Climate Change, Bioenergy and Sustaining Forests of Idaho and Montana
Thoughts and comments by Ned Pence
March 3 and 4, 2010
Boise, Idaho
The following are my thoughts and comments on a recent conference sponsored by the Society of American Foresters and the University of Idaho’s College of Natural Resource. Others involved were the Forest Service, the BLM, the Intermountain Forest Association, Idaho Conservation League, the Wilderness Society, Idaho Department of Lands, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the Nature Conservancy. The Snake River Chapter of SAF deserves credit for the hard work that went into the conference. A similar convention was held in Missoula last fall.
I attended the conference seeking information on the possibility of a bioenergy industry utilizing forest fuels with the possibility of sustaining forests in the inland empire. Attendance at the conference were a mix of foresters, environmentalists, and persons involved in attempts at collaboration between the federal agencies, public, forest industry and environmentalists in an attempt to find a solution to the current gridlock of forest management on federal lands.
The stated purpose was, “This conference will help people connect with global-scale issues regarding climate change, renewable energy, and carbon emissions on forests in Idaho and Montana. Discussions centered on strategies for sustaining our forests and the services people expect from them.”
Sponsors recognized the “sustainability premise” identified as “the current and future conditions of our forests determines their ability to contribute to our society’s energy security, climate change mitigation, and resilience goals.” It was recognized that the current forested conditions put the forests at risk of stand-replacing wildfire and insect and disease outbreaks. A key statement of the conference was that forest management actions must be ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially desirable to be sustainable. It is felt by conference organizers that forest managers can take action to meet “sustainability” only by obtaining a “social license” through collaboration. A few collaborative efforts are currently underway in Washington, Idaho, and Montana and the conference had sessions to discuss what has worked well and not so well.
Searching This Site
A commenter requested that he would like to see some posts about anthropogenic fire regimes in the Pacific Northwest.
By my count there have been 40 posts about anthropogenic fire in Oregon, and over 100 on anthropogenic fire in general.
Also, at the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes, we have posted at least 25 scientific papers on the topic.
There is a method to help you search this site and all the sub-sites at W.I.S.E. for topics of interest to you. That method is to use the Search Applet in the upper right hand corner of every page. To use the Search Applet, follow these simple rules:
1. First, go to the root home of the sub-site you wish to search. You can do that by clicking on the large type, bold header at the top of the page.
On this sub-site, the large type, bold header is “SOS Forests“. Click on that. To insure that you are at the root home, check the URL. It should say:
https://westinstenv.org/sosf/
2. Type your search words into the little box that says “search”.
The word “search” will disappear. Your search terms will replace it.
3. Push *Enter*. That is, tap the *Enter* key on your keyboard.
You should see a new URL that will look something like this:
https://westinstenv.org/sosf/?s=anthropogenic+fire
Notice that your search terms will appear in the URL. That is the way to check and see if you completed all the above instructions correctly.
4. All the posts that contain your search terms will appear. It happens very quickly, so you might not notice it at first. But scroll down the page and you will see all the posts that contain your search terms.
5. If your search returned more than 15 posts, at the bottom of the page you will see a hot link that says “Next Page ->“. Click on that. Another page will appear with a URL that looks something like:
https://westinstenv.org/sosf/page/2/?s=anthropogenic+fire
Notice that “page/2″ in there? That tells you that you have found the second set of 15 posts containing your search terms.
Scroll to the bottom again. If you see the hot link that says “Next Page ->” again, that tells you that more than 30 posts meet your criteria. You can click on the hotlink again and see the third set of 15 posts. And so on. If there is no “Next Page ->” hot link at the bottom of the page, you have reached the end and found all the posts with your search terms.
6. To perform a new search (you may wish to try some other search words, for instance), be sure to click on the large type, bold header first. That will take you back to the root home. If you don’t do that, you may inadvertently search within your old search results.
7. All the sub-sites at W.I.S.E. are their own, stand alone databases. You cannot search multiple sub-sites from one location.
