An earlier post repeated an often voiced notion: I suspect that if the biomass removed for fire management was pyrolyzed and used as a soil amendment that carbon sequestration would rise rather than fall as when used for fuel. This has long seemed to me to be an emerging best practice. . . Forest cleanup and management also seems like it would be a boon to local communities that have suffered from reduced production of forest products. For example: With the support of $4.25 million in federal economic stimulus money, they expect to create at least 40 jobs and put the county at the forefront not only of new energy technology, but an emerging field of soil science focused on charcoal-like biochar. Borgford said total investment could reach $19 million, much of that provided by his family. . . The Kulzer project will start with site preparation for a community center/Borgford office site, but the real centerpieces will be...

There's a reason for recent posts about forests and fire . . . it's fire season. We've already had one local fire, a typical tourist fire as the urban camper Jims flock to the mountains and set them ablaze. A section of the flume that brings water to town down below was destroyed. The same thing happened the summer before last. I watched the fire and suppression efforts from my front deck, though it was on the other side of the river and no real threat to me. I can still smell it in the morning when the air is heavy and moist with dew. Forests are more vulnerable to fire for several reasons - past suppression efforts that prevented natural fire from maintaining tidy forest floors, drought, encroachment by homes, tourist and insect plagues. Management plans are controversial, most recently due to concerns about carbon sequestration. Widely sought efforts to reduce fuels that increase catastrophic fire in Pacific...

I've been following the mountain pine beetle issue for years trying to winnow the hysteria and political posturing from the ecological insights. It seemed that the current plague of beetles was an entirely natural occurence made worse by decades of fire suppression and warming climate. (see Smokey Terror and Denim Pine). Realism makes a rare appearance. Some environmentalists and scientists support the beetles. While they acknowledge the severity of the problems the beetles are causing, they argue that the insects, which kill only mature trees larger than five inches in diameter, are a natural phenomenon, like forest fires, and play a vital ecological role. “It’s not the end of the forests, and they are not destroyed,” said Diana L. Six, a professor of forest entomology and pathology at the University of Montana here, who has studied the beetle for 16 years, as she walked in a beetle-infected forest near here recently . “Lodge pole pine evolved to go out...

Unsurprisingly, entrepreneurs in developing countries quickly enter markets for biological materials desired by developed country customers. Conservationists have been lamenting the conversion of ag land and newly cultivated land for biofuel production, and it now seems that something similar is happening for biochar. The forests of Indonesia are being cut and chared for use by fashion forward agriculturalists and climate warriors. Perhaps this is an improvement? The forests are being cut anyway to clear land for cropping, but the wood is simply being burned to dispose of it. The atmosphere would be improved if that wood was turned into char rather than CO2, and developing countries can use the extra income. It would be better if they dosed their own land with the char rather than exporting it, but they need or at least want the cash. I'd welcome a clear headed analysis of the situation by some competent scholars that quantified these trends and proposed advantageous, realistic behaviors....

Few people read this blog except by accident of googling. That makes sense to me. I'm not complaining. A significant percentage of the traffic hits a few old posts. They aren't remarkable in any way, they just have topics that are of interest to some but apparently are not often written about, so that my old pages float to the top. The one about muck fires in Florida and Indonesia is a good example. Another old post that gets lots of traffic but not from Google deals with a subject of enduring interest. The gist of the difference between US management of public lands and Canadian management is that the Canadian national government makes no attempt to actually do the management. That makes sense since 70% of their massive forest lands are owned by the government, a legacy of colonialism when it was all the King's forest, or the Queen's, and are still often called "Crown Lands". Instead they...

There's a lot of confusion about nitrogen. Increasing levels of nitrogen deposition associated with industry and agriculture can drive soils toward a toxic level of acidification, reducing plant growth and polluting surface waters, according to a new study published online in Nature Geoscience. The study, conducted in the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia by the University of Colorado, University of Montana, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Geological Survey, shows what can happen when nitrogen deposition in any part of the world increases to certain levels – levels similar to those projected to occur in parts of Europe by 2050, according to some global change models. On the basis of these results, the authors warn that the high levels of nitrogen deposited in Europe and North America over the past half century already may have left many soils susceptible to this new stage of acidification. The results of this further acidification, wrote the authors, are highly reduced soil fertility...

What's bad is good, and the reverse. Reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from less burning coal and increased sea surface temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic, are causing a heightened risk of drought in the Amazon rainforest. . . Sulphate aerosol particles arising from the burning of coal in power stations in the 1970s and 1980s have partially reduced global warming by reflecting sunlight and making clouds brighter. This pollution has been predominantly in the northern hemisphere and has acted to limit warming in the tropical north Atlantic, keeping the Amazon wetter than it would otherwise be. Chris Huntingford of CEH, another of the co-authors, explains: “Reduced sulphur emissions in North America and Europe will see tropical rain-bands move northwards as the north Atlantic warms, resulting in a sharp increase in the risk of Amazonian drought”. No win, no draw, no escape. . . unless, you know, the engineers have a go. A poetic fantasy would be for Amazonians to...

