Forest, Wildlife, and Climate News

Forest Service releases Station fire transcripts

The agency says the recordings show that it was aggressively responding to the fire. But the data show a formal order for aircraft wasn’t placed.

By Paul Pringle, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2010 [here]

The U.S. Forest Service said Thursday that dispatch recordings illustrate that the agency aggressively attacked last year’s Station fire with the nearest available planes, but the conversations also show that officials did not place a commander’s orders for air tankers on the critical second morning of the blaze. …

The diverted tankers did not start reaching the Station fire until about 9 a.m., after the flames had jumped a key defense line and began raging out of control. The fire became the largest in Los Angeles County history, burning 250 square miles and destroying scores of homes and other structures. Two county firefighters died while defending their Mt. Gleason camp. …

A federal inspector general is investigating whether laws were broken when the recordings were not turned over last year to a Forest Service review team and The Times.

The investigative arm of Congress is conducting a broader probe of the fire, examining the Forest Service’s decisions and tactics, including whether there were avoidable delays in getting aircraft to the blaze on the morning of Day 2. … [more]

ESA requires real repairs

Editorial, Capital Press Agriculture Weekly, September 16, 2010 [here]

For the past year and a half, Congress and the Obama administration have become the Mr. Fix-its of politics. They’ve strapped on their legislative toolbelts and gone to work in the name of “change.”

They fixed health care — even though it wasn’t needed — and they fixed Wall Street just in time for those fat executive bonus checks to go out.

But one law that is profoundly broken — and has been since Richard Nixon signed it in 1973 — has been totally ignored: the Endangered Species Act.

The ESA doesn’t accomplish its stated goal — helping to bring back species from the brink of extinction. Since it was passed, 25 species of plants and animals have been delisted — most because they were put there by mistake. In all 1,375 plants and animals have been put on the list as threatened or endangered.

But not helping endangered species is the least of the act’s shortcomings.

The ESA is the Gordian knot of laws. It creates problems that cannot be solved. In the Klamath Basin, the Columbia and Snake rivers, the Sacramento Delta, and the forests, rangeland and farms of the West environmental extremists use the ESA as a blunt legal instrument to stop economic activity.

Though the excuse used by the extremists and their lawyers is to “save” salmon, suckers, smelt, wolves, owls, sage grouse and worms, the real, albeit unstated, goal is to stop economic activity they don’t support or to shake the federal money tree, or both.

All Americans have a stake in the ESA. Billions of taxpayer dollars and billions more of private dollars are spent in the legal and regulatory Kabuki dance whose goal is not to preserve wildlife and plants but to keep the dance going. Environmental lawyers get money from the federal government if they win, so the incentive is to keep suing, appealing and suing some more. …

The Endangered Species Act does not protect species. What it does is costs the federal, state and local governments billions of dollars, hobbles the economy and has either decimated or threatens to decimate the livelihoods of ranchers, farmers, loggers and other Americans.

If Congress and this administration want to fix something, they should look where the problem is greatest: the Endangered Species Act. … [more]

About 1,700 Snake River Sockeye Spawners To Enter Redfish Lake This Year, Most Since 1950s

Columbia Basin Bulletin, September 10, 2010 [here]

Central Idaho’s Redfish Lake is teeming, in a comparative sense, with sockeye salmon once again after decades of relative dormancy.

Through Tuesday a total of 1,145 of the reddening spawners had been counted this year at either Sawtooth Hatchery or Redfish Lake Creek after completing a 900-mile freshwater journey up the Columbia, Snake and Salmon rivers to Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley. That’s the most sockeye known to have entered the valley in any year since 4,361 were counted swimming up Redfish Lake Creek in 1955. No other known return, dating back to at least 1954, has even totaled as much as 2,000.

Of this year’s total return to-date, about 400 were sampled at a Redfish Lake Creek fish trap by Idaho Department of Fish and Game researchers to determine their condition and ancestry and then allowed to continue their trip toward spawning grounds in Redfish Lake.

The rest of the trapped fish were taken to Eagle Hatchery near Boise for holding and sampling. Most of those fish are being returned to the creek this week and next as spawning time approaches. About 100 of the sockeye held at Eagle will be spawned at the hatchery so that their genetic makeup is infused into the Snake River Sockeye Salmon Captive Broodstock Program, which is responsible for most of the returning fish … [more]

Dig unearths 9,500 years of native inhabitants

Artifacts tell stories of hunters “enamored with mountains.”