8. However, you may perform an author search at the W.I.S.E. Library by going to that subsite and typing the author’s name into the search applet. All the authors of papers posted in the W.I.S.E. Colloquia are listed at the Library.
Important: the Library lists the Colloquia posts, not the Commentary posts. To find authors at the Commentary sub-sites, you must visit the appropriate Commentary sub-site and do your search there.
The Library may be accessed by clicking on the hotlink that says “Library” in the upper lefthand corner of every page.
Any questions?
Where Have All the Fires Gone?
Stephen J. Pyne. 2000. Where Have All the Fires Gone? Fire Management Today, Vol 60, No. 3, Summer 2000
Full text:
IN the United States, few places know as much fire today as they did a century ago. Fires have fled from regions like the Northeast that formerly relied on them for farming and grazing. They have receded from the Great Plains, once near-annual seas of flame, ebbing and flowing with seasonal tides. They burn in the South at only a fraction of their former grandeur. They have faded from the mountains and mesas, valleys and basins of the West. They are even disappearing from yards and hearths. One can view the dimming panorama of fire in the same way that observers at the close of the 19th century viewed the specter of the vanishing American Indian.
Missing Fires, Missing Peoples
And with some cause: Those missing fires and the missing peoples are linked. The fires that once flushed the myriad landscapes of North America and have faded away are not fires that were kindled by nature and suppressed, but rather fires that people once set and no longer do. In some places, lightning has filled the void. But mostly it has not, and even where lightning has reasserted itself, it has introduced a fire regime that can be quite distinct from those shaped by the torch.
Anthropogenic (human-caused) fire comes with a different seasonal signature and frequency than natural fire. Moreover, it is profoundly interactive. It burns in a context of general landscape meddling by humans—hunting, foraging, planting—in ways that shape both the flame and its effects. So reliant are people on their fire monopoly that what makes fire possible generally makes human societies possible. What prevents one retards the other. Places that escaped anthropogenic fire likely escaped fire altogether.
Pre-Columbian Fire Practices
Did American Indians really burn the land? Of course they did. All peoples do, even those committed to industrial combustion, who disguise their fires in machines. The issue is whether and how those fires affected the landscape. Much of the burning was systematic. Pre-Columbian peoples fired along routes of travel, and they burned patches where flame could help them extract some resource — camas, deer, huckleberries, maize. The outcome was a kind of fire foraging, even fire cultivating, such that strips and patches burned as fuel became available. But much burning resulted from malice, play, war, accident, escapes, and sheer fire littering. The land was peppered with human-inspired embers.
The aboriginal lines and fields of fire inscribed a landscape mosaic (see Lewis and Ferguson (1988) for a different terminology). Some tiles were immense, some tiny. Some experienced fire annually, some on the scale of decades. In most years, fires burned to the edge of the corridor or patch and then stopped, melting away before damp understories, snow, or wet-flushed greenery. But in other years, when the land was groaning with excess fuels and parched by droughts, fires kindled by intent or accident roared deep into the landscape. People move and fire propagates; humanity’s fiery reach far exceeds its grasp of the firestick. Remove those flames and the structure of even seldom-visited forests eventually looks very different.
Forestry education Politics and politicians Useless and Stupid
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More Junk Forest Science from OSU
By Mike Dubrasich
Destruction and Sabotage
I write this essay with a heavy heart. As a professional forester for 35+ years, I have always professed good forest stewardship backed up by the best forest science. But over the last 20 years or so, forest science has been polluted and degraded by political advocacy of a pernicious and destructive nature, and so too have our priceless, heritage forests been destroyed by horrendous and catastrophic fires.
There is a crisis in our forests and in our forestry schools and those crises are interconnected. Bad forest science, junk or pseudoscience if you will, has sunk to the level of promoting forest destruction. Instead of commitment to saving forests from destruction, our forestry schools now promote that destruction on the most tenuous and disingenuous grounds.
