. Donate safely via the orange "Give Now" button at the top of our homepage at sagehen.ucnrs.org

Future Forests partnership

 Sagehen is working hard to scale up the kind of forest treatments needed to return low intensity fire and restore health and resilience to our precious central Sierra forests.

But we can't move forward--and could never have gotten anywhere in the first place--without a broad and increasing range of excellent partners. We need a fundamental shift in our cultural relationship to fire and forestry, and to get there will involve 5 prongs: Art, Business, Policy, Management, and Science. In particular, art is how you change culture, so we need an artistic response at the scale of the management response.

Joining with the Nevada County Arts Council, Arts & Culture Eldorado, the Nevada Museum of Art - Center for Art + Environment and many socially-engaged artists and other supporters, we have initiated an effort called Future Forests. See the website to learn more about us, see what's already happening, and to get involved if our work meshes with yours. We always need more partners!

Listen to Jeff describe the pieces of the puzzle on WeatherBrains 724 (watch from 38:05-44:09):

It's finally happening!

After all these years, we may have actually slain this dragon: congratulations everyone!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Contact: Governor's Press Office Thursday, August 13, 2020 (916) 445-4571 California, U.S. Forest Service Establish Shared Long-Term Strategy to Manage Forests and Rangelands Agreement will improve coordination to reduce wildfire risks on federal and state lands   Funding included in the federal Great American Outdoors Act   Agreement comes as Lake Fire burns in Angeles National Forest   SACRAMENTO -- In a key step to improve stewardship of California’s forests, the Newsom Administration and the U.S. Forest Service today announced a new joint state-federal initiative to reduce wildfire risks, restore watersheds, protect habitat and biological diversity, and help the state meet its climate objectives.   The Agreement for Shared Stewardship of California’s Forest and Rangelands includes a commitment by the federal government to match California’s goal of reducing wildfire risks on 500,000 acres of forest land per year. To protect public safety and ecology, experts agree that at least one million acres of California forest and wildlands must be treated annually across jurisdictions.   A historical transition toward unnaturally dense forests, a century of fire suppression and climate change resulting in warmer, hotter and drier conditions have left the majority of California’s forestland highly vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire and in need of active, science-based management. Since the federal government owns nearly 58 percent of California’s 33 million acres of forestlands, while the state owns 3 percent, joint state-federal management is crucial to California’s overall forest health and wildfire resilience.  Improved coordination also is key since nearly half of the state dollars invested in fuels management in recent years was spent on federal land.     “Wildfires don’t stop at jurisdictional boundaries. As we respond to wildfires in real-time this summer, improving coordination between the major stewards of California’s forested land will help us protect communities and restore forest health across California,” Governor Gavin Newsom said. “We are grateful to secure the U.S. Forest Service’s commitment to help us more effectively address the scale of California’s current wildfire crisis.”   “Collaboration between state and federal agencies on issues of forest health and resiliency is critical,” said U.S. Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen. “The Forest Service is fortunate to collaborate on restoration projects across the state and share science and research to address issues to help care for the land and serve people. We are excited to expand our partnership with California to enhance our collaboration though this Shared Stewardship agreement with California.”   The Shared Stewardship Agreement builds on existing coordination between state and federal agencies, and outlines six core principles and nine specific actions that will drive improved state-federal collaboration:   Prioritize public safety; Use science to guide forest management; Coordinate land management across jurisdictions; Increase the scale and pace of forest management projects; Remove barriers that slow project approvals; and Work closely with all stakeholders, including tribal communities, environmental groups, academia and timber companies.   Specifically, through this agreement California and the U.S. Forest Service commit to execute the following activities together:   Treat one million acres of forest and wildland annually to reduce risk of catastrophic wildfire (building on the state’s existing 500,000-acre annual commitment); Develop a shared 20-year plan for forest health and vegetation treatment that establishes and coordinates priority projects; Expand use of ecologically sustainable techniques for vegetation treatments such as prescribed fire; Increase pace and scale of forest management by improving ecologically sustainable timber harvest in California and grow jobs by tackling structural obstacles, such as workforce and equipment shortfalls and lack of access to capital; Prioritize co-benefits of forest health such as carbon sequestration, biodiversity, healthy watersheds and stable rural economies;   Recycle forest byproducts to avoid burning slash piles; Improve sustainable recreation opportunities; Enable resilient, fire-adapted communities; and Share data and continue to invest in science.   The Great American Outdoors Act, signed by President Trump on August 4, will provide critical funding for the Forest Service’s work in California.     ###

Governor Gavin Newsom State Capitol Building Sacramento, CA 95814

Black-backed woodpeckers need small fires, not large ones

Scott Crosbie bands a BBWO at Sagehen in 2004.