By Cory Hatch, Jackson Hole News and Guide, September 15, 2010 [here]

Underneath a white tent near Game Creek along Highway 89/191, University of Wyoming archeology student Bryon Schroeder sits in a 6- foot-deep hole troweling out the winding path of a rodent burrow through a square of gray earth.

Schroeder excavates the burrows first so the rodent-churned dirt doesn’t contaminate the cake layers of history that jut out at perfect right angles from the walls and floor like an M.C. Escher drawing.

On one wall, the charred, fractured stones of a partially exposed roasting pit are visible at waist level. Given its location in the strata, the pit likely dates back 3,000 to 5,000 years, when it probably was used to roast tubers such as sego lily. …

While some might think of Jackson Hole as untrammeled before a handful of trappers made their way here in the early 1800s, the written history of the region is just a postscript on the 10,000 years or so that prehistoric and Native American tribes lived in this region. … [more]

Three Billion and Counting

by Paul Driessen, Townhall, 09/11/2010 [here]

We will eradicate malaria by 2010, stricken families were promised a few years ago. Well, 2010 is almost gone and, instead of eradication, we have more malaria than before, and a new target date: 2015.

Unless malaria control policies change, that date too will come and go. Billions will still be at risk of getting malaria. Hundreds of millions will continue getting the disease. Millions will die or become permanently brain-damaged. And poverty and misery will continue ravaging Third World communities.

For years, malaria strategies have been dominated by insecticide-treated bed nets, Artemisia-based drugs, improved diagnostics and hospitals, educational campaigns, and a fruitless search for vaccines against highly complex plasmodium parasites. All are vital, but not nearly enough.

Notably absent in all too many programs has been vector control – larvacides, insecticides and repellants, to break the malaria victim-to-mosquito-to-healthy-human transmission cycle, by reducing mosquito populations and keeping the flying killers away from people. Dr. William Gorgas employed these methods to slash malaria and yellow fever rates during construction of the Panama Canal a century ago.

They are just as essential today. But well-funded environmental pressure groups vilify, attack and stymie their use, callously causing needless tragedy and suffering. They especially target the use of DDT.

Spraying the walls and eaves of houses once or twice a year with this powerful spatial repellant keeps 80-90% of mosquitoes from even entering a home; irritates any that do enter, so they don’t bite; and kills any that land. DDT is a long-lasting mosquito net over entire households. No other chemical, at any price, can do this. And no one (certainly not any eco pressure group) is working to develop one. …

This miracle chemical had helped prevent typhus and malaria during and after World War II, and completely eradicate malaria in the United States, Canada and Europe. It was then enlisted in an effort to rid the entire world of malaria. After initial successes, DDT ran into an unexpected roadblock in 1969.

As physician Rutledge Taylor chronicles in his pull-no-punches new film, “3 Billion and Counting,” Sierra Club, Audubon Society and Environmental Defense Fund enlisted DDT in their own campaign, to get it banned. They said the chemical posed unacceptable risks to people, wildlife and the environment – and used pseudo-scientific cancer and ecological horror stories, like those in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, to spook people, politicians and bureaucrats.

Along with Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Pesticide Action Network and other eco activists, they portrayed themselves as white knight planetary guardians. Their true motives were far less virtuous. “If the environmentalists win on DDT,” EDF scientist Charles Wurster told the Seattle Times, “they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before.”

In short, the war on DDT was never about protecting people or birds. It was, and is, about power, control, money and ideology – regardless of the resultant human misery, disease and death. …

Three billion humans dead so far from malaria … and counting. And green ideologues work tirelessly to ensure that the callous, needless global death toll continues to rise. … [more]

Salmon runs, global warming as clear as mud

Fish farms can no longer be linked to sockeye’s demise

By Jon Ferry, The Province, September 8, 2010 [here]

Yesterday’s closure of the Fraser River sockeye fishery — along with accusations that it’s premature and that too many salmon have been spared — is a tad ironic, to say the least.

For years, we’ve been led to believe by wild-eyed environmentalists and their media cheerleaders that the science is clear, that wild salmon on our coast are on the verge of extinction and that sea lice and disease from fish farms are to blame.

Last November, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced an inquiry into the apparent decline in

B.C. sockeye stocks, high-profile activist Alexandra Morton was quoted as saying “our sockeye are at the moment of no return.”

The sockeye, however, have returned. In full force.

This year’s Fraser River run, numbering a projected 34 million fish, is being hailed as the largest since 1913.

Bargain-hunters have been scooping up freezers-full of fish from off the Steveston dock. And grizzled commercial fishermen have been complaining there are scads of sockeye still to be netted.

