Brian Nowicki Interview
| Hear interview excerpts: | Biographical data |
My name is Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt. And Jennifer Kern is present. Jennifer and I are doing an internship with Northern Arizona University, Cline Library, Special Collections and Archives Department. The subject is called Fire on the Plateau [July 2001]. I am with Brian Nowicki from the Southwest Forest Alliance.
Garcia Hunt: How are you doing this morning, Brian?
Nowicki: Doing good, thanks.
Garcia Hunt: Could you please tell us a little bit about the Southwest Forest Alliance?
Nowicki: Sure. The Southwest Forest Alliance is a coalition of sixty-five member groups, which are environmental and community groups throughout the Southwest, and the Southwest Forest Alliance works on primarily environmental issues in Arizona and New Mexico. It has currently three main campaigns: one is forest restoration, another is the wildland-urban interface—that is protection of communities from the threat of a forest fire—and the third is old-growth protection. And currently that third one, old-growth protection, is centered primarily on the North Kaibab, the Kaibab Plateau on the north side of the Grand Canyon, where there is probably the greatest amount of old-growth ponderosa pine forest left in the Southwest.
Besides those three campaigns, we are largely a watchdog group, or even within those three campaigns, we're largely a watchdog group that monitors and follows and provides input to agencies—that is, federal, state, agencies, such as the Groveland Management and the Forest Service—on how to implement projects and the various programs and projects that come up in the Southwest.
Currently we have three staff members at the Forest Alliance. That's Sharon Galbraith, the executive director. I'm the conservation biologist; I've been working there for a year. And in just the past couple of months we hired Jason Thivener, who is working on community outreach and member outreach. We're centered in Flagstaff, and have our member groups throughout the Southwest, so we travel a lot through Arizona and New Mexico. That's about it.
Garcia Hunt: Could you please also talk about yourself, your education, and what brought you to Flagstaff, and maybe where you were born?
Nowicki: Sure. I was born in the greater Chicago area, and went to school. (aside about mic) Went to school in Illinois, and did not leave Illinois until after I'd gotten my bachelor's. When I moved out to Flagstaff—four years ago now—to do a master's of science and forestry at Northern Arizona University School of Forestry, under Laura DeWald, I worked here on —Laura DeWald is the conservation biologist for the School of Forestry— and my particular project involved the sky islands of Arizona-New Mexico, and in particular the genetics of Douglas fir, and interaction with dwarf mistletoe in those sky island populations. I finished that up, actually, just recently. I've decided to stick around and have settled down in Flagstaff.
Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us about any changes in the organization?
Nowicki: Well, the organization, Forest Alliance is only, I think, eight years old now, and I've been there only for the past year. I can tell you what's happened in the past year, and that is that we have changed executive directors. Martos Hoffman has been the executive director for three years prior to that, to this past February, before Sharon Galbraith took over as executive director. Sharon Galbraith, along with the founders of the Center for Biodiversity, initially founded the Southwest Forest Alliance, because they felt there was a need for a presence—actually a physical presence—up here in northern Arizona.
As such, it was more of a cooperative effort, working on campaigns, I think, when it first started out. In the past year, it has certainly come to be that the Forest Alliance has, in some ways, taken the lead in Arizona-New Mexico on dealing with the fire issue, the wildland-urban interface issue, and the forest restoration issue, from the environmentalist side. We're very active in those areas, and I would say in some ways providing the first ideas and information to the member groups that we have, and the other groups that we work with throughout the two states.
Garcia Hunt: Could you please tell us about urban interface within the city of Flagstaff?
Nowicki: Sure. Well, before talking just about Flagstaff in particular, I'd like to mention that, or explain that our campaign for the wildland-urban interface is very much supportive of protection of communities from the threat of wildfire and forest fire. But the Forest Alliance very much supports the projects that are actually providing protection for communities that are up against forests and fire threats in the West. However, another part of our campaign, and a very important idea, overall, outside of this campaign and throughout the nation right now, as this fire plan is being developed, is that there is a very clear distinction between wildland-urban interface treatment and forest restoration.
But there are very specific goals when you want to protect a community—that is, houses and people and development—from the threat of fire, and when you want to implement treatments on the ground in the forest that are going to have effects on the forest structure and function, which is what restoration largely has as its goal. I'm not saying that there is no overlap, and that there isn't also a need to coordinate those different objectives, so that on the landscape scale they do all fit together and complement each other.
However, the basic objectives of those two different ideas are distinct. In particular, wildland-urban interface project, wildland-urban interface treatment, is very much centered on the objectives of protecting people, houses, and communities from burning. And to do that, it requires very specific treatments, of which there are still a range, but the range is very much centered around the communities. In particular, there is absolute need when protecting houses from burning, of treating that area, the yard that is directly around that house.
The number one way to protect the house is to implement treatments that actually protect the house—that is, on the house, in the house, the roof, what's right up against the house, and what's in the yard directly adjacent to that house. And that is just a few hundred feet that we're talking. In some cases, depending on slope, and how much vegetation you have, and what kind of weather patterns you have, it can be anything from less than a hundred feet to a couple hundred feet. And these are not my ideas, these are basically not prescriptions but findings that have come out of research from even the Forest Service's own research division, but also in the fire academics in the West.
In particular, especially when it comes to talking about houses and structures burning, Jack Cohen [phonetic spelling] of the Forest Service is probably the most vocal, and has put out the most papers, and really appears to be the expert of the moment on this particular issue—that issue being structures lighting on fire. He has put out a lot of research and papers on it.
