Redwood Reader

92. New Plans for National Parks and National Forests
Forest ecologists have not caught up with government sustainable agriculture scientists or the discovery of glomalin in 1996 by USDA SAR Lab in Beltsville. Glomalin is a glycoprotein manufactured by fungi in soils that conditions soil to absorb precipitation and store water in the root zone of vegetation. It is tough and durable. It is accelerated by increased atmospheric CO2. Without this storage mechanism, most precipitation is lost as runoff in events, the net result being increasingly earlier low flows and dry streams. This in turn has all kinds of bad implications for natural aquatic and terrestial systems.
Glomalin management allows us to restore function to watersheds while maintaining a profitable landscape. Ignorance of it has been catastrophic, yet acknowledgement only suggests prescriptions that are actually much less restrictive than todays standards, set by guess work because the science wasn't there. Glomalin management consists of preserving ground cover, canopy and reducing fire risk. Stands of well spaced large trees will provide the year round flows critical to fish. Management would include continuous select cuts, in contrast to the concentrated clear cuts demanded by costs and machinery. However, there is little need for set asides or preservation with a sustainable model that concentrates on natural systems first.The need to bring forests into order will demand large amounts of TSI initially.
Glomalin has revolutionized farming by allowing no-till methods that preserve soil and sequester carbon. Little has been done in forestry although Matthias Rillig ant U of Montana, and Dr. Leslie Reid at Redwood Sciences Lab in Arcata have taken an interest. Fuel reduction projects look the same as glomalin management. Decreasing stream flows in areas seeing little or no development are a result of impacted soil water storage mechanisms. These are readily fixed with understanding. Doing nothing will improve the glomalin situation but result in uncontrolled growth and greatly increased fire danger. Fuel reduction also lessens the amount of water lost in transpiration and growth processes. Salmon, streams, sediment, slides, trees, roots, fungi, CO2, glomalin: a progression of study.
The two articles below show the extremes of the issue. The first one covers fire plans and the second relaxation of regulations and elimination of public comment process for National Forest logging plans.

Park lays out 5-year fire plan
By John Driscoll The Times-Standard
Tuesday, January 04, 2005 -
Redwood National and State Parks has ruled out a let-it-burn policy for natural fires but will continue using prescribed fire and mechanical treatment to improve ecological and cultural conditions and buffer the land from severe blazes.
The five-year plan is outlined in a recently released document that the National Park Service is now taking comments on. There are few significant changes to its current fire plan, said Rick Young, fire management officer for the parks. Among the shifts will be burning three coastal prairies used by Roosevelt elk, grasslands that are being squeezed by encroaching trees. All three areas are to the west of U.S. Highway 101 and once were prime elk grazing lands, Young said. The three prairies will be added to the slate of other grasslands the park has been burning for years to maintain cultural resources for area tribes. The park also is looking to burn in the Little Bald Hills in Del Norte County, in part to improve habitat for a rare butterfly that doesn’t do well in dense, older undergrowth, Young said.
The park also has two priority areas for mechanically altering its forests to make them less prone to major wildfires. The first is a shaded fuel break outside Berry Glen, when dense, young forest will be thinned to give firefighters a chance to fight a blaze that could come up from Elk Prairie Campground. The other is a massive project that will be done in stages. The park is looking to create a shaded fuel break from near the Elk Camp California Department of Forestry station out Holter Ridge along the park boundary to U.S. Highway 101. That’s 17 miles of fuel break that would help firefighters mount a defense on a park fire that could spill over into adjacent timberland.
The park will not explore using naturally caused fires as an agent of change in the park, Young said. The park’s 109,000 acres—which border prime timberland—were determined to be not large enough for such a program, he said.
The park is taking comments on the plan until Feb. 5. Copies of the plan may be requested by calling Rick Young at (707) 464-6101, Ext. 5290. They can also be picked up at the park’s Crescent City and Orick offices, at the Humboldt, Del Norte county libraries and the Humboldt State University Library.
Comments should be submitted to: Superintendents, Redwood National and State Park, attention: Fire Management Plan, 1111 Second St., Crescent City, CA 95531 Fax: (707) 464-1812

