ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL BLOGS

DRAMATIC FIGHT BREWS BETWEEN HOMEOWNERS AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS AS RESULT OF LAKE TAHOE FIRE DESTRUCTION

     The Los Angeles Times today explores the latest wrinkle in the classic debate over whether the environment is here to serve us or the other way 'round.  In this regard, the Times reports (under the headline "Crowd aims fury at regional panel"):

The mood of the crowd jammed into the meeting room was angry.

Many had lost their homes to the forest fire that swept through the Sierra Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe.

They said they were angry at bureaucrats and environmentalists who made cutting of trees and clearing of land difficult. There was always too much red tape, they said, and now it was too late.

In all, a crowd of nearly 2,000 people descended on the South Tahoe Middle School auditorium Monday night, wanting to be heard in the face of their losses.

And if there was an object of scorn in the crowd, it was the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a powerful bi-state environmental land use agency charged with managing the resources of the basin.

When a speaker mentioned the agency, the crowd responded with a chorus of boos. "What a joke!" yelled one man.

The wrangling began in earnest over the assignment of blame, including arguments over whether federal and state forest managers had made their tree clearing rules too strict in the face of pressure by environmentalists.

A common sentiment Monday was expressed by Jerry Martin, a bartender at the Horizon Casino Resort, whose house was still standing, although eight others around it had burned to the ground. He said U.S. Forest Service rules regulating the harvesting of dead trees were too stringent for those living next to government land.

"I hate to get political, but environmentalists wouldn't let us cut down the dead trees," he said.

     The complete article, which is found at the link above, makes plain that the government does not agree with the above-quoted criticisms.  For example, a spokeswoman for the local Regional Water Quality Control Board states that the homeowners in fact could, without a special permit, have cut down dead trees on their property as a fire-protection measure.

     No doubt further debate and investigation of this particular disaster will follow. But for the moment, the key observation is this:  the destructive fire and the Times' story illustrates once again the tension between those who believe the environment should be treated in the way that best benefits humans and those who believe that we are mere guests (some have gone further, saying we are parasites) of nature.

THERE'S A FUNGUS AMONG US

     From The Oregonian, today:

Question: What does the world's largest living organism do all day? Answer: Pretty much whatever it wants. But very slowly.

The U.S. Forest Service has adopted an informal live-and-let-live policy for the enormous tree killer it calls the "humongous fungus."

The huge root-rot infestation underlies 2,200 acres east of Prairie City in a remote corner of eastern Oregon's Blue Mountains at an elevation of about 6,500 feet near the Strawberry Mountain and Monument Rock wilderness areas.

***

Its sheer mass -- it's roughly the size of 1,600 football fields -- makes Herman Melville's fictional white whale Moby Dick seem like a tadpole. And it could get bigger.

In terms of age, Armillaria is a fungiform Methuselah. Researchers say it may have been 100 years old when Alexander the Great conquered the known world in 330 B.C. And some estimates suggest it could be 8,000 years old, said Forest Service researcher Catherine Parks, who has spent 10 years studying it.

     Holy Moley, Batman!

EARTH'S FORESTS PROVE THE DOOMSAYERS WRONG YET AGAIN

     Today's The Scotsman reports:

FEARS of a "skinhead" Earth devoid of any trees appear to be unfounded, according to new research which shows forests making a comeback in China and India.

An international team of scientists, including Aberdeen University academic Professor Alexander Mather, found that 22 out of the world's 50 most forested countries were now increasing the amount of woodland and predicted that a "great restoration of the landscape" could begin by 2050.

While global forests are still in decline, China, Vietnam and Spain have seen significant net increases from 1990 to 2005 and India's forests are now stable.

     But how can this be?  Almost all we ever hear is that we-- humans, particularly capitalist indsutrialized humans-- are destroying the ozone layer, the oceans, the mountains and, yes, the forests.  And yet here we have a report that the most rapidly industrializing country on earth-China- has seen a "signficant net increase.." in its forests.

     History teaches us that, as far back as Copernicus, the wisdom of every era is subject to challenge when future generations look back.  Thirty-some years ago, a Saudi Arabian official predicted that the world would run out of oil by the turn of the century.  No doubt readers can recall other dire predictions about the end of the food supply as the world's population increased beyond manageable proportions.  These prophets of doom turned out to be wrong. 

     If the forests are any indciation, the prophets of doom are wrong yet again.

TWO PENDING BILLS IN CONGRESS RE CALIFORNIA WILDERNESS

     From the AP, as reported today in The Press-Enterprise [Inland Empire], the House Resources Committee forest subcommittee is holding hearings on these two bills:

...the Giant Sequoia National Monument Transition Act of 2006 [authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare], has two components:

_It would allow completion of logging projects on 2,413 acres in the 327,769-acre Giant Sequoia National Monument. These projects were under contract with Sierra Forest Products when the monument was designated in 2000, but the company set them aside for several years. ...