So perhaps it’s time the Harper-ordered inquiry, now being conducted by Justice Bruce Cohen, changed its mandate from one of investigating the decline in B.C. salmon stocks to probing the increase in them, instead. … [more]

Biodiversity – an ecology of dirty test tubes

by Brady Caldwell, Skeptical Swedish Scientists, Fri 10 Sep 2010 [here]

Hello fellow Life Lovers.

It looks like the love of our life is likely lost. All our plants and animals are going, going, gone… again! Hmmm…

But fear not! Our official Life Lovers are planning to save us…

“New UN science body to monitor biosphere – ‘IPCC for biodiversity’ approved after long negotiation”

Maybe not such a good idea… considering the (94 and counting) scandals we have had with the IPCC in the past.

Now we have an advance copy of this world biodiversity TEEB report.

…but the problem again is… even at this early stage it is riddled with “IPCC like” errors. These ecological errors have happened (lots) in the past too. Like world leading ecologist Prof. Paul Ehrlich’s famous 1981 prediction: “…half the world’s species extinct by 2000 and all gone by 2010-2025?”

Fact #1: This happened in the 1800s, so we have had more than 100 years to see the ‘barely hanging on species’ die out, and they haven’t. …

“No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause.” … such as habitat reduction – WOW!

Let’s check this claim by crossing the environmental organisations’ “impartiality challenged” IUCN Red List of endangered, threatened, almost threatened, has-to-be worried, let’s include it anyway, you’ll never get off our list, and extinct animals …

“3 continental mammals have gone extinct — 1 antelope hunted to extinction, and 1 rare rabbit and 1 rarer antelope gone from unknown causes. 6 continental birds have gone extinct — 3 prolific terrestrial bird species hunted to extinction, and 3 single-habitat freshwater bird species hunted, drained dry, eaten by fish, and polluted to extinction. This historical record of 9 continental extinctions in 500 years contrasts starkly with Wilson’s predictions of over thirty continental bird and mammal extinctions per year, each and every year.”

NONE by habitat loss in these 500 years! … [more]

Forest Service Chief Mum on Why He Imposed Gag Order

Agency Faces FOIA Lawsuit for Failing to Turn Over Documents

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) News Release, September 9, 2010 [here]

WASHINGTON - September 9 - The Chief of the U.S. Forest Service is wrongfully withholding documents explaining why he imposed a “gag order” forbidding all staff from responding to media inquiries without headquarters approval, according to a lawsuit filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The policy prevents timely release of crime, fire and accident reports, as well as adding weeks to the response time for even routine reporter inquiries.

On August 25, 2009, Thomas L. Tidwell, Chief of the Forest Service, issued an order to his leadership directorate concerning “National Media Contacts” in which he forbade any employee from responding to “a member of the national media on any subject; or…a local or regional reporter seeking information about a national issue, including policy and budget issues” without prior clearance from the National Press Office (emphasis in original). In this memo, Chief Tidwell also stated that “I have received disturbing information concerning contacts by some employees with national media, without coordination” and cited the need for “consistent and coordinated messaging.”

On February 16, 2010, PEER submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Forest Service asking for all documents reflecting the rationale or circumstances leading up to the issuance of the gag order. On April 26, 2010, the agency declared that other than the Chief’s memo itself it had no further documents that could shed light on why it was issued.

“This memo was not the product of immaculate conception, springing fully formed from the Chief’s forehead,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that as a result of the memo national forest units contacted by a reporter must first file a 20-part “Forest Service Media Coordination Request” and await official approvals before responding to inquiries. “This order prevents Forest Service law enforcement from doing their job in cases where media cooperation can be a major asset.”

While the Forest Service claims that Chief Tidwell’s memo simply reaffirmed pre-existing policy, the memo goes much further. For example, it superseded provisions in the agency’s Law Enforcement Handbook that “Responses to requests for background information from the national news media should be provided…and do not require U.S. Department of Agriculture, Press Office approval.” More significantly, the handbook also provided that law enforcement personnel “may provide factual information to the media” concerning “emergency or fast-moving situations” such as accidents or crimes.

“President Obama promised a new level of transparency but on any issue of potential controversy, the same old penchant for secrecy still controls,” said PEER Counsel Christine Erickson, who drafted the complaint filed today in federal district court in Washington, D.C., noting the irony of official obfuscation over the basis for its public communication policy. “In order to get Freedom of Information Act compliance under this administration, we have had to file on average a new lawsuit every month.”

DeFazio questions use of foreign workers on forest-thinning projects

John Sowell, Douglas County News-Review, September, 8 2010 [here]

U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio says he wants a federal agency to scrutinize companies that employ foreign workers on Oregon tree-thinning projects financed by federal stimulus funds.