Bush Official to Probe Sierra Logging Rules
Environmentalists fear the review could lead to revisions that would weaken protections on national forest land in the mountain range.
By Bettina Boxall
Times Staff Writer
LA Times
December 30, 2004
A Bush administration official has decided to review a new plan that increases logging levels in the Sierra Nevada, adding another twist to a decade-long fight over the future of national forest land in California’s most famous mountain range.
The review by Agriculture Undersecretary Mark E. Rey opens the possibility of further revisions to a plan that has been criticized by the timber industry for not allowing enough logging and by environmentalists for allowing too much.
”The undersecretary didn’t give me any reasons for doing a review other than to say he was doing it,” said Dan Jiron, national press officer for the U.S. Forest Service.
Jiron said Rey has reviewed other forest plans in the past, typically making only minor changes.
”Would he rewrite the decision entirely? The answer is no,” Jiron said.
But Rey could send the plan back to California for extensive modifications.
The plan Rey has chosen to review is itself a revision of a wide-ranging set of protections adopted for the Sierra’s 11.5 million acres of national forest land during the Clinton administration.
Those guidelines deemphasized commercial timber harvesting, set aside 4 million acres of old-growth reserves where only small trees could be cut, and relied heavily on controlled burning to reduce the risk of wildfire.
After Bush took office, his administration moved to weaken the Clinton rules, saying they were too restrictive and didn’t do enough to thin dense growth that can fuel forest fires.
Early this year, Regional Forester Jack Blackwell amended the Clinton plan to allow for more logging of larger trees, effectively eliminating the old-growth reserves and loosening habitat protections for rare species such as the California spotted owl and the Pacific fisher.
Blackwell’s decision, appealed by both timber interests and environmentalists, was upheld in November by Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, informed officials Tuesday that he was reviewing Bosworth’s action.
In the background is a lawsuit filed by the timber industry — and the promise of more lawsuits to come from environmentalists and the California attorney general’s office.
The California Forestry Assn., a timber industry group, sued the Forest Service earlier this month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, contending that the latest Sierra plan still contained too many logging restrictions and thus undermined one of the primary purposes for which national forests were created — to provide timber.
Environmentalists and the attorney general’s office, on the other hand, have criticized the Forest Service for weakening wildlife and old-growth protections.
”There will be a challenge coming from a variety of parties, including the attorney general and environmental groups,” said Craig Thomas, executive director of the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign.
Thomas said that in light of the timber lawsuit, Rey’s review could be “an attempt by the Bush administration to give the industry what they want, which is a settlement that remands [the plan] back for increased logging in the Sierra Nevada.”
The administration has elsewhere cited industry lawsuits in dropping environmental protections.
Earlier this year, for instance, it eased restrictions on logging old growth in the Pacific Northwest and parts of Northern California after settling a timber industry suit challenging the regulations.
Jiron said he was not aware of any settlement talks in the Sierra case. California Forestry Assn. officials could not be reached for comment.
Efforts to overhaul management of the Sierra’s 11 national forests began in the early 1990s with concern over decline of the California spotted owl and loss of the old-growth habitat it favors. Years of scientific and Forest Service reviews produced the Clinton regulations, which signaled a major shift toward ecosystem and wildlife protection and away from commercial timber production.
The Bush administration’s move to weaken the Clinton rules was criticized by Democrats as well as by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was running for governor.
Candidate Schwarzenegger called the Clinton plan “a model of forest ecosystem resource protection” and vowed that “as governor, I will direct all relevant agencies to comply fully with [it] and call on the federal government to abide by the policies.”
But since his election, Schwarzenegger has not taken any action to defend the Clinton rules.
Regional Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes said his agency has received no letters or formal comments from the Schwarzenegger administration on the matter.