Emphasizing the ideas voiced in Part Duh that the notion of subsidizing "avoided deforestation" was a stupid idea. Beetle Mania. natural events can upset a forest’s carbon calculus. Big fires, for instance, spew plenty of CO2 into the atmosphere, and the dead trees that remain eventually decompose by microbial action, releasing more of the gas. By killing trees by the thousands, widespread insect infestations can do the same thing. But rarely have insect blights been considered when determining a forest’s carbon balance. Now Werner A. Kurz of Natural Resources Canada and colleagues have calculated the impact of an infestation of mountain pine beetles on pine forests in British Columbia. The effect, they report in Nature, is startling: the forests are now a large carbon source, and will remain so at least until 2020, long after the infestation peaks. At more than 32 million acres and counting, the pine beetle blight is at least an order of magnitude larger than...

Here's an interesting item for those who have been duped by the green machine and climate hysteria: The Big Green Fire Machine is Hungry. Last week Dan Berman noted that the Forest Service is in line to receive over a Billion Dollars a year from sale of carbon credits . . . The bill could mean $1.1 billion per year for Forest Service and Interior Department firefighting costs between 2012 and 2050, relieving the annual strain on agency budgets. . . Some argue that this will spell relief for budget taps the Big Green Fire Machine, or the Fire-Military-Industrial-Complex as Wildfire called it, has on agency budgets. But in another way "free money" will add more incentives for extant fire fighting procedures to become even more entrenched, therefore resistant to change. Every issue that gets politicized is twisted to serve the agenda of politicians and their bankers. The rhetoric may be about the common good but the reality is...

There's been a lot of angst about deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Various dark siders have picked out one culprit or another to blame, but the issue is larger and more structural. That may change. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to create Brazil’s first coherent, effective forest policy, is to begin auctioning off timber rights to large tracts of the rain forest. The winning bidders will not have title to the land or the right to exploit resources other than timber, and the government says they will be closely monitored and will pay a royalty on their activities. . . On paper and in principle, said Stephan Schwartzman, an Amazon specialist at Environmental Defense in Washington, “I think everyone agrees that this system is an improvement over the current situation, which is totally out of control.” But in the end, he added, “everything is going to depend on how it is done...

See this PERC essay by Alison Berry about forest management. Federally owned forests in the United States are experiencing ecological and financial problems. Concern about the state of the nation’s public forests has inspired a search for different approaches to the management of logging and other forest-related activities. Th is search has led to Canada, where public forests are managed in ways that are strikingly different from those in the United States. In this essay, “Branching Out: Case Studies in Canadian Forest Management,” Alison Berry presents four case studies from Canada that illustrate the benefits of long-term leases and licenses (oft en called tenures) and decentralized control. The gist of the difference between US management of public lands and Canadian management is that the Canadian national government makes no attempt to actually do the management. That makes sense since 70% of their massive forest lands are owned by the government, a legacy of colonialism when it was all the...

The tragedy of politicized environmentalism is that the politics is more important than the environmentalism. When push comes to shove, as it always does in politics, politicized environmentalists will sacrifice the environment to gain power. The past few decades of this sort of behavior has repeatedly harmed the environment as well as alienating a large portion of the public. Western forest environments are an instructive example of the problem and this Salon article is an example of the way politics displaces environmental thinking precluding sensible policy. The town of Hayfork, which sits in the middle of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest 200 miles north of San Francisco, is similar to thousands of other rural communities in the West that have faced economic crisis over the past decade. Like all other communities situated next to the forest, Hayfork also faces the threat of wildfire every summer and fall. But, paradoxically, fire and a planned shift to forest-restoration-based jobs sparked a ray...

Pseudo - a person who makes deceitful pretenses. This article, an example of the histrionics pointed out elsewhere regarding the reversal of a Clinton Administration restriction on road building on federal lands, demonstrates the deceitfulness of a destructive segment of the environmental community. The roadless rule, implemented in the final month of the Clinton administration, protects the last remaining untouched wilderness in the American national-forest system -- roughly 60 million of the 190 million acres of national forest -- from mining, drilling, and development. But it doesn't protect the forests from fire - a far, far more dire and immanent threat. The concept of "untouched wilderness" is a simple minded social construction that is both historically and ecologically deluded. This isn't an innocent or harmless quirk of an indifferently educated though vocal political group. It is an intentional deceit for political gain by groups willing to destroy the forests to gain power. They are politicians posing as environmentalists, pseudo-environmentalists....

One of the weird behaviors of climate change hysterics and PR flacks is to abstract every tiny bit of information that could be remotely construed as support for their obsessions from otherwise unconnected reports.

We may hear these coastal scrublands referred to as forests but the dominant vegetation in these areas is low growing desert shrubs. Such lands are better described as chaparral than forests.

When you cross from state forest to federal forest the boundary is obvious since you leave healthy forest and enter a realm of sickness and overpopulation devoid of wildlife except for insects.