SOS Forests

Indian Forestry: Imagine the Possibilities

Note: the following essay was first posted at Evergreen Magazine Online [here]. For more on Indian Forestry see special issues of Evergreen Magazine: “Forestry in Indian Country - Progress and Promise” was published in June 1998 [here] and “Forestry in Indian Country - Models of Sustainability for our National Forests” was published in the winter of 2005-2006 [here].

About the authors: Jim Erickson was associated with the Colville Reservation’s tribal forestry program for 25 years and served as its director for several years before starting his own consulting business. Gary Morishima has been a technical advisor to the Quinault Nation for more than 30 years. He holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Science and Environmental Management and is a expert in computer simulation modeling.

Indian Forestry: Imagine the Possibilities

by Jim Erickson and Gary Morishima, Evergreen Magazine, 2010-01-14 [here]

What do you really know about Indian forestry and the long tradition of resource management? Contrary to the beliefs of some, the landscape that Columbus encountered when he glimpsed the Americas was not a vast wilderness untouched by the hand of man. The park-like forests of Ponderosa Pine, the grasslands, prairies and savannas, and groves of acorns and date palms were all produced by the stewardship of the tribes that had lived on the land for thousands of years. Tribes did not just gather the fruits of the land, they managed the resources relying on lessons learned over the generations and passed on through practice, tradition, and stories of people, places, and events.

Indian forests are found in many diverse ecotypes, from the black spruce forests of Alaska, to coastal rainforests in the Pacific Northwest, to the Ponderosa Pine forests and woodlands of the intermountain region, to the hardwoods of the lake states. Like our forests, our cultures and traditions are diverse, developed over generations of relying on the gifts of the land to meet daily needs for food, clothing, transportation, and shelter. We survived on this land for millennia by relying on the wisdom, knowledge, and native science gleaned from years of observation, experience, and interpretation. Our strength lies in our differences, our resilience, our adaptability, and in our capacity to live within limits sustainable by available resources. While we depend heavily on commodity production from our forests, like state forests, Indian forests are managed for multiple purposes, providing timber, firewood, foods, medicines, recreation, fish and wildlife habitat, and sacred places where we worship and find spiritual renewal.

We respect our resources by managing them. We understand that we cannot fulfill our stewardship obligations if we abandon our resources to neglect or allow ourselves to become paralyzed by inaction or stalemate. We live with the consequences of our decisions every day in innumerable and unimaginable ways. And we understand that our duty for resource stewardship extends beyond today to the generations yet unborn.

more »

The Grandeur of the WFU

by bear bait

The legal situation in the US concerning WFU fire and the Feds is this: they don’t have any financial responsibility for the fire when it leaves Federal Land, unless they are in an agreement with the other public and private land firefighting entities to assist in a cooperative agreement.

On the other hand, the US Attorney General has three teams of US Attorneys, one in Sacramento, one in LA, and one in SLC, whose sole job is to litigate and secure damages when fire from other than Federal origins damage the Federal Estate. They can sue you for your fire and its damages to Federal land and assets, but you can’t sue them if their fire crosses onto your property and damages your land and assets. In two cases [here] that have gone to trial, Pacific Gas and Electric paid $14.75 million due to a right-of-way ponderosa pine that fell across power lines, starting a fire during a wind event. The issue was that PGE was negligent in not removing a tree that was damaged or rotten. I do imagine that a phalanx of utility attorneys have given instructions to lay waste to any possible vegetation that might fall across a power line.

The other case involved the Union Pacific RR, and the judgment against them was for $102 million, due to a broken rail repair fix that resulted in sparks into duff in the right-of-way and the confusion of who did what to suppress the fire and how. You have to know that five barely literate railgang crewmen are not the best witnesses, and they were led into various traps by the Ivy League US Attorney swells, who used their language skills and reasoning skills to baffle, confuse, and demean the blue collar workers. Poofs from law school dazzling a judge. Whoopee. It was established that the fire fighting effort was not that of Hot Shots, and therefore the Railroad was liable. So they ended up paying 102 million bucks for damage to trees that would never be logged, ever, due to specific area protections, but the trespass by fire garnered double stumpage. And then there were estimates of wildlife damage, and habitat damage, and watershed damage (in the Feather River, a river that sends zero water to the ocean, all of it claimed for irrigation and potable water use, and dammed to keep salmon out of it almost in the river’s entirety), and the best one of all “loss of the grandeur of the landscape.”