_The bill also would speed a forest-thinning and restoration project called the Kings River Research Project covering more than 130,000 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada.

The committee also heard testimony on a second California environmental bill that has more widespread support. The "Eastern Sierra Rural Heritage and Economic Enhancement Act" by Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, would protect 40,000 acres of wilderness area in Mono County and designate 26 miles of the Amargosa River in Inyo County as wild and scenic river. It also would create an 11,000 acre snowmobile recreation area near the Sonora Pass.

UN: DEFORESTATION DOESN'T TRIGGER FLOODS

Reuters reports:

Deforestation is often wrongly blamed for causing floods, like in Guatemala this month, under a myth that has skewed agricultural policies, an international report said on Thursday.

"There is no scientific evidence linking large-scale flooding to deforestation," the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) said in a report.

The frequency of major floods in the past 120 years, back to the late 19th century when forests were far more abundant, has been stable worldwide, it said. That implied that deforestation was not a cause of flooding.

It said devastation from Hurricane Stan in central America this month had been widely and wrongly blamed on excessive runoff caused by deforestation. The same was said about recent floods in China, Thailand and Vietnam.

***

And floods are a part of a natural cycle, helping maintain fertility on flood plains. In some parts of the world, crops like rice and jute depend on seasonal flooding.

The report said a surge in the human death toll and mounting economic losses from floods in recent years was largely because more people lived in flood plains.

"As a result, many floods that previously would have been only minor events now become major disasters," the report said.

CO2-THE FORESTS' FRIEND(?)

      On March 31, 2005, I posted a reference to the fact that forests are actually increasing in the good ol' USA (see "FORESTS" under categories on the right-hand side of this page).  Now, from studies around the world, comes word that at least some forests' increases may be attributed to -- guess what-- increased CO2!

     In an article on CO2Science [subscription required-$12.95/year] bearing today's date and entitled "Continued Accelerated Growth of Amazonian Forests", the authors summarize various studies:

For most of the past century it was believed that old-growth forests, such as those of Amazonia, should be close to dynamic equilibrium.  Just the opposite, however, has been repeatedly observed over the past two decades.

***

...the growth rates of these already highly productive forests [forty tropical forests from all around the world]had been rising ever higher since at least 1960, and that they had experienced an apparent acceleration in growth rate sometime after 1980.

***

A few years later, Phillips et al. (1998) analyzed forest growth rate data for the period 1958 to 1996 for several hundred plots of mature tropical trees scattered around the world, finding that tropical forest biomass, as a whole, increased substantially over the period of record.  In fact, the increase in the Neotropics was equivalent to approximately 40% of the missing terrestrial carbon sink of the entire globe.

***

At the end of the day, it thus appears that a large body of scientists ... agrees that a wealth of scientific data confirms the reality of the ever-increasing productivity of earth's tropical forests, especially those of Amazonia; and they tend to agree that the concomitant rise in the air's CO2 content has had much to do with this phenomenon.

     The article explains that the Earth appears to have a self-compensating mechanism regarding climate change:

...[the increase in] tropical forests "may be helping to buffer the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2, thereby reducing the impacts of global climate change."  And, again, they identified the aerial fertilization effect of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content as one of the primary factors likely to be responsible for this phenomenon.

     To a scientific layperson such as myself, it is hard to reconcile the above studies with the popular press' almost insatiable appetite for warning that the tropical forests are on the verge of disappearing.  However, to a legal and policy wonk such as myself the CO2Science article reinforces the belief that we know far less than we sometimes think we know about the Earth's ability to take care of the environment on its own or, if the planet needs help, exactly what measures to "help" are necessary/wise.

FORESTS

At Townhall.com, columnist Jonah Goldberg writes:

forests are breaking out all over America. New England has more forests since the Civil War. In 1880, New York State was only 25 percent forested. Today it is more than 66 percent. In 1850, Vermont was only 35 percent forested. Now it's 76 percent forested and rising. In the South, more land is covered by forest than at any time in the last century. In 1936 a study found that 80 percent of piedmont Georgia was without trees. Today nearly 70 percent of the state is forested. In the last decade alone, America has added more than 10 million acres of forestland. ...

America's environmental revival is a rich and complicated story with many specific exceptions, caveats and, of course, setbacks. But the overarching theme is pretty simple: The richer you get, the healthier your environment gets. This is because rich societies can afford to indulge their environmental interests and movements. Poor countries cannot.

The full Goldberg column can be found here.