The root cause of both crises is a corrupt political movement that seeks to impose centralized control and oppression, authoritarianism if you will, in the name of environmental protection. But protection is the furthest thing from the minds of the advocates and activists; diminution of freedom and liberty is foremost. The propaganda about environmental protection is a smokescreen, and behind the smoke lays a wasteland of environmental abuse on a landscape scale.
This essay is not about the crass political motivations of the neo-authoritarians, however. It is about catastrophic forest fires and corrupted forest science, and how the two go hand-in-hand.
It is an essay written in grief, grief for the loss of our heritage, our rationality, our institutions of higher learning, and most especially grief for the priceless forests incinerated by exceedingly bad decisions founded on exceedingly hateful and hurtful lies.
The Rape of Forest Science
A case in point: an article in Science Daily dated Feb 25, 2010 and entitled More Frequent Fires Could Aid Ecosystems [here] (unsigned but “adapted from materials provided by Oregon State University”).
The article reeks, of myths, half truths, and out and out lies.
Its ostensible purpose is to promote a conference taking place today at OSU, where the pseudoscientific justifications for forest holocaust will be preached to the public, the paying public mind you, and we all pay for it in more ways than one.
Its actual purpose is promotion of catastrophic and irreparable forest fires.
The pernicious fallacies in the article are numerous, and I shall demolish them one by one. This exercise may be tedious, but I see no other way to thoroughly deconstruct the lies.
Ecology Politics and Crocodiles
In a post last week [here] we discussed certain aspects of a recent paper: Duncan, Sally L., Brenda C. McComb, and K. Norman Johnson. 2010. Integrating Ecological and Social Ranges of Variability in Conservation of Biodiversity: Past, Present, and Future. Ecology and Society 15(1): 5.
One claim made in that paper is worth deeper examination:
The role of burning by Native Americans is a subject of debate, but the general consensus is that humans individually and collectively had only a marginal impact on the creation of this [conifer early seral forest] condition.
There are at least three problems with that statement.
First, the authors are making a quantitative statement in a science paper. They claim a “consensus” exists. A consensus is defined as general agreement, unanimity, agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole. But the authors provide no evidence to support their claim. They did not take a poll of scientists, or if they did, they did not present the data or a summary of the data.
Second, the paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, Ecology and Society [here]. The editorial board is extensive [here]. Yet neither the unnamed peer-reviewers nor the editorial board questioned the claim. They did not request or examine the polling data, which frankly we do not believe exists. They accepted the quantitative statement in a science paper without question, a complete failure of the peer-review system.
Third, the statement is demonstrably false. We have posted numerous papers (and reviews of books) wherein the authors (who are environmental scientists) make the opposite claim; that indeed humans have individually and collectively had major impacts on the creation of a wide-range of vegetation conditions, including early seral conifer conditions, for millennia, across the continent. Therefore, the “consensus” claimed in support of the paper’s contention does not exist. QED.
W.I.S.E. Comments on the USFS Planning Rule
We have discussed the US Forest Service intention to create a new Planning Rule [here] and offered some guidance, written by NAFSR Exec Dir Darrel Kenops, for drafting comments [here].
Now we present our own Comments, submitted today [here].
Some other excellent comments include those written by W.I.S.E. member Randy Shipman [here], by the National Association of Forest Service Retirees [here], and by Julie Kay Smithson of Property Rights Research [here]. And comments by Tim Bailey, Natural Resource Project Planner, Willamette National Forest are [here]. And the comments from the Coalition of Local Governments of Wyoming are [here].