The Black-backed Woodpecker (BBWO) is a threatened bird that colonizes burned areas, and depends on standing dead snags for their nests. As such, they are a touchstone species in the debate about salvage logging of burned and beetle-killed forests. Some environmentalists (notably, Chad Hansen of the John Muir Institute) are advocating for allowing large wildfires to burn, assuming this creates more habitat for the BBWO.

Here's an interesting new paper on Black-backed Woodpeckers:

"Our expectation, grounded in island biogeographical theory (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967), was that larger fires should show increased colonization and persistence. To the contrary, sites in larger fires were less likely to be colonized..."

So much for the emerging "Just Let it Burn" argument--these fires are just too big and destructive. We need to thin first, then let regular, low intensity fire back in. And leave lots of standing dead for BBWOs and other wildlife, too, of course.

Here's a short video of a BBWO nesting near the Sagehen fishhouse in 2014. BBWOs are a regular resident at Sagehen, where they nest in standing beetle-killed trees, not burned ones. See observations of BBWOs at Sagehen on iNaturalist:

Saving The West

The Sagehen Forest Project has spun off several remarkable related projects.

Saving The West (STW), now Living Forests, is a policy document developed by the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz, including artist Newton Harrison and consultant Josh Harrison. STW is being developed as a rallying point to bring together a group of folks interested in addressing the glaring hole in the Sagehen Forest Project: the lack of a California market for raw wood product.



Going into the collaborative process, we all thought that getting environmentalists and loggers to agree would be the hard part. But, given a little time, that turned out to be relatively easy: everyone benefits from a healthy forest. Yet, now that we all agree on what needs to be done, we are stymied by the lack of someone to buy even the saw logs coming off the forest, much less the wood chip and small diameter wood. For the unit treatments around the station which are being funded by the National Forest Foundation (NFF) grant, we are just masticating everything into chip that will be burned on the ground. Or chopping and stacking logs into burn piles. This seems so wasteful: that material should be used, and continue to act as carbon storage.

The Center is working to put forestry issues onto the platform of the Democratic presidential nominee, as well as into the Governor's office. If these politicians start to hear about this need from both the scientists and the artists, it carries more weight and importance.

We have begun to bring Cathexis Architecture into the conversation. Cathexis has an impressive redevelopment project planned for a sizable chunk of downton Reno, NV, and they would like to build at least one wooden skyscraper. Binderholz, an Austrian company that manufactures engineered wood products, is planning to open a plant in the US. They are looking in the Pacific Northwest, but the NFF is reaching out to try to connect them with the Reno Dept. of Economic Development. If we could develop a market for wood product here, that reduces transportation costs to get material out of the forest.

The Proposal:

• STW Talking Points
• STW Proposal

Related info:

• What the West's Trees Tell Us
• Use of linear programming to optimize the social, environmental, and economic impacts of using woody feedstocks for pellet and torrefied pellet production
• CA Assembly Votes to Recognize Forests as Part of State’s Water System

Public policy shifting on fire management?

The Sagehen Forest Project proposes restoring ecological function to the Sagehen Basin. It turns out that doing this tames wildfire and is good for wildlife, good for the timber industry, and good for water quality. Everyone wins.

Some recent developments suggest that forest management policy in California may be about to shift dramatically in that direction.

1. California Budget Request: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions and Forest Carbon Storage through Forest Health Treatments. 

"The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) requests $180 million Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) in Fiscal Year (FY) 2016-17, with position authority and associated funding in subsequent years through FY 2021-22...for a comprehensive forest health program that will further secure forest carbon and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to meet the 2030 carbon goals within Executive Crder (EC) B-30-15. Funds will support the expansion of the Urban and Community Forestry, Forest Legacy Programs , and target landscape-scale Forest Health projects in high-priority forested upper watersheds in coordination with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, to realize the largest direct benefit for GHG reduction, forest resilience and cobenefits, such as protection of water, wildlife habitat, and rural economic stability."

2. Saving The West (now Living Forests). A policy Discussion Document from the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, 2016.

3. Proclamation of a State of Emergency: Tree Mortality, Governor of California. December 2015.

4. Improving the Federal Response to Western Drought, Public Policy Institute of California. February 2016.

From Amy Horne:

"Just released PPIC report urges 5 reforms needed for water in California including restoring forest health and reducing fuel loads in headwaters. Also calls for FS to shift focus from fire suppression to fire prevention. The specific recommendation is:"

Initiate multiple large-scale collaborative projects to restore forest health 

There has been considerable progress in improving the pace of restoration of forested lands nationwide (US Forest Service 2015). Yet many interviewees felt that to date, most efforts at fire prevention and forest health have been small-scale demonstration projects. To improve public perception and demonstrate benefits—including the potential for boosting drought resilience for downstream users—the Forest Service needs to incorporate a series of large-scale projects into all of the emerging forest management plans. These projects should explore incentives for financial investments from beneficiaries to cover a portion of the costs.32 In addition, partnerships should be formed to promote research and development of new wood energy and building industry products that can increase the value of harvests that reduce fuel loads.