So if “loss of the grandeur of the landscape” is a compensable damage, where in the hell is it in the WFU, “fire for resource use” handbooks? Where is the NEPA document that so states that wildland fire can result in “loss of grandeur of the landscape?”

I would like the ODF to mention to the Feds that they have the right as a State to petition the Feds to control their freaking fires, and keep them off the non-Federal lands, as we are losing the “grandeur of our landscape” along with other compensable damages as are now recognized in Federal case law by precedent of trial results and judicial opinions.

The tyranny of the Federal Court is upon us, and the irresponsible actions of Federal land managers need to be addressed. If the US Military is not permitted to wage war on its own people, how is it that the Federal land managers can loose fire on the private estate without penalty or Congressional oversight???

The flaming liberals that Oregon elects to Congress need to answer these questions on the campaign trail, and since all but two have been there for a decade or longer, it isn’t like this is something new. This is something blue, and the blue state reps and senators need to go to the firelines and have their feet held to the very same fires.

When Tom Brokaw was still a news anchor, and I believe it was the Derby Fire that threatened his Montana ranch and hideaway, there was no end to the resources the Feds put forth to make damned sure his ranch was not consumed as were so many others. The Derby was a WFU that blew up, and was in “dangerous” terrain (are they not all?), and it was not worth the risk or time and effort to contain in the wilderness, so there was little effort until it was a full fledged fire front. But no public complaints were ever aired on the evening news because the effort to contain it was right where it was supposed to be: at the doorstep of the leading US news anchor.

It is not a world of equality. Never was, never will be. But at the least we can implore the ODF Board to flex some muscle and talk tough to the USFS about the WFU deal, and the impacts on Oregon private resources, for after all, fire protection is paid for by a property tax assessment in most cases. If you don’t have a protection agreement with the state, your fire does not get fought. By ODF or the Feds.

The other question should be, of course, is why does a private person have to insure or pay to protect himself from fire from the Federal estate? Aid to Haiti? Sure. Aid to Iraq? Sure. Aid to New Orleans? Sure. But have the conflagration from the Feds run over your land, where is the aid? Ha ha ha ha……

ODF Slams Let It Burn

Last November the Oregon Department of Forestry issued a “perspective” on the Let It Burn policies of the US Forest Service. The short story: ODF has big problems with federal wildfire policy.

Rather than give a synopis, here is the ODF “perspective” in full (unfortunately I can’t supply a link because I can’t find this document on the ODF website):

Oregon Department of Forestry

Perspective on 2009 Federal Wildfire Policy Guidance

November 29, 2009

Background

The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) provides fire protection on 16 million acres of private, state, local government and federal lands. ODF’s protection jurisdiction borders, and is intermingled with, thousands of miles of US Forest Service and other federal ownership. ODF’s fire protection system is funded through a combination of landowner assessments and state general fund (roughly 50/50). Both federal and state protection systems have been well coordinated at both the local and regional levels. Each agency maintains fire fighting resources and cost effectively shares contract resources such as contract crews, engines and helicopters based on established priorities and the availability of the resources.

ODF is supportive of the USFS and the other federal agencies. We strive to maintain the established high level of cooperation that we have between the agencies. ODF is also supportive of the role of fire to help meet resource management goals. However, ODF and the landowners we provide protection to prefer forest management tools other than wildfire to treat unhealthy fuel loads. ODF does understand that with the limitations imposed on the federal lands, by a variety of factors, available federal forest management options are limited. ODF does not want the federal agencies to lose the effective use of fire as a management tool.

However, current and past guidelines for federal wildfire policy that allow wildfires to grow large over peak burning conditions during the summer months without full suppression efforts impact the state. These impacts include loss of ODF protected landowner’s resources, increased state preparedness costs, the possibility of increased suppression costs, competition for firefighting resources, and increased safety risks for all firefighters through additional exposure.

Federal Wildfire Policy guideline changes made in 2009 further complicate the issues by allowing the use of multiple resource objectives within one fire. Actions such as these further complicate state fire management activities, cost share agreements, and the use and coordination of firefighting resources.

ODF Federal Wildfire Policy Issues

* Transfer of risk to ODF and other firefighters. Ability/willingness of USFS to cover suppression costs associated with fires that impact others due to their activities.