Some excerpts from the W.I.S.E. Comments on the Scope of Analysis for the DEIS [here]:
*****
The biggest threats to forest and grassland health are catastrophic fires that alter ecosystems, destroy forests, and convert forests to fire-type brush. … Those impacts are immediate and also accumulate over the long-term. …
In addition, other threats to forest and grassland health are insect infestations, disease epidemics, and passive-reactive management. Litigation due to over-reliance on the unnecessary National Planning Rule and LRMPs instead of project-by-project EISs is also a major threat to forest and grassland health. …
Forest restoration means active management to bring back historical cultural landscapes, historical forest development pathways, and traditional ecological stewardship to achieve historical resiliency to fire and insects and to preclude and prevent a-historical catastrophic fires that decimate and destroy myriad resource values.
Forest restoration requires active management to remove, through mechanical means and with scientific silviculture, a-historical fuel loadings. Follow-up treatments with prescribed fire are also required, but not until forests are prepared to receive fire without catastrophic results.
Landscape-scale forest restoration is an alteration of the USFS mission. More attention must be paid to restatement of the mission, preferably by Congress. As it stands, the USFS has lost sight of any coherent mission. …
Landscape-scale forest restoration is an alteration of the USFS mission. …
The current Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, and the current Chief Forester, Tom Tidwell, have both made public vision statements that specifically incorporate forest restoration as the overriding goal of their respective tenures.
The Planning Rule must state or restate the mission of the USFS. …
In addition to articulation of the mission, to foster restoration the concept of Historical Range of Variability (HRV) must be dropped.
There is no such thing as HRV. Each watershed has a real and specific history. There is nothing random or stochastic about history; it is what really happened. Historical conditions were what they were. There is nothing flexible or malleable about history. It is non-fictional.
The Planning Rule must specify that real landscape history must be studied and elucidated for each planned project. History is an important part of the concept of forest restoration. …
In the case of forests, the previous condition in general was open, park-like, widely spaced trees arrayed in an anthropogenic mosaic of prairies, savannas, fields, and woodlands and maintained by anthropogenic fire. The previous condition was not wilderness but was modified from “natural” by extensive historical human influences intentionally administered by the residents.
The USFS must undertake studies, perform research, convene symposia, and encourage the full and scientific investigation of forest history on a watershed-by-watershed basis within each NFS unit.
The USFS must acknowledge and elucidate the historical human influences that helped to create and maintain historical conditions.
Heritage is not an afterthought; the protection of heritage must be part and parcel of USFS planning and actions. …
Zybach On Alseya
We have presented some important works of Anthropogenic Ecology, the study of historical human influences on the environment, in the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes. Today we are pleased to present another seminal work in AE, The Alseya Valley Prairie Complex, ca. 1850: Native Landscapes in Western GLO Surveys by Dr. Bob Zybach [here].
The Alsea [the common spelling, but Alseya is more euphoniously accurate] Valley lies in the Coast Range between Corvallis in the Willamette Valley and Waldport on the Pacific Ocean. The name of the valley refers to the Alsi, or Alseyah, or Alciyeh Indians that were resident there for 4,000 years or more prior to fatal contact with European diseases. The Alseya prairie complex refers to the culturally-modified landscape tended and cared for by the Alseya people over those millennia.
Today Alsea is a typical Oregon rural community, a small town center with rural homes, farms, fields and pastures, and a thick Douglas-fir forest blanketing the hills. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Alsea Valley has been thus for thousands of years, with the exception of the Douglas-fir thicket.
Over past few dozen centuries, the Alseya Valley has been a bustling community with fields and roads, much like today. The Alsi people were traders and merchants, as well as farmers. Their landscape was modified by anthropogenic fire which served to create and maintain an anthropogenic mosaic, a landscape that served the needs of the residents far better than dense forest.
