Restoration

The Other Green Jobs

bethanie — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:21:56 -0600

Five million new jobs… this mantra was repeated over and over at the Democratic convention. If elected, Barack Obama would invest $150 billion over 10 years in green jobs that would help the nation reduce its dependency on foreign oil. It’s a great idea, I’m all for it, but we can and should go even further.

As currently envisioned, the green jobs idea is urban-focused, providing only limited benefits to people in rural America. In addition, it is almost exclusively focused on energy-related jobs, for example, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, and developing alternative energy sources. These are critical, important things, but they aren’t the only green jobs out there on the horizon.

Americans can also invest in another type of green jobs – those that are created through natural areas restoration. In his position papers, Obama mentions restoration in the context of the Great Lakes, wetlands and even forests, but he doesn’t translate that to jobs, even though he should. To build an actual green economy, whoever is elected president has a unique opportunity to integrate urban/suburban revitalization with natural areas restoration.

The current Green Jobs Act has the revitalization part pretty-well laid out – create jobs programs for disadvantaged youth in the emerging market of energy efficiency – helping to retrofit homes and buildings to make them more energy efficient. The plan might include apprenticeships, trainings and other efforts to bring millions of new people into this effort to ensure that our country starts consuming less electricity. In addition, the current dialog around green jobs includes investing in the science, technology and implementation of new and enhanced renewable energy sources, and the jobs that go with that. All of this is critical if we are to combat the difficult challenges of global climate change and continue to compete on a world market.

Most of the benefit of the green jobs programs, as currently envisioned, will be felt in urban America. But rural America is equally, if not moreso, in need of green jobs. Throughout the rural west, communities and state government are beginning to invest in jobs in the woods, restoring forests, streams and watersheds to healthier, more dynamic, more resilient conditions. They’re doing this to protect and restore clean drinking water, wildlife and the associated hunting and fishing opportunities they provide, and opportunities for wildland recreation.

Green jobs advocates, including Obama, have an opportunity to knit together their outreach to rural and urban America by integrating the energy-efficiency revitalization program, with a natural areas restoration program. What type of work would be done in these rural areas? The national forests, for example, are in desperate need of an aggressive program of forest and watershed restoration. Mining reclamation is needed throughout the country, and desert and grassland restoration are also critical. We could recreate a Civilian Conservation Corps, but this time it could be the Civilian Restoration Corps.

The national forests provide one example of how to implement restoration on the ground. Approximately 3400 American communities get their clean drinking water from rivers and streams with their headwaters on the national forests. Past logging, mining and forest roads all threaten the integrity of those forests and their capacity to continue to provide clean drinking water to these communities without the need for a filtration plant. Dirt and gravel roads in the forests, in particular, cause some of the most lasting and significant damage to clean water resources. Every one million invested in road reclamation provides at least 15 direct high-wage, high-skill jobs in rural communities (Obama's green jobs proposal, for example, would create about 30 jobs per million spent, and restoration jobs would likely be relatively similar once you add in some multiplier effects). Similarly, for the roads that aren’t reclaimed, but that remain on the landscape, there is a need for critical maintenance and restoration of fish habitat connectivity (many roads have culverts that block fish from accessing their spawning or rearing habitat) – those culverts can be upgraded to restore fish passage.

Right now, the Forest Service has a $10 billion backlog for road reclamation, upgrades and critical maintenance. In 2008, the Forest Service received $40 million in new funding for the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative to start to restore watersheds by dealing with road impacts. The investment has already begun, but it must be sustained over the long-term.

How about $1 billion a year, of that $150 billion proposed, for the next ten years, to erase the road maintenance and decommissioning backlog, restore clean drinking water, reconnect fragmented fisheries and wildlife habitat and reinvest in rural economies. Investing that money will not only provide jobs, but it will also protect other resource- and amenities-based rural economies and environments from collapsing.

It's imperative that the United States invest in energy-based green jobs to slow climate change, but it's equally imperative that we invest in green jobs that put people to work restoring our natural areas, so they will be more resilient in the face of climate change. Our public lands provide clean water to millions of Americans, in addition to wildlife and aquatic habitat to threatened, endangered and sensitive species. They must be restored to the most resilient, adaptive conditions possible so that they can handle the unknown impacts of climate change. A comprehensive green jobs program, that recognizes both rural and urban needs, is a great opportunity to both delay and reduce the impacts of climate change.

Forest Society Continues Kennedy Flats Restoration

Franklin Seal — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:44:31 -0600

Gifford Pinchot Will Scrape to Keep Up With Costs

Franklin Seal — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:43:57 -0600

Removal of roads key to keeping Portland's water source clean

Franklin Seal — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:59:06 -0600

The Dangers of Playing with Fire

Franklin Seal — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:23:28 -0600

The Dangers of Playing with Fire

The Bush Administration played with fire last year when it cut the Forest Service’s 2008 fire-fighting budget from $1.6 billion to $1.2 billion. In early August, with nearly 2 hot, dry months still remaining in the agency’s fiscal year, the Forest Service had already overdrawn its fire account.

To deal with the problem, Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell announced that the agency would transfer $400 million from other programs to cover the shortfall. The consequences of this transfer are significant, and the impacts will be felt in many National Forest System and maintenance programs.