* Transfer of risk and damage to non-USFS landowners. Ability/willingness of USFS and federal government to compensate for damages.

* During a heavy fire season firefighting resource shortages:

- Impacts firefighter and public safety and increases resources lost

- Continues to drive up the agencies costs for the availability of limited resources

* Reliability of national federal fire models to help make predictions

- 2008 Bridge Creek WFU – predicted high Haines, wind shift, poor humidity recovery, were the primary drivers in the fire blowing up and burning 1,963 acres of ODF protection.

- 2009 Big Sheep Ridge WFU – fire ignited in wilderness on August 29, on September 28, fire blows up with a dry, cold front passage, resulting in wind shifts and low humidity’s – fire burns 136 acres of ODF protection.

* Safety and least cost objectives seem to be used synonymously for resource benefit. However, what may be least cost for the jurisdictional agency that has the fire may be most costly for the neighbor. For true “least cost”, the focus should be on increased and aggressive initial attack.

* Increased preparedness and coordination cost to ODF to prepare in the event one of the federal fires comes onto ODF protection regardless of who pays the suppression costs. Increasingly, the threat to ODF jurisdiction exists nearly anywhere a federal wildfire is being managed for other than full suppression.

* Federal WFU and non-aggressive suppression fires impact on air quality and global warming through carbon emissions.

* Impact on habitat for threatened and endangered species.

* When the federal fire management objective is to increase the amount of wildfire acres burned across the landscape, through the use of multiple resource objectives, it becomes unclear what decision making is driving when aggressive initial attack is implemented. In other words when is the agency really trying to catch the wildfire at IA versus increasing the amount of wildfire acres burned across the landscape.

* The use of federal emergency wildfire suppression funds to accomplish land management resource objectives.

Summary

Federal fire suppression policy guidelines have undergone significant change since the shift from the “10 a.m. policy” of the 1970’s and before. In an effort to address the hazardous fuels issue on National Forests, variations of “let it burn” guidance with differing descriptors has been used over the years on an increasing number of fires that have escaped initial attack. Through discussions last spring and this fall, Forest Service managers have been communicating their intent to continue, and to expand their use of indirect attack and encourage the use of fire for resource benefit to accomplish land management objectives. It is ODF’s opinion this will result in larger, more expensive fires with the likelihood of increased impacts to the Oregon Department of Forestry and Oregon’s forest landowners.

Schizophrenic Forest Unmanagement

My blogging mentor, the Rogue Pundit, has written another perceptive essay about forests. The Rogue Pundit is a Renaissance man, interested in and knowledgeable about a vast array of topics — forests and forestry are not his sole or even primary themes. But whenever he focuses on forests, he hits the nail on the head.

RP’s latest essay is [here]. Some excerpts:

The Aborigines and Cap & Trade

by the Rogue Pundit, January 17, 2010

One of the first things Kevin Rudd did upon his election as Australia’s prime minister was sign the Kyoto Protocol. However, his Liberal government’s attempts to pass cap & trade legislation have gone poorly. Lurking behind the overheated rhetoric regarding catastrophic climate change grew a bill that was more about pork and income redistribution than reducing emissions… same as what our Democratic leaders have produced thus far.

In August and again in December, the Australian Senate soundly rejected the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). Rudd was really hoping to fly triumphantly into Copenhagen with the bill signed. However, he couldn’t even get the Greens to vote for it. …

Big businesses are perfectly willing to support a cap & trade system so long as it doesn’t hurt their bottom line. Even better, supporting the CPRS greenwashes those which will come out even or profit from the scheme. Meanwhile, those that pay will try to pass along the costs to their customers. That indirectly taxes the public while making many Australian goods less competitive on the international market. When activists claim that such initiatives will boost the economy via green jobs, they’re either ignorant or lying… higher energy costs function as a tax on the economy. And of course there’s the additional bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, most Australians have managed to ignore the fact that Aborigines aren’t particularly thrilled with the CPRS either. The legislation essentially freezes them out of the pork and income redistribution [here].

…Aborigines have no way to participate in the carbon trading because native title does not give them any control over vegetation. Generally, they have limited rights to hunt animals and enjoy customs on land shared with other interests.

Pastoralists, as well, have no means to enter the carbon economy. They do not own their land, they merely lease it from governments. Governments will be able to use the vast native title and pastoral inventories to offset their own pollution, or to trade on the open carbon market.