Evidence indicates that in the 1850s, the time of initial White settlement in the area, the Alseya Valley existed as a series of prairies, brakes, balds, openings, patches and meadows connected by a network of foot trails, horse trails, and canoe routes, and bounded by stands of even-aged forest trees, burns, seedlings and saplings. This condition has been described as “yards, corridors, and mosaics” (Lewis and Ferguson 1999). Lewis and Ferguson initially used the phrase to describe a cultural landscape pattern maintained by Native people who lived in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska, but determined that similar management patterns were also used by people in the conifer forests of the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas, northwest California, western Washington, Australia, and Tasmania (Lewis and Ferguson 1999:164-178). These researchers found that in each instance, fire was the tool most commonly used to establish and maintain grasslands and other openings (“fire yards”), bounded by stands of trees and open transportation routes (“fire corridors”). Fire was also the agent that entered unmanaged forested areas, whether by human cause or lightning, and caused burns that regenerated to a shifting mosaic of evenaged stands of seedlings, saplings, and trees (Lewis and Ferguson 1999:164-165).
Another Crack Showing in the Old Paradigm
We have frequently described the New Paradigm in forest science and ecology as the recognition of historical human influences.
Ecology is an historical science, in that it attempts to describe how vegetation and animal populations change over time. The Old Paradigm, which we have called Clementsian [here], holds that ecological dynamics have always been “natural”, at least up until recently, because Modern Man has only recently messed with Mother Nature. Or so the Clementsians say.
In the W.I.S.E. Colloquium: History of Western Landscapes [here], we have presented scientific papers and reviews of books written by the leading proponents of the New Paradigm. They hold that human beings have been modifying vegetation and animal populations for many thousands of years.
For example, the Old Paradigm considers the Amazon Basin to be a wilderness untouched by Man. But intrepid New Paradigm researchers have found mounds, canals, and human-modified soils called terra preta that are evidence of vast Amazonian populations in pre-Columbian times [here, here, here, for instance].
Similarly, the Old Paradigm maintains that the Pacific Northwest was also an untouched wilderness prior to Euro-American settlement. It’s ridiculously a-historical and a-scientific of course, but that’s the myth that has dominated PNW forest science for 80 years. To counter that myth, we have posted numerous papers and book reviews that express New Paradigm findings in the PNW [here, here, here, for instance].
In particular, historical anthropogenic fire gave rise to open, park-like forests, savannas, and prairies [here, here, here, here]. Frequent, seasonal, deliberate, expert, traditional Indian burning created conditions whereby trees could live to old ages, i.e. the old-growth trees extant today [here, here, here, here, for instance].
Sometime we feel like we have beat this drum to the point of boring readers excessively, but truthfully the New Paradigm has not yet supplanted the old one. There have been some notable cracks in the old facade, however [here, here, here, for instance].
Last month another crack appeared, as some Old Paradigmers gingerly dipped their toes in the new waters. A paper was published wherein the old guard finally admitted there might be something to this historical anthropogenic fire after all.
The Benefits of Forest Restoration
Note: This essay, with references, is now available for downloading as W.I.S.E. White Paper 2010-2 [here]
By Mike Dubrasich
Restoration forestry aims to recover our nation’s forest heritage while also restoring the productive and harmonious relationship between people and forests that existed in historic forests. Restoration forestry is a vision for the future rooted in respect for the past. — Dr. Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Protecting Communities and Saving Forests–Solving the Wildfire Crisis Through Restoration Forestry.
FOREST restoration means active management to bring back historical cultural landscapes, historical forest development pathways, and traditional ecological stewardship to achieve historical resiliency to fire and insects and to preclude and prevent a-historical catastrophic fires that decimate and destroy myriad resource values.
Forest restoration is beneficial to man and nature in numerous ways. The following describes these benefits in general.
1. Heritage and history
To restore means to return to a former or original state. In the case of forests, restoration requires knowledge of and respect for forest history as a starting point. Forest restoration looks to pre-Contact forest conditions as a guideline.
Many (if not most) North American forests were at one time (prior to ~120 years ago) open and park-like, with widely spaced, large, old trees. Forests were conditioned to be that way by frequent, non-stand-replacing, anthropogenic fires. Historical human features included village sites; sacred and ceremonial sites; hunting, gathering, agricultural and proto-agricultural fields; extensive trail networks; prairies and savannas; and other features induced and maintained by ancient human tending through the use of traditional ecological knowledge.