DeFazio sent a letter last week to the Department of Labor’s acting inspector general, Daniel Petrole, asking him to investigate. The Springfield Democrat said foreign workers should not be hired at the expense of qualified Oregonians.

“Rural Oregon has suffered from long-term unemployment of well above 20 percent,” DeFazio said in a written release Tuesday. “There is no excuse to not be hiring these hard-working Americans in the current recession. We cannot allow U.S. companies to abuse immigration laws to undercut American workers.”

Last month, The Bulletin newspaper in Bend reported that several companies awarded U.S. Forest Service contracts funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act filed applications to use foreign workers. Four companies that sought permission to employ 300 foreign workers in Oregon received a total of $10 million to thin forests. … [more]

Note: Campaign ploy. The hiring of illegal aliens by the USFS has gone on for 35 years that I know of. Pete has never done jack about this problem during his previous 24 years in Congress. Now he writes a letter. Big deal. Business as usual.

A million strong and bull trout are endangered, seriously?

Roger Phillips, Idaho Statesman, September 09, 2010 [here]

I’M CALLING BULL

… Idaho’s bull trout are more plentiful than people realize, and it’s debatable whether they should even be listed under the Endangered Species Act. …

According to a population estimate published by Idaho Fish and Game biologists in 2008 in the American Fisheries Society journal, “within 262 local populations designated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within seven Idaho recovery units, the number of 70-millimeter total length and larger bull trout was estimated at 1.13 million.” …

[I]t’s been 12 years since bull trout were listed under the Endangered Species Act, and there’s still no final federal recovery plan, so there’s no chance of delisting them.

Under a best-case scenario, it will probably be at least two or three years before the feds could even start the delisting process and remove bull trout from ESA protection.

The irony here is that it’s going to take longer to get a recovery plan for bull trout than it was for Idaho to recover them, whether or not they were actually “threatened” in the first place.

Czar She Blows

U.S. names Asian carp czar

Chicago Breaking News, September 8, 2010 [here]

The White House has tapped a former leader of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Wildlife Federation as the Asian carp czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.

On a conference call today with Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and other congressional leaders, President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality announced the selection of John Goss to lead the near $80 million, multi-pronged federal attack against Asian carp.

“This is a serious challenge, a serious threat,” Durbin said. “When it comes to the Asian carp threat, we are not in denial. We are not in a go-slow mode. We are in a full attack, full-speed ahead mode. We want to stop this carp from advancing.” …

The challenge for Goss, who was director of the Indiana DNR under two governors and served for four years as the executive director of the Indiana National Wildlife Federation, will be to make sure millions in federal money is spent efficiently, to oversee several on-going studies — including one looking into the possibility of permanently shutting down the Chicago waterway system linking Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River-and to bring together Great Lakes states currently locked in a courtroom battle over the response to the Asian carp threat. … [more]

Nota bene: this article is about the carp czar, not the crap czar. The crap czar is someone else.

Nota bene duo: Czar, czar, everywhere a czar. Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you heed the czar.

You can’t walk down the street these days without tripping over a czar. They’re thick as fleas on a dog.

I want to be the czar czar, the czar that oversees all the other czars. I could be Czar Czar Binks or Czar Czar Gabor. Czar vil be no escapes from my czarishness.

Lawsuit filed over wolf program

Karen Warnick, White Mountain Independent, September 4, 2010 [here]

APACHE COUNTY - The Board of Commissioners of Catron and Otero counties, the Gila National Forest Livestock Permittees’ Association, the group Americans for Preservation of the Western Environment (APWE), and several ranches filed a lawsuit in New Mexico federal district court against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and its Director Benjamin Tuggle and the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish (NMGF) and its Director Tod Stevenson over their handling of the reintroduction of the Mexican Gray Wolf program.

The 40-page lawsuit was filed, Aug. 27 Daniel Bryant attorney for the law firm Bryant, Schneider-Cook. The case alleges violations of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. “The defendants have through actions and omissions violated the enabling rules and altered the program without completing the environmental review or other environmental documentation required by NEPA and its implementing regulations, and these actions are therefore arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with the law…” according to the brief.

In a phone interview, Bryant said he has spent 32 years battling the federal government over land issues. “I’m the one waving my hands at the federal land managers telling them they have to give us a voice and pay attention to how their decisions affect the people.”