The CPRS will become subject to an indigenous legal challenge but not directly. The challenge will be directed at native title, specifically the Mabo case. Aborigines will argue that if Mabo found that indigenous title was never extinguished by colonisation, then indigenous rights are deeper than the right to wander and hunt. If animals and bush fruit are an indigenous asset, do they have rights to the ecosystems which sustain them? If so, they could use the bush to trade for carbon offsets.

An indigenous backroom agitator from Darwin, Tracker Tilmouth, is pushing this idea. …But Mr Tilmouth says not much Australian bush is really virgin.

“Aboriginal people have been fire-farming this land for 40,000 years,” Mr Tilmouth says.

“If you’ve been in central Australia and seen the spinifex [grass] plains of the Tanami desert, that is man-made. They burn it every year and use it for hunting kangaroos and other animals. They do it to this day.”

Most environmentalists would prefer that Aborigines stop managing the land and let it return to nature… whatever that is after 40,000 years of fire-farming. Gee, do you suppose that many of the plants, animals, etc. haven’t evolved over that time to become dependent upon man’s regular fires?

That same dynamic is at work in many parts of the U.S., especially here in the West. Anthropogenic fire has been missing here for most of two centuries now, subsequent fire suppression strategies have been schizophrenic, we’ve added some invasive species and killed off others, and on and on. Our forests aren’t returning to anything they’ve ever been.

Our forests aren’t returning to anything they’ve ever been.

That’s exactly right. Millennia of human stewardship through intentional, frequent, seasonal anthropogenic fire and the application of traditional ecological knowledge led to open, park-like forests, savannas, and prairies, arranged in an intentional anthropogenic mosaic.

Absent that stewardship we get fuel build-up, megafire, and conversion of forests to fire-type brush which infrequently erupts in return (or repeat) fires.

The ancient methods encouraged light-burning fires that allowed trees to grow to very old ages. The new un-methodology leads to catastrophic stand-replacing (or eliminating) fires that preclude long-lived trees.

Good-bye old growth, hello repeated disasters. Not smart.

The GW Hoax Is Collapsing

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

by Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings, The Sunday UK Times, January 17, 2010 [here]

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, then I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.” …

The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%. …[more]

Note: not “blunders” but a deliberate hoax with intent to defraud and steal on a global scale. You can’t call this kind of thing “science”. Note also the involvement of BINGO’s. See [here] for a discussion about BINGO’s.

Biochar Is a Sidetrack

I attended an interesting mini-conference on “biomass” yesterday. All the speakers were engaging. One of the topics discussed was biochar, charcoal incorporated into soils.

Charcoal has been identified as an important soil constituent in anthropogenic enriched dark soil (Amazonian dark earths or terra preta) found throughout the Amazon Basin.

Biochar is a valuable soil amendment in heavily leached soils because carbon binds to and stores the metallic oxide nutrients essential to plant growth. The addition of charcoal as well as organic detritus and “night soil” to Amazonian lateritic soils helped to create and sustain terra preta over centuries.

But singular additions of biochar to soils do not have much effect, even to very poor and weathered soils [here]. Incorporating compost and wood ash is more beneficial. That was the strategy of the ancient indigenes who created terra preta. Charcoal was not necessarily the key ingredient. Further, biochar is a very expensive soil amendment [here]. It is far cheaper and more effective (at increasing soil productivity) to apply manure straight, rather than to cook the manure in ovens first.

Nor is biochar the solution to global warming. The globe is not warming, CO2 is not a significant driver of global temperatures, and biochar is not made from fossil fuels. Biochar is a part of the natural, organic, carbon cycle. There will never be enough man-made biochar produced to make a detectable difference in atmospheric CO2.

Terra preta has other charms, though. The most significant finding from terra preta research is the reconstruction of human history. Historical human influences over millennia have dramatically altered the landscapes and vegetation in Amazonia and on every continent save Antarctica.

more »

Carbon Forestry: A Cautionary Note

By Roger Underwood

from The Forestry Source, January 2010. © Society of American Foresters

My position regarding global warming and climate change, and their impact on forestry is simple: it is one of fairly certain uncertainty.

On the one hand I accept that the world is gradually becoming warmer, as we continue to emerge from the last ice age. This might lead to a rise in average temperature in Australia of a couple of degrees over the next 100 years, probably through an increase in minimum, rather than of maximum temperatures. And I accept that many parts of Australia at the moment are experiencing prolonged drought, or periods of below-average rainfall, but I cannot tell yet whether these are due to global warming or are just natural climatic cycles.