Forest restoration, properly researched, designed, and implemented, restores, protects, and perpetuates many of the heritage features of forested landscapes.
2. Ecological functions including old-growth development
Our old-growth trees arose under much different conditions than today. The forest development pathways of pre-Contact eras were not punctuated by catastrophic stand-replacing fires but instead were the outcomes of frequent, seasonal, light-burning fires in open, park-like forests. Those fires were largely anthropogenic (human-set by the indigenous residents). Because the fires of historic eras were frequent and seasonal, they gently removed fuels without killing all the trees. The widely-spaced trees thus survived repeated burning and grew to very old ages.
As more and more forests have been investigated for actual age distribution, it has been discovered that “old-growth” forests, are not even-aged. Instead, many (if not most) older forests are distinctly multi-cohort. That is, forests often have two or more widely divergent age classes of trees. This fact tends to disprove the “stand replacement fire” theory, at least in regards to older forests. Their development pathways must have been different than that. It is now widely concluded that many (if not most) North American forests were at one time (120 to 500 years ago) open and park-like with widely spaced, large, old trees, and that forests were conditioned to be that way by frequent, anthropogenic fires. That is, the actual historical forest development pathways for many (if not most) of our forests involved frequent, light-burning fires, not stand-replacing fire.
Restoration forestry seeks to restore, maintain, and perpetuate historical forest development pathways that engender old-growth trees.
Federal forest policy Politics and politicians Useless and Stupid
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Battling Over the Forest Restoration Meme
When does “forest restoration” mean “abandonment to catastrophic destruction”? Answer: in the “Green Budget 2011″ proposal.
A coalition of quangos (quasi-governmental non-governmental organizations) is playing games with words. They want the word “restoration” to mean the opposite of what it actually means, prompting a battle over the meme.
The “Green Budget 2011″ [here] was prepared by 34 “environmental” lobbying groups including perennial litigation-happy bullies such as Defenders Of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, and the World Wildlife Fund. Note that these same groups are the big pigs at the EAJA trough, raking in $billions from the government to sue the government in order to sabotage restoration programs [here].
The Green Budget 2011 defines “restoration” this way:
Restoration management should be viewed as a way to recover the natural processes, structure, composition and function of a healthy forest ecosystem; it is an intentional effort to restore land, air, and water degraded by human activities to a more natural state, enhancing our forests’ ability to adapt and be resilient to disturbances and change. This is a separate and distinct vision from traditional logging or hazardous fuels reduction; while these activities may have a place on national forests, the goals and objectives are not necessarily consistent with ecosystem restoration, and the terms should not be used interchangeably.
In other words, to the quangos “restoration” means No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch It Rot.
In actuality, real forest restoration means active management to bring back historical cultural landscapes, historical forest development pathways, and traditional ecological stewardship to achieve historical resiliency to fire and insects and to preclude and prevent a-historical catastrophic fires that decimate and destroy myriad resource values.
Defining, Identifying, and Protecting Old-Growth Trees
Note: This essay, with references, is now available for downloading as W.I.S.E. White Paper 2010-1 [here]
By Mike Dubrasich, Western Institute for Study of the Environment, Feb. 3, 2010
IN ORDER TO SOLVE our current forest crisis and protect our old-growth, it is useful to understand what old-growth trees are and how to identify them in the field.
At first blush this may seem to be a simple problem, but it is not, and much confusion and debate abounds over the issue. Old-growth trees are “old,” but how old does a tree have to be to qualify as “old-growth”? And what is the difference between an individual old-growth tree and an old-growth stand of trees? Why does it matter?
Some rather sophisticated understanding of forest development is required to get at the root of these questions.
Frequent Fire and Multicohortedness
As we have discussed at SOS Forests numerous times, so-called old growth stands are actually multicohort, meaning separate and distinct age classes of trees coexist in the same stand. Typically the older cohort consists of trees that arose in the frequent fire era, while the younger cohort of trees arose after the frequent fire era ended.
