For three years I’ve been wondering whether anyone in USDA pays attention to what the Forest Service does or says. Left to its own devices, the Forest Service is capable of much mischief. Here’s today’s example, from the “National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy“:

Wildland fire management actions are guided by a suite of laws, implemented through regulations and adopted as agency policy after public review and comment. Regulations and policies, however, are often more limiting than the authorizing legislation itself, and sometimes may impede the accomplishment of management objectives and timelines. While legislation such as the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) has been beneficial to active management of public lands, other legislation has been used to promote agendas and philosophies that are not necessarily in harmony with the legislation’s original intent. This is especially true of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), which was meant to provide a means for underprivileged people to bring legal action against the federal government. Similarly, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are sometimes utilized by special interest groups to achieve objectives not considered by Congress when the bills were enacted. In addition to barriers presented by existing regulations and policies, the articulation of new or revised policies and changes in agency terminology and/or goals create challenges related to communication and implementation. It is important to seek out opportunities to streamline and coordinate procedures and to pursue broader use of authorities across jurisdictions to achieve common goals. Legislative barriers that are impeding project implementation must be examined and reformed to create incentives for resolving conflict through collaboration rather than litigation.

So, there we have it. The Forest Service now supports legislatively amending the Equal Access to Justice Act, the Endangered Species, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Is the Forest Service speaking for the Obama Administration? Does USDA know or care that its flagship agency has called upon Congress to amend three bedrock laws?

At least in the U.S., no one even comes close.

The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres with a wildland fire management budget of about $2 billion. That’s $10.36 an acre.

The Department of Interior manages 500 million acres with a wildland fire budget of $856 million. That’s $1.71 an acre.

By the way, DOI enjoys a 98 percent initial attack success rate (defined as the percent of fires kept smaller than 300 acres) — same as the Forest Service.

The Rocky Mountain Research Station released its Fourmile Canyon Fire report, requested by Senator Udall of Colorado. The Report confirms that:

1) A home’s fate depends upon fuel in its immediate surroundings and construction materials;

2) Fuel treatments, especially those that leave fine fuels untreated, are ineffective protection against wildfires that threaten homes, i.e., windy, dry conditions; and,

3) Fire suppression resources are easily overwhelmed precisely when Fire-Unwise homes need them the most.

The report took a special look at aerial attack, finding that the great preponderance of retardant was dropped after the fire had already stopped advancing.

Oregon’s longest-serving senator, Mark Hatfield, died yesterday at 89. As a youngster, I remember my mother campaigning for Hatfield in his first election to the U.S. Senate (1967), notwithstanding her life-time Democratic Party affiliation. As Oregon’s governor, Hatfield had opposed the Vietnam War, and that was enough to earn my mom’s support. Later, as an adult, I got my own chance to see him at work.

The first time was during the Mapleton litigation, circa 1982. My employer, the National Wildlife Federation, sought to reform logging practices in the steep and erosion-prone Oregon Coast Range. For a generation, the Forest Service had paid little heed to its own scientists who warned that clearcut logging and roadbuilding would accelerate mass wasting and landslides. When environmental disclosure documents fabricated erosion calculations, we sued and won a court injunction stopping timber sales on the Mapleton Ranger District. Throughout the lawsuit and its aftermath, I made it a point to stay in constant contact with Senator Hatfield natural resources staff. Sure enough, the Senator used his Appropriations Committee chairmanship to attach a rider that allowed buy-back timber sales (sales returned to the government due to purchaser speculative bidding) to go forward, notwithstanding the court’s order. It was a measured legislative response (we had not sought to stop these sales in the first instance) to the beginnings of an inexorable reformation in Coast Range logging practices.

A couple years later, Hatfield presided over a fractured Oregon delegation as it passed the 1984 Oregon Wilderness Bill. His office vetted every roadless area included in the bill, which, among other things, gave Siuslaw coastal rainforests their first (and, so far, only) wilderness protection.

Although Hatfield did not have any great interest in forest or environmental policy — his scope was much broader — his last act as a legislator was the protection of Opal Creek’s ancient forests.