On the other hand I have seen no convincing evidence that global warming is caused by human emissions of CO2. And even if this hypothesis is true, the idea that Australian (or American) foresters can fix the problem by planting trees is ambitious to the point of fantasy. The extent of tree planting needed to counteract the CO2 emissions from Australia alone could never be accomplished without an enormous impact on the high rainfall land-base, which in turn would have a dramatic impact on food production. Besides, the Australian contribution to the world’s carbon emissions is tiny; surely we foresters would be kidding ourselves if we think anything we do will make a difference on a global scale (other than as a symbolic gesture).

I am also puzzled by the view that increased temperatures will lead to reduced rainfall. Across geological time the reverse has always been the case, with the driest climates being associated with the times of coolest temperatures.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge the current political and media hysteria about climate change. It has taken on a life of its own. The situation is made worse by the fact that the world’s smart moneymen see the thing as a business opportunity, a way to get richer. Banks and financial institutions are not just capitalising on global warming hysteria, they are promoting it. Others also have their snouts deep in the trough. Australian academics love global warming—not only is it a source of very large research grants, it is a heaven-sent opportunity for some of them to drive the final nail into the coffin of the native forest timber industry.

more »

A Very ‘Rhum’ Affair

By Roger Underwood

I was mulling over a paper on the temperature record at Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia the other day [1]. The paper presented data that diverged significantly from the ‘official’ view that Darwin’s temperature has skyrocketed in recent years as a result of global warming. On the contrary, the Bureau of Meteorology’s own temperature records actually show no upward or downwards trend over the last century. The difference between the actual data and the official position is perplexing, to say the least, and I could not help but sniff the wind and wonder where the smoke was coming from.

However, I am no climatologist so I will have to wait for an independent analysis of the Darwin situation before reaching a firm conclusion. Nevertheless, the issue triggered an intriguing memory. I went to my bookcase and ran my eye along the titles. There it was: a slim paperback I had bought second-hand several years ago: A Rum Affair. A true story of botanical fraud by Karl Sabbagh, published in 1990 [2]. I sat down and re-read it, finding to my pleasure that I could easily recapture the fascination of the first reading. Almost an entire Sunday slipped past.

The story centres on John Heslop Harrison, an eminent British botanist and academic in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Heslop Harrison was Professor of Botany at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an expert on the natural history of the Hebrides, including the island of Rum (the spelling of the name was changed to Rhum in Victorian times, for the sake of propriety, but is today more usually spelled Rum, a spelling I prefer).

Heslop Harrison had a theory about the Hebrides, the string of islands lying off the west coast of Scotland. He believed that they had escaped the last Ice Age, despite the fact that glaciation had covered the rest of the British Isles, Europe and North America. His theory could be proven, he maintained, by the discovery of plant species growing on Hebridean islands that are found no-where else in Britain, species representative of the pre-Ice Age flora. Indeed he found several such species on Rum, including a sensational discovery of a rare sedge Carex bicolour, which he duly announced in a paper in the Journal of Botany, and a reed (Juncus capitatus) previously known only from the Channel Islands south of England.

Many contemporary scientists were sceptical of Heslop Harrison’s theory, and suspicions grew about the validity of his ever-lengthening list of rare plant discoveries. Suspicion deepened when attempts to find the plants by other botanists were unsuccessful, and when it was pointed out that the rare species found by Heslop Harrison on Rum were growing on very different soils and in quite different topographical situations to those where they naturally occurred.

Heslop Harrison also ‘discovered’ a species of water beetle in a Hebridean loch which had never been found in the British Isles before, and never was again, giving rise to puzzlement amongst British entomologists. This led to further rumours and whispers within scientific circles.