The frequent fire era is more properly termed the anthropogenic fire era — the last 6,000 to 12,000 years during which the indigenous residents managed landscapes with frequent, seasonal, deliberate burning.
That deliberate burning gave rise to an anthropogenic mosaic. The fires set by human beings may have sometimes been accidental, but by and large the fires were set intentionally to modify the vegetation for purposes of human survival. Carefully timed and located burning was used by the First Residents to develop and maintain berry patches, for instance. Some of those “patches” covered thousands or even tens of thousands of acres, so the word “patch” is an understatement in this case.
Deliberate burning also gave rise to oak and conifer savannas that covered millions of acres. Every year (or two or three) the inhabitants set the prairie grasses on fire. The fires were light-burning, but they killed most of the tree seedlings that might have been present.
Across the West, and in other regions of North and South America, trees readily establish themselves. But frequent anthropogenic fire favors grasses, not trees. Historically, only a very few seedlings survived the frequent fires. Perhaps one seedling per acre every 20 to 40 years survived the repeated burning and grew to a fire-resilient size. Over time, 5 to 25 large trees per acre comprised the oak and conifer savannas. Beneath the trees, grasses and other prairie plants dominated the “understory.”
Poor Forest Science Leads to Forest Policy Failures
It is a truism that reliance on defective forest science leads to defective forest policies which then fail miserably. The prime ignominious example in Oregon is the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP).
The NWFP was based on outmoded and outdated forest ecology theories that were originally proposed by Frederic Edward Clements (1874-1945) in the early 1900’s. From the Wiki [here]:
Clements suggested that the development of vegetation can be understood as a sequence of stages resembling the development of an individual organism. After a complete or partial disturbance, vegetation grows back (under ideal conditions) towards a mature “climax state,” which describes the vegetation best suited to the local conditions. Though any actual instance of vegetation might follow the ideal sequence towards climax, it can be interpreted in relation to that sequence, as a deviation from it due to non-ideal conditions.
Clements’ climax theory of vegetation dominated plant ecology during the first decades of the twentieth century, though it was criticized significantly by ecologists Henry Gleason and Arthur Tansley early on, and by Robert Whittaker mid-century, and largely fell out of favor. However, significant Clementsian trends in ecology re-emerged towards the end of the twentieth century.
Modern day Clementsians ascribe to “natural succession” that leads to “climax” forests, aka “old-growth.” The modern Clementsian theories have been promulgated by numerous individuals, but championed especially by Dr. Jerry Franklin of the UW School of Forest Resources.
In a recent Guest Opinion [here] in the Eugene Register Guard (co-authored by Dr. Norm Johnson of OSU), Dr. Franklin opined the following:
… Most BLM forests are growing on “moist forest” sites, outside of the interior Rogue River and Umpqua River valleys. These moist forests — typified by Douglas fir and Western hemlock — evolved with infrequent but relatively severe disturbance events, such as intense wildfires and windstorms. These disturbances allowed new generations of trees to become established.
Generally, it is unnecessary to do silvicultural treatments such as thinning to maintain existing old-growth forests on moist forest sites — in fact, such activities generally degrade these forests ecologically. Left alone, these old-growth forests can perpetuate themselves for centuries, barring one of those severe natural disturbances. …
There are many scientific errors in that statement. First, forests do not evolve, species do. Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection applies to species, not aggregations of species. The forests of today are not mutualistic associations of interdependent plant species co-evolved over millions of years; rather they are chance combinations of competitive species filling temporary niches during a temporary break in the Ice Ages [here].
The plant mixes in this interglacial are not the same mixes that occurred in prior interglacials, nor (in most respects) anything like the plant communities of the Miocene, the last time it was as warm (continuously) as today.
The EPA and the Data Quality Act
Last week Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), Sen. David Vitter (La.), Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (Wis.) sent a letter [here] to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson expressing concern that the EPA’s recent “endangerment finding” regarding CO2 violates the Data Quality Act.
