Daily Archives: October 9, 2018

The Northern Arizona Forest Fund took the top honor at the Arizona Forward Environmental Excellence Awards presented by Salt River Project. Judges also named the Arizona Pure Water Brew Challenge as winner of the Governor’s Award for Arizona’s Future, and two new categories – Sustainability Champion and Waste Reduction – made their debuts. Northern Arizona national forests provide the majority of water to the Salt and Verde rivers and eventually into the homes of millions of Phoenix-area residents. …A press release stated, “The Northern Arizona Forest Fund was created to address declining forest health conditions. To date, the Northern Arizona Forest Fund has completed over 10,000 acres of projects, reducing severe fire risk by about 25 percent.” The Arizona Pure Water Brew Challenge overturned a long-standing legal prohibition against potable water reuse. It also used craft beer to educate the public about the benefits of the “toilet to tap” revolution, the release stated.

The Mail Tribune’s front page Sept. 30 asked, “What is being done” for what was the worst air in the nation this summer in our valley. The repeated solution is more logging, thinning, prescribed burning and salvage logging. And then Sen. Ron Wyden asked for funding for residents to seek refuge from the smoke, saying “… we’re going to have clean air refugees and that’s just going to be a public health crisis.” However, prescribed burning is somehow still on the table. If prescribed burning becomes a method for “forest management,” the new normal will be smoke nine months out of the year. …As solutions are being sought to end the smoke, the oxymoron of prescribed burning is accepted as routine practice.

This is Part 2 of a five-day series on devastating wildfires and their effects on Southern Oregon. See Part 1 here. When a lightning storm started at least 145 fires on July 15 in Southern Oregon, firefighters weren’t just battling the blazes — they were trying to strike a balance between sharing critical resources and competing for the ground forces, air tankers and helicopters they all needed. During the first 48 hours after the lightning storm, firefighters snuffed out most of the fires during initial attack operations. But with so many fire starts on one day, some blazes escaped initial attack efforts and grew into large-scale wildfires that filled the summer sky with smoke. …The Oregon Department of Forestry’s goal is to suppress 98 percent of fires at 10 acres or less. That not only protects lives, homes and trees, it reduces firefighting costs.

It’s been a rough wildfire season for Utah. One of the hottest and driest summers on record turned the state into a tinderbox. …That means there’s a lot of talk about finding a way to prevent the fallout of big fires, with some policymakers zeroing in on logging as the solution. “I would begin with … reducing fuel load. That means thinning forests, being able to establish … contracts with sawmills and so forth. We’ve lost sawmills because they don’t have a reliable supply of timber,” said Mitt Romney at a late-August roundtable arranged by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop. …“We still have 22 timber-related industries in the state of Utah — mills and such,” said Dave Whittekiend, supervisor of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, during Bishop’s roundtable. “But we need more diverse wood fiber industries to take advantage of some of the material that’s out there.”

A group of people knowledgeable about wildland fire have produced a 52-page document that attempts to assemble and summarize areas of agreement and disagreement regarding the management of forested areas in the western United States. Calling themselves the Fire Research Consensus Working Group, they looked for areas of common ground to provide insights for scientists and land managers with respect to recent controversies over the role of low-, moderate-, and high-severity fires. …“Respondents disagreed about whether large, high-severity fires have increased to a significant and measurable degree in all forest types in comparison to historical fire regimes (i.e., prior to modern fire suppression). …“Opinions also vary over the consequences of any increases in fire severity. For most dry forests… there is broad agreement that under current and projected climate, post-fire forest resilience is less than in the past.

BOISE, Idaho — The U.S. Forest Service advanced changes to sage grouse protections in five Western states that environmental groups say are part of the Trump administration’s efforts favoring industry but that push the imperiled bird closer to extinction. The agency on Friday released draft plans altering rules, put in place in 2015 by the Obama administration, generally viewed as keeping the bird from being listed for federal protections under the Endangered Species Act. The new plans cover 8,000 square miles (21,000 square kilometers) of greater sage grouse habitat in Idaho, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah. John Shivik, the Forest Service’s national greater sage grouse coordinator, said the plans balance protections for sage grouse while improving efficiency and aligning federal and state efforts. He said the goal is to protect habitat while also meeting the agency’s mandate to make lands available for recreation, mining and livestock grazing.

WABASH, IND. – Activists opposed to the planned logging of a state forest in northern Indiana say it would harm one of the region’s largest remaining tracts of woodlands and allow invasive species to take hold. State officials say the logging of selected trees on about 120 acres (50 hectares) in the Salamonie River State Forest will clear dead and dying pines planted about 90 years ago for flood control, and allow old hardwoods more room to regenerate. The forest lies about 60 miles (100 kilometers) north of Indianapolis. The state Division of Forestry’s logging plans for parts of Huntington and Wabash counties was announced in 2014.