Eventually, just after the end of World War II, a searching investigation focusing on about a dozen of Heslop Harrison’s “suspect” reeds and sedges, was undertaken. The investigator was John Raven, a Cambridge classics don, skillful amateur botanist and son of a noted British botanist. Raven’s methods were not entirely honourable. For example he tricked Heslop Harrison into allowing him onto Rum and joining in with one of Heslop Harrison’s field excursions. Nevertheless, his investigations were meticulous and his analytical skills impeccable. Raven concluded that the rare species found by Heslop Harrison did not occur on Rum. On the contrary, he considered that they had been raised by Heslop Harrison in his garden shed at Birtley, and then planted on Rum, where they were dramatically discovered by Heslop Harrison (working alone) shortly afterwards. To this day no other botanist has been able to duplicate Heslop Harrison’s key finds. Nor, inexplicably, were Heslop Harrison’s original collections professionally curated and archived, so they cannot be studied in herbaria today.

more »

Blogs, Peers, and Watching the Paradigm Shift

Within hours after posting a blurb about a research paper on ancient Amazon earthworks [here], our vast network of science adepts sent in the paper itself.

Martti Parssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi. 2009. Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Pur’us: a complex society in western Amazonia. Antiquity 83 (2009): 1084–1095 is now posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes [here].

So you need not rely on the interpretation of journalists; you can read the paper and make your own interpretations.

That’s nothing new for W.I.S.E. Almost all the reference works in our Library [here] have been supplied by our readers. This blogistic endeavor is an exercise in participatory science. And that is true of many other blogs as well (climate science blogs are a good example).

Something wonderful is happening to science today. Thanks to the Internet, science has been freed from the shackles of the Ivory Tower. No longer is science an esoteric and exclusive practice — now we all get to participate. We are all peers now.

But what is even more rewarding is that the research papers and books suggested by our science-adept contributors are uniformly excellent and cutting edge in this respect: they are representative of a paradigm shift in ecology.

A paradigm shift is a change in the fundamental structure of a scientific field, from one way of thinking to another. In this case the shift is from old ecological ideas about natural development to new ones that include the recognition of human influences.

We have posted book reviews and whole research papers that present evidence of profound historical human impacts in Amazonia, the Pacific Northwest, California, the Mississippi Valley, Manhattan, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, British Columbia, Alberta, Australia, and many more locales and regions.

The implications are more than a refinement of history — they affect the way we understand ecological change and dynamics, and by extension, how we might practice sustainable stewardship today.

That is because ecology is at its heart an historical science. Ecology is the study of the interactions between organisms and their environment. Those interactions, and the dynamic changes in plant and animal populations, play out across time. Ecological processes can take hundreds of years and even longer to mature and cover broad geographic areas. Hence history is essential to ecology.

The new understanding, of human influences on ecological processes across time, is as significant a change in thinking as plate tectonics was for geology. Alfred Wegener first proposed the idea of continental drift in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans, but it took almost 50 years before Wegener’s theory was generally accepted. Improved seafloor mapping in the 1950’s, including of rift zones and spreading plates whose movements were calibrated by the magnetic pole reversal signatures in rocks, provided overwhelming evidence, so that in the early 1960’s plate tectonics became the paradigm, supplanting the old theories that assumed the Earth’s geologic features were fixed in place.

Similarly, the new theories of ecological development, including recognition of historical human influences, are supplanting the old ones.

That shift in ecological thinking is happening today, and you have a ringside seat. We all do, thanks to the contributors to W.I.S.E., who are often the leading scientists themselves. We are witness to a major advancement in scientific understanding.

That’s pretty exciting — I think it is, anyway. And it is hugely gratifying to be a part of it, too, and to be a conduit to you, the scientific peers in our new age of digital communication.

It is easy to get caught up in the forest, fire, and wildlife policy issues of the moment, and it is also our duty, as we see it, to be involved in those issues. But the real joy for those of us most closely associated with W.I.S.E. is to witness and be a part of the new paradigm in ecology.

We don’t express our gratitude enough, so here’s a loud THANK YOU to the courageous researchers who brave uncharted waters, and who generously share with us the tales of their voyages of exploration.

Ancient Anthropogenic Fire in Harlem

Back before Harlem became a borough of New York City, indeed before NYC ever existed, Manhattan Island was home to the Lenni Lenape, or Delaware people. The Delaware, as did other Algonquins, burned their habitat annually to induce open fields (cultivation by fire). These they planted with corn, squash, beans, and other domestic crops.

Or so has been hypothesized. Two researchers from UC Berkeley, William T. Bean and Eric W. Sanderson, devised a unique method of testing that hypothesis through the use of modern fire behavior models. Their report on their findings, Using a spatially explicit ecological model to test scenarios of fire use by Native Americans: An example from the Harlem Plains, New York, NY, has been added to the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: Forest and Fire Sciences [here].