The wolf reintroduction program has cost taxpayers at least $20 million since 1998 according to an article in the Arizona Daily Star in June. … [more]

Wolf, grizzly bear cases set back progress, biologists, managers say

By ROB CHANEY, the Missoulian, August 29, 2010 [here]

Wolves and bears don’t behave well in courtrooms.

But the two big predators are likely to spend the next 18 months there as their advocates and enemies try to untangle them from the federal Endangered Species Act.

Last week, Montana wildlife managers decided to appeal U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy’s Aug. 5 decision placing the gray wolf back under federal protection. Meanwhile, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials in Missoula appealed another Molloy ruling that prevented state management of Yellowstone ecosystem grizzly bears.

No one knows how the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will settle the two lawsuits. But wildlife managers for both wolves and bears fear that years of cooperation and compromise in the woods may wither while the animals’ fate is debated - and ultimately decided - on paper.

“If people look in and realize how difficult it is for agencies to work together on anything, they would realize incredible steps were made,” said Gregg Losinski, an Idaho Department of Fish and Game official who is part of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Committee. “All the mechanisms were there for bear recovery - that was the frustrating thing. This relisting put things back 20 years.”

Molloy’s 2009 decision blocked a FWS plan to let states manage about 600 grizzlies living around Yellowstone National Park.

His wolf ruling earlier this summer canceled public wolf hunts in Montana and Idaho for the 2010 season. Montana officials hoped hunters would kill 186 wolves and bring the state’s population down to about 450 animals. Wolves are blamed for both falling elk and deer numbers and growing domestic livestock attacks. …

Chris Servheen sounds equally frustrated. The head of the federal government’s grizzly bear recovery program fears the bears he’s spent decades trying to save may have turned a bad corner.

“It really breeds mistrust in the public and amongst all the agencies that do the work when we go to court,” Servheen said. “We’ve seen it with the wolves, where people become angry and less likely to support these species. The law as it’s written provides the guidance we need to recover (a threatened species). That’s what we did with grizzly bears and that’s what we did with wolves.

“When courts add their own requirements to these laws, it makes it almost impossible to achieve success in these recovery areas. Legal blockage makes it difficult for the public to invest in it. They become suspicious and cynical about the whole thing. It poisons the well when courts intervene in these things.” … [more]

GAO will probe Forest Service’s handling of Station fire

The investigative arm of Congress acts on a request by California lawmakers after questions are raised about the tactics and decisions used to fight the largest fire in L.A. County history.

By Paul Pringle, Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2010 [here]

Acting on a request by California lawmakers, the investigative arm of Congress has agreed to conduct a broad inquiry into the U.S. Forest Service’s handling of last year’s devastating Station fire, officials said Wednesday.

The state’s two U.S. senators and several House members last month urged the Government Accountability Office to examine the Forest Service’s decisions and tactics in the fire fight, including its use of aircraft and whether enough was done to protect homes that burned in Big Tujunga Canyon.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) said in a statement that the GAO investigation would “help us to better understand the events surrounding the initial response to the Station fire to improve the response to future fires.”

Schiff and other local House members plan to convene a panel in the Los Angeles area in the near future to look into the first stages of the Station fire operation. A session scheduled for last month was canceled because the legislators were called back to Washington.

In addition, a U.S. inspector general is investigating the Forest Service’s failure to release recordings of telephone dispatch calls to a federal review team and the public. The Times sought the recordings last year and again this year under the Freedom of Information Act, but Forest Service officials said they did not exist. The inspector general’s probe could lead to criminal charges, depending on its findings. … [more]

Landfill in tiny Clark a draw for grizzlies amid deadly attacks on people in region

By MEAD GRUVER, AP, Star Tribune, September 07, 2010 [here]

CLARK, Wyo. - From a grizzly bear’s perspective, the small landfill in this tiny northwest Wyoming community might smell like a buffet dinner, with dead livestock and meat processing waste dumped in a pit not far from the other trash.

Environmentalist Hilary Eisen with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition calls the situation in Clark “very worrisome,” with only a short wire fence standing between the landfill and any hungry grizzlies drawn by the scent.

“Bears coming into places where humans are, such as garbage dumps or other places, and recognizing that as a food source, is one of the first steps toward creating a dangerous bear,” Eisen said.

Some point out that landfills with designated pits for dead animals aren’t uncommon and there’s nothing specifically about Clark’s that would make it particularly risky. Others aren’t so sure.

Grizzlies have killed two people within 50 miles of Clark since June. A grizzly seriously injured a man last summer a few miles from the landfill.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department has trapped two grizzlies this year at the landfill near the Montana state line. The department moved them about 100 miles away to remote areas south of Yellowstone National Park. … [more]