In today’s era when many elected officials seem less leaders than supplicants, Hatfield stood tall as a true Oregon statesman.

This week, in a 3-0 opinion, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Forest Service’s use of a deer habitat suitability model was “arbitrary and capricious” because key numbers in the model were altered without any rational explanation. The case is a special testimonial to the persistence of Greenpeace’s Larry Edwards, a Sitka resident, the advocacy skills of co-plaintiff Cascadia Wildlands Project (one of my favorite grassroots outfits for its combination of smarts and passion) and their legal counsel’s (Chris Winter of Crag Law Center), talents.

It is the back story that it is especially poignant to me.

The story begins six years ago, when Tongass wildlife biologist Glen Ith emailed me aerial photographs taken by an Alaska Department of Fish and Game employee. The photos showed on-going logging road construction appearing to access the Overlook project. Overlook was an old-growth forest timber sale that is prime winter range habitat for Sitka black tail deer. What caught Glen’s eye was that the Forest Service had not yet completed the Overlook NEPA analysis, but had already started building the roads. Turns out that there were several million dollars that Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) had earmarked for Tongass road work; money that if not spent by fiscal year’s end would be lost to the Forest Service, and incur Stevens’ displeasure. Overlook’s NEPA documents were behind schedule, but that didn’t stop the road engineers from moving forward. [NB: The conspiracy to spend the money was broader than the engineers alone, including district and forest-level planning staff, line officers, and contracting officials.]

Glen and FSEEE filed suit, challenging the Overlook and Traitors Cove (another site of illegal “advance” work) road building. It was the first-ever environmental lawsuit by a Forest Service employee. We won. The Forest Service retaliated, suspended Glen from work, and eliminated his job. Several days thereafter, Glen passed away from sudden heart failure.

Early on in our roads litigation, Glen told me that the Tongass was using irrational numbers in its deer habitat capability model. He wanted to cure the errors. We agreed the on-going roads case wasn’t the place to do so, primarily because the issue was not ripe as the timber sale environmental reviews were not complete. Glen said he would try to work internally to fix the modeling problem, but he wasn’t confident he would be successful. He believed the errors were intentionally designed to allow the Forest Service to defend logging high-value old-growth forest habitat.

Glen assiduously documented the problems with the deer habitat model; documents that Greenpeace’s Larry Edwards later found in the administrative records. Glen also administratively appealed the Scott Peak sale on these grounds.

Larry Edwards dedicated this week’s court victory to Glen’s memory.

June 27th is the deadline for commenting on the Forest Service’s draft fire retardant EIS.

FSEEE’s comments can be read here. The associated spreadsheet collects together national forest-level data over an 11-year period on initial attack success rates, numbers of fires by size class, and retardant use. These data are the basis for FSEEE’s statistical analysis of retardant effectiveness.

Here is our take-home message:

“The fact of the matter is that each and every year the Forest Service drops millions of gallons of a toxic chemical slurry, predictably killing about a half-dozen air personnel while jeopardizing dozens of protected plant and animal species, all for a program that could best be characterized as faith-based firefighting. The Forest Service can and should do better.”

President Obama has committed his administration “to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government” and “a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.”  Since transparency, participation and collaboration depend upon communication, it is strange that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s on-line organizational directory is “temporarily unavailable,” and has been for some time.

The organizational directory lists telephone and FAX numbers for all USDA offices, including those of the Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service.  No directory means it takes a phone call to Undersecretary Harris Sherman’s office to get his FAX number – you would also have to know his name to make that phone call.

FSEEE seeks to save you that trouble and the toll charges associated with it.  Without further ado, here is Undersecretary of Agriculture Harris Sherman’s FAX number:

(202) 720-0632 (FAX)

And, if you want to talk with Mr. Sherman, you can call him at

(202) 720-7173

We look forward to the restoration of the USDA’s organizational directory, which will happen as soon as this blog post is brought to Mr. Sherman’s attention.