Their findings in a nutshell:

Our model results indicate that by controlling fire frequency in the pre-settlement Harlem Plains, the Lenape people could control the structure of the landscape. Van der Donck’s claim that they cleared the land every 20 years does not appear to be supported by our model results. For the land to be a “plain” or “grassland” the landscape would have had to been burned at least once every 10 years and, depending on initial condition, would have yielded a mosaic of vegetation types. Burning every year overwhelms succession through disturbance and keeps the landscape in a grassland steady state.

Our results suggest that the hardwood forests of the northeast required significant maintenance in order to keep them clear and open—escaped fires and lightning strikes would not suffice to maintain a savanna or grassland. We believe this adds to the consensus that, while individual historical accounts may be suspect, the evidence continues to suggest that Native Americans were using fire to control their landscape, not only in the western and plains states, but also in the northeast.

Bean’s and Sanderson’s research constitute a novel use of modern fire behavior models, to “predict” the past rather than the future. The potential application of this technique is far-reaching.

more »

Ancient Amazon Earthworks Seen by Satellite

Amazonia is not the “wilderness” many assume it to be. For thousands of years human beings have been residing in and cultivating (for agriculture) lowland and upland areas across the Amazon basin and beyond.

A recent article in National Geographic News provides a glimpse of earthworks built long before Columbus. Rediscoveries of the ancient croplands and city sites force us to re-evaluate notions of wilderness and to consider the long-standing, organized, cultural interactions and influences of humanity upon western landscapes.

The Nat Geo News article (below) cites Denise Schaan and William Woods, historical landscape geographers whose research we have posted (in small part) at the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes. Among our Amazonia references are:

* William Woods et al. (including Dr. Schaan). 2009. Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision [here]

* Michael J. Heckenberger et al. 2007. The legacy of cultural landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon: implications for biodiversity [here]

* William M. Denevan. 2001. Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes [here]

* Charles C. Mann. 2008. Ancient Earthmovers Of the Amazon [here]

* William Denevan. 1992. The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492 [here]

* Charles C. Mann. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus [here]

Ancient Amazon earthworks seen by satellite

more »

Short Break

We’ll be taking a short break to attend to some family matters. Back soon,

Mike

Weyco Goes REIT

Presto! Weyerhaeuser’s a REIT

To remain a qualified REIT, however, the forest products company must take care to meet technical rules, especially related to its non-REIT assets.

by Robert Willens, CFO.com, January 4, 2010 [here]

It has finally happened. In December, Weyerhaeuser Company announced that its board of directors “determined that conversion to a real estate investment trust (REIT) would best support the company’s strategic direction.” The most likely date for conversion of the forest products and real estate development company, which owns extensive timberland, is the taxable year ending December 31, 2010.

From what we can gather, the conversion will not be accompanied by a spin-off of Weyerhaeuser’s non-qualifying assets. Instead, those non-REIT qualified assets will be lodged in one or more subsidiaries which will operate as “taxable REIT subsidiaries” (TRSs). That said, a later spin-off, along the lines employed by Potlatch Corporation in 2008, should not be ruled out.

Related Web Sites:

Section 301 of the Internal Revenue Code [here]
Section 305 of the Internal Revenue Code [here]
IRS Revenue Procedure 2009-15 [here]
U.S. Treasury Regulation Section 1.305-2(a) [here]
IRS Revenue Rule 2001-50 [here]

Once the conversion (to REIT status) becomes “old and cold”, we fully expect that the stock of the TRSs will be distributed to Weyerhaeuser’s shareholders. Such a distribution may be necessitated by the REIT qualification rules. Among other requirements, to remain a qualified REIT, not more than 25% of the value of the REIT’s total assets may be represented by securities of TRSs. Accordingly, if the securities of the TRSs appreciate too rapidly, Weyerhaeuser’s REIT status would be imperiled.

Indeed, to qualify as a REIT, the corporation must eliminate the “earnings and profits” it has accumulated in non-REIT years by the close of the first taxable year for which REIT status is desired. In Weyerhaeuser’s case, the amount to be excised is nearly $6 billion. Therefore, to eliminate this balance, Weyerhaeuser must undertake distributions of property “to which Section 301 [of the tax code] applies.”