In the last ten years, fire suppression has gone from about 15% of the Forest Service’s budget to about 50%. The $1.2 billion they had budgeted for FY ’08 is already nearly half of the annual budget – making it extremely difficult for the Forest Service to manage anything but fire. Early this year, Congress provided supplemental fire fundingbut clearly it wasn’t enough.

Five primary factors put the agency in this position:

increased fire severity and frequency due to climate change (drought, increased insect infestations, etc.);
fuels build-up from past fire-suppression;
rapid and extensive development in the wildland urban interface – dramatically increasing the amount of private property at risk from wildfire; and
inability of Congress or the Administration to create a separate, viable and reasonable funding source for wildland fire fighting.
Contracting out firefighting responsibilities adding overhead costs previously not absorbed by the agency.

Fire has become more expensive to control because of these factors, and as a result the Forest Service has lost some of their capacity to use fire as a management tool. But fire is still a critical component of many functioning ecosystems, whether we’ve built houses in them or not, and the agency needs to find a way to keep this tool in its toolbox.

Fire isn’t the only management problem the agency is facing, but with constant budget shortfalls, and increasing firefighting costs, it is eating up the funding needed for other management problems. Roads for example, cause significant short and long-term impacts to forest ecosystems. More than half a million roads cut through national forests, bleeding sediments into drinking water supplies, fragmenting wildlife and aquatic habitat, spreading invasive pests and pathogens, and damaging fisheries.   Increasingly severe and frequent pacific storms cause tens of millions of dollars worth of damage nearly every year, much of that from massive road failures.

In 2007, Wildlands CPR and the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative worked with Congress, the Forest Service and others to promote a new funding mechanism for dealing with old, failing, expensive and ecologically-damaging forest roads.    This resulted in the 2007 Omnibus Appropriations bill including $39.4 million for the new Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative. The LRRI provided funding to every region of the Forest Service to fix ailing forest roads by upgrading culverts (to restore fish passage) or performing critical maintenance. It also provided long overdue and much needed funding for restoring watersheds by removing unneeded forest roads. But $40 million was just a drop in the bucket – the Forest Service has a road maintenance backlog of approximately $10 billion.

Now even this limited funding is in jeopardy. The LRRI funds are just one of numerous accounts being raided to cover the fire-fighting shortfall. Some regions estimate that the initial $400 million transfer will take approximately half of the LRRI funds allocated to their region. But many LRRI projects had matching funds, so the agency risks losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in matching funds from public and private partners.

The Forest Service cannot manage their lands effectively when forced to operate in this fashion. They cannot commit to restoration, mitigation or even planning projects when they don’t know if funding will be available for the duration of the year. They cannot commit to contractors, jeopardizing local jobs. They cannot commit to partners who bring matching funds to the table to do important work. Fire is not the only ecological or economic challenge the Forest Service is facing. If the agency doesn’t fix its crumbling road system, including reclaiming unneeded roads, we will end up with severely damaged fisheries, degraded drinking water, and the loss of access to public lands from road failures.

In previous years, Congress has paid the Forest Service back for money it had to borrow to fight fires but time is running out on this congress and it looks bleak for another supplemental appropriation to reimburse the Forest Service for this year’s fire transfers.    Earlier this year legislation was introduced in the House to create separate fire-fighting accounts, so the agency could have a reliable budget. The Federal Land Assistance, Management and Enhancement Act (FLAME Act) (H.R. 5541), though far from perfect, could ease the burden if it passed. So would zoning regulations to prevent more exurban growth; prescribed fire to reduce fuel loading; investment in community “fire-proofing” in the wildland urban interface; thinning in the interface; and numerous other approaches. Instead nearly all of the money is being poured into suppression.

The Forest Service has a lot more “fires” to put out than those that actually involve heat and flame. Unstable, under-maintained roads are like rotting foundations waiting to collapse when the next big storm comes through. Thousands of miles already have, and thousands more will. And the damage can be more costly than that caused by fires. If we can provide more than $1 billion/year for fire-fighting, then it seems we could also provide at least $500 million/year for the Legacy Roads Initiative to begin erasing the $10 billion road maintenance/management backlog. But without a rational mechanism to fund comprehensive fire management (including prescribed fire), and full funding for other resource management needs, the Forest Service might as well just change its name to the Fire Service.

BLM finalizes Cascade-Siskiyou management plan

Franklin Seal — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:09:21 -0600

Low-balling wildfire budget burns everyone in the end

Franklin Seal — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:55:57 -0600

Firefighting costs burn through Forest Service budget

Franklin Seal — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:01:29 -0600

Forest fire costs will sap Gifford Pinchot road funds

Franklin Seal — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:55:23 -0600

Partnering Opportunities: NGO's and Watershed Restoration

Greg Peters — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:33:51 -0600

The following links open the home page of conservation organziations who are engaged in watershed restoration and may prove to be a valuable partner for tribal restoration efforts. Many of these groups have partnered with tribes in the past and are dedicated to promoting healthy ecosystems.

Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative (Washington) -

http://www.wawatersheds.blogspot.com

Water Watch (Oregon) -

http://www.waterwatch.org

Oregon Wild (Oregon) -

http://www.oregonwild.org

Sustainable Northwest (Oregon/Northwest) -

http://www.sustainablenorthwest.org

Olympic Forest Council (Washington) -

http://www.olympicforest.org

Pacific Rivers Council (Washington/Northwest) -

http://www.pacrivers.org