P.S.  During the first Bush presidency, the Forest Service deleted its own organizational directory from the web due to “national security” concerns.  FSEEE, however, happened to have downloaded the directory’s files several months earlier.  As a public service, we posted the entire directory on our own website.  A couple months thereafter, a Republican staffer on the Senate Natural Resources and Environment Committee complained to the Forest Service that he had to go to FSEEE’s website to get agency phone numbers.  The directory was restored the next day.

A 46-page 2nd “errata” sheet accompanies the Forest Service’s FY 2011 budget. All but one of the corrections are of no particular consequence.

The eye-popper is almost at the end (where else?). The Forest Service proposes to increase stewardship contracting targets by six to eight-fold compared to previous years. Timber volume from stewardship contracts will increase from 413 mmbf (2010 target) to 2 billion b.f. Biomass energy fuel will increase from 376,000 to 2.6 million tons. “Acres of wildlife habitat improved” (I’ve never understood what that means) go from 8,630 to 100,000 and noxious weed-treated acres (I’ve got a better handle on that notion) sky-rocket from 1,292 to 180,000.

Somehow these Herculean feats will be pulled off by reducing stewardship contracting spending from $6.5 to $6.0 million. And with zero employees, too (huh?).

So I thought, “Maybe the errata sheet itself is one big typo?” I called the Washington Office. The helpful lady said that these numbers reflect the Chief’s commitment to the stewardship contracting program. When I pressed her on how the FY 2011 numbers compared to previous years, she said “someone from upstairs will have to get back to you tomorrow.” No one did.

Alternate Title: “What happens if a pillar falls in the woods and no one hears it . . . “

Former Chief Dale Bosworth had his Four Threats: fire and fuels, invasive species, loss of open space, and unmanaged recreation. Current (but for how long?) Chief Tidwell’s signature initiative was to be his “Four Pillars”: Restore and Sustain Landscapes, Protect and Enhance Water Resources, Jobs and Sustainable Communities, and Climate Change Resiliency.

But Tidwell’s pillars have fallen before construction even began because he wasn’t paying attention to one minor detail. His boss, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack, already had “Four Pillars” — renewable energy, broadband internet access, responding to climate change and harnessing local food production.

Your Forest Service leadership hard at work.

Forest Service Chief Tidwell responded this week to the agency’s “morale focus groups,” which convened in response to the Forest Service’s basement-dwelling rankings as a good federal agency workplace. In the survey, employees ranked Forest Service leadership 217th out of 223 federal agencies. Tidwell’s response? He appointed a new director for the Office of Communications “tasked to work on the effectiveness of our internal communication,” among other actions that also include a “major commitment to improving safety.” Tidwell thinks the troops have low morale because they just aren’t getting his messages and working unsafely to boot.

The good news this week is that Associate Chief Hank Kashdan is retiring. Kashdan played a key role in centralizing the Forest Service personnel functions in a new Albuquerque Service (sic) Center. This supposed cost-savings measure, for which there is no evidence of saved dollars, fouled-up hiring, payroll, travel, and other day-to-day chores that should be seamless in any well-run organization. Kashdan’s departure is a welcome start, but the exodus shouldn’t stop with him. That low-leadership ranking was also well-earned by Chief Financial Officer Donna Carmical who retaliated against Forest Service auditor Jeffrey Park after he blew the whistle on former CFO Jesse King’s travel embezzlement scheme. Former Chief Gail Kimbell earned the first-ever directed reassignment for a Chief when she recommended King for a performance raise even while he was being investigated for his malfeasance.

The housecleaning should also sweep up Chief of Staff Tim DeCoster who “reviewed and approved” Jesse King’s fraudulent travel vouchers. In addition to looking the other way as King fleeced the government, DeCoster’s position as Chief of Staff makes him the top day-to-day agency manager; a position he has held throughout the Forest Service’s steep descent to the bottom of the government’s morale rankings.

This better-off-without list wouldn’t be complete without the head guy himself, Tom Tidwell. Tidwell’s biggest failing is that he hasn’t done the housecleaning at the top that is needed to restore leadership as something other than perks for the top dogs. Tidwell’s resignation would be the biggest boost to agency morale he has to offer.

Attachments:

Tidwell Morale Memo

[memo to FS on morale]

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