I’m guessing you never heard of the Data Quality Act (DQA). I hadn’t, either, until today. The DQA is not an Act per se; it is a statute that was attached to an appropriations bill in 2000 (Section 515 of the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2001 — Public Law 106–554; H.R. 5658). Section 515 directed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to:
… issue government-wide guidelines that “provide policy and procedural guidance to Federal agencies for ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by Federal agencies.”
The OMB did so [here] by defining what the quality (including the objectivity, utility, and integrity) of information means, in the legal sense. The OMB guidelines also established:
… administrative mechanisms allowing affected persons to seek and obtain, where appropriate, correction of information disseminated by the agency that does not comply with the OMB or agency guidelines.
In the comment period prior to establishing the guidelines, concerns were expressed about whether the DQA applies to Federally funded scientific research. The OMB said no, unless:
… the agency represents the information as, or uses the information in support of, an official position of the agency.
Federally funded scientists can hold any opinion they want to (at least in regards to the DQA). However, any “information” used by a Federal agency in support of “an official position of the agency” must meet the quality guidelines.
This is a little bit tricky. If the research is Federally funded, and the researcher includes “an appropriate disclaimer … to the effect that the ‘views are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the view’ of the agency,” then that information is outside the purview of the DQA. But if the sponsoring agency “directs the person to disseminate the results, or the agency reviews and approves the results before they may be disseminated,” then the DQA does apply.
In sum, these guidelines govern an agency’s dissemination of information, but generally do not govern a third-party’s dissemination of information (the exception being where the agency is essentially using the third-party to disseminate information on the agency’s behalf).
What does data quality mean? According to the guidelines, qualifying information must be accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased, and must be presented with full, accurate, and transparent documentation. If the information is peer-reviewed (subjected to formal, independent, external peer review), then the objectivity criteria is satisfied, with the provisos that:
(a) peer reviewers [shall] be selected primarily on the basis of necessary technical expertise, (b) peer reviewers [shall] be expected to disclose to agencies prior technical/policy positions they may have taken on the issues at hand, (c) peer reviewers [shall] be expected to disclose to agencies their sources of personal and institutional funding (private or public sector), and (d) peer reviews [shall] be conducted in an open and rigorous manner.
Further, agencies were required to establish:
… administrative mechanisms allowing affected persons to seek and obtain, where appropriate, timely correction of information maintained and disseminated by the agency that does not comply with OMB or agency guidelines. …
Agencies shall specify appropriate time periods for agency decisions on whether and how to correct the information, and agencies shall notify the affected persons of the corrections made. …
If the person who requested the correction does not agree with the agency’s decision (including the corrective action, if any), the person may file for reconsideration within the agency. The agency shall establish an administrative appeal process to review the agency’s initial decision, and specify appropriate time limits in which to resolve such requests for reconsideration.
Meaning scientific information promulgated by agencies in support of their official positions can be challenged, and the agency must respond to those challenges. Theoretically, if the agency’s response does not satisfy, the appellant may seek judicial relief in Federal court, citing the DQA.
I don’t know if that has ever happened, but the possibility has cropped up regarding the EPA’s CO2 endangerment finding. The four Congresspersons’ letter refer to the Climategate emails and IPCC 4th Assessment as information the EPA relied upon that does not meet the tests of the DQA. They requested that EPA Admin Lisa Jackson conduct a review of the information the EPA used in their endangerment finding, and that she report to Congress as the whether the DQA was violated.
Chances are Jackson will either ignore the letter from Congress, or she may provide some excuses for the EPA’s compromising of the DQA. But the door has been opened to potential appeals and lawsuits, should “affected persons” (all of us) decide to legally invoke the DQA.
The situation is getting curiouser and curiouser. The CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) hoax is disintegrating. There may be a fireworks display or two before the party is over.
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.
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.