As many companies have done before, Weyerhaeuser will satisfy this dividend payment obligation largely with its stock. Ordinarily, a distribution by a corporation of its stock is not a distribution of property to which Section 301 applies. However, such a distribution can easily be transformed into a qualifying distribution. To be sure, Section 305(b)(1) provides that a distribution by a corporation of its stock shall be treated as a distribution of property to which Sec. 301 applies if the distribution is, at the election of any of the shareholders, payable either in its stock or in property. …

A recognized built-in gain is, with certain exceptions, any gain recognized on the disposition of an asset during the recognition period. Fortunately, the Internal Revenue Service has ruled that where a REIT: (1) holds timber property on the date its election becomes effective; and (2) during the recognition period cuts the timber and sells the resulting wood products, the income on the sale is “normal operating business income in the nature of rent or royalties” which is not subject to Section 1374.3

As a result, as long as it does not undertake any “extraordinary” sales of assets (owned on the conversion date) during the recognition period, Weyerhaeuser will not be liable for the “BIG” tax. …

And this is after they received a $182 million tax break to NOT become a REIT [here].

See also [here, here, here, here].

Actually, all in all, this is great news. It is time to break up this monopoly, something many of us have been predicting would happen for years.

The next step is to stifle any more taxpayer bailouts and to ensure that the properties remain private and are NOT acquired by government. I predict that will be a difficult scam to repel — already the anti-private-property types are salivating like dogs at the backdoor of the butcher shop.

How Coordination Plans Work

And How They Can Help Protect Your Rights

Note: the following is a introduction to “coordination plans,” a tool that local governments can use to become meaningfully involved in federal land management.

Federal law (specifically the Federal Land Policy Management Act, FLPMA) mandates federal agencies to coordinate actions with local governments. That process occurs if and only if local governments insist upon it. County Commissioners need not sit on the sidelines while federal agencies promulgate and implement plans to burn public forests, degrade watersheds, pollute air and water, and cripple local economies. The FLPMA can be invoked, forcing federal agencies to deal directly and substantively with local interests.

By Fred Kelly Grant, Stewards of the Range, American Land Foundation and Liberty Matters, February/March 2007 [here]

Local governments that have implemented “coordination” status with federal management agencies are successfully fighting erosion of private property rights in their communities. The “coordination” status is authorized by almost every federal statute relating to management of land, resources, and the environment. All the local government has to do is formally accept the congressional invitation to “coordinate,” and federal agencies have no choice but to agree.

What is this “coordination” factor, which elevates the involvement of local government in federal planning and management actions? The foundation for the concept is found in the Federal Land Policy Management Act, commonly known as FLPMA. Section 1712 of Title 43 of the United States Code requires that the Bureau of Land Management must coordinate its “land use inventory, planning, and management actions” with any local government which has engaged in land use planning for the federal lands managed by the federal agencies.

Congress did not leave the definition of the word “coordination” to chance, or to the whim of the federal management agencies. Congress defined the word by specifying the duties and responsibilities of the BLM regarding local plans. The statute REQUIRES the following:

1. BLM must keep apprised of local land use plans;

2. BLM must assure consideration is given to local plans when federal plans are being developed;

3. BLM must attempt to resolve inconsistencies between federal and state local plans;

4. BLM must provide “meaningful…involvement” of local government officials in the development and revision of plans, guidelines and regulations;

5. The Secretary must, finally, compare local and federal plans and make sure they are consistent “to the maximum extent…consistent with federal law.”

BLM regulations set forth a very clear process by which the local government, which has developed a plan is able to “coordinate” with the BLM, and this process includes an elevation of the participation level of the local government to a point of notice and “meaningful” participation above and ahead of “public participation.”

Note that the statute does not limit mandatory coordination to “counties,” but rather extends it to “local government.” That language includes any unit of local government, often identified as any separate tax-raising unit of government, i.e., school districts, road districts, fire districts, irrigation districts, and cities and towns.

So, in a county where county commissioners or supervisors refuse to develop a local plan for coordination status, any school board or other tax-raising unit of government can gain coordinate status for itself. The ideal goal for local government would be to develop a plan by which the county, towns within the county, school districts, irrigation districts, fire districts, could all participate in the same coordination activities.

Other federal land management agencies are also required to deal with local governments on a higher plane than they do with the general public. This applies to those which operate under and implement the National Forest Management Act, Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the National Preservation Act, Soil Conservation district statutes, and the National Environmental Policy Act. … [more]