Now, beyond that, beyond just treating the house, protecting the house, and those prescriptions, the ways that you would treat a house and protect a particular structure or home, the Forest Service and the fire departments all through the Southwest and West have put out many different bulletins and guides and booklets on how to do that. And while there are variations within them, they all basically say the same thing: you need to do thinning, you need to remove wood from being stacked right up against the wall of your house, you need to make sure your gutters are clear of needles and leaves. If you can have nonflammable roofing material, not shake shingle houses, things like that. You're removing the ladder fuels and severe fuel loads that might be right up against your house.
And as Jack Cohen points out in the Cerro Grande Fire, that is, the fire that burned through Los Alamos last year, some houses—well, the fire that went through Los Alamos, when it actually got to the city, was a surface fire, but it was burning on the ground. It was not raging, at that point, through the crowns of the trees, through the treetops. It actually came into town as a surface fire, and some houses that did not burn were actually protected by just a scratch line—that is, just a raked line to bare dirt, around the house. And that's why the house didn't light up. Basically saying that no protection of your house is the main reason why it went up in the Cerro Grande Fire—but the lack of any protection is what caused them to burn, and that anything at all, even these scratch lines in some cases, were enough to keep the house from burning. So the first place to start is by protecting the houses.
Going beyond that, there still may be a need or desire to actually protect the community as a whole—that is, not just keep your house from burning, but minimize the ability of a fire to come into your community, but that does not take away the need for the protection of individual houses. And the Forest Service has actually been doing this for decades. It's been implementing a two-step, two-phase or stage, treatment that has been called "intensive zone" and "extensive zone." The intensive zone is just the first few hundred feet that surround an area.
In this case, let's say from the backyard line of those houses that are right up against the forest. So for that first few hundred feet, actually that the general rule is 660 feet, and that's an eighth of a mile, but that area would be treated to remove all ladder fuels, to reduce the fuel load overall, to fragment the canopy so that there wasn't continuous canopy throughout that entire area. And that would, besides providing a space that would be much more likely to cause the fire, if it were in the crown, to drop to the ground, because it can't go from crown to crown once you've thinned out that strip there. It also provides a defensible space in which firefighters can get in.
So your houses are protected by you protecting your particular house and yard, and then there's the space where the firefighters are able to get into, use as a defensible space, it's an eighth of a mile, which is generally considered big enough to be able to implement such a protective strategy and be safe for the firefighters and so on. So that's the first eighth of a mile from the backyards.
And then if you go out another half mile, that's generally what was called the extensive zone. And again, through that next half mile, or through the half-mile boundary strip there, was or is the treatment where again, you've removed the ladder fuels, you've reduced the fuel loads, you've fragmented the canopy again, but not on the individual basis that no two tree crowns are touching, but so that groups are more separated from each other—basically reducing now the ability of the forest to carry a crown fire, but not to the extremity and severity that you do within the intensive zone. It's basically slowing it down, and then it gets to the intensive zone, and you have a defensible space where you can really attack the fire. And this is what the Forest Service has been implementing, especially in the Southwest and the West, back to the seventies, I think—for decades.
And here in Flagstaff, we have currently several projects going on that are being done in the name of wildland-urban interface. And one in particular that has been relatively high profile was the Fort Valley Ecosystem Project. And that is a 9,100-acre analysis area, of which I believe about half has been treated. And within that analysis area there's a large meadow and lots of private property that is cleared. So of the entire 9,100 acres, I believe that 4,500 acres or so are being treated. And of the areas that are being treated, some of them stretch seven miles out of the town of Flagstaff proper. The areas that are being treated within that project that are over two miles from a single structure—meaning a single house—that not even one of the homes that are out there are within two miles of some of the areas that are being treated.
And the problem that Forest Alliance has been bringing up, and the problem that we have with that, is that there is a need for forest restoration projects, and there's a need to be doing work within the forest. But when you're implementing projects and doing treatments that are not within a couple of miles of even a single house, then, that's an improper project to call a wildland-urban interface project. To me, for the Southwest Forest Alliance, "wildland-urban interface project" refers only to those projects that have the specific goal of protecting communities and houses from fire. Now, there are some houses out there, some scattered houses within the Fort Valley project, and those would certainly be appropriate for protection with wildland-urban interface. But again, there are areas that I know aren't near any of those.
Now, the general idea that has been expressed to me by the proponents of the project is that the viewshed—that is, the view of the mountain, because you can see it from all sorts of places in town—but the view of the mountain actually is part of the wildland-urban interface, because if we can see it burn from town, then it's part of town, and seeing that side of the mountain burn would severely impact town, therefore that's an urban issue, and that project to protect it would be wildland-urban interface treatment. Well, I don't really go for that, and I think it sets a really bad precedent for using money that is meant for community protection, and also just leaves the door wide open for pretty much anything—saying that, "Well, if you can see it from anywhere that's developed or have a house, then it must be wildland-urban interface"— I think it's just extremely too general and gets way off the point. Wildland-urban interface means protection of communities and houses and the people that are in them.
So there's several projects that are being pieced together by the Grand Canyon Forest Partnership in order to provide this ring of fire protection, supposedly, throughout the west side, and then eventually all the way around the community of Flagstaff. And while their sometimes use of extreme cutting measures will provide certain amounts of reduced fuel loads, certainly, it is not necessarily what is necessary to protect the community and the houses from fire. And not that those areas don't need to be looked at for forest restoration and the general wildland fuels reduction standpoint, but we also must keep in mind that we need to do the actual specific wildland-urban interface treatment that is right up against, right adjacent, to the houses and community. And actually, I don't see that happening very much.
Certainly the Flagstaff Fire Department is willing to come out to your house anywhere in Flagstaff and help you come up with a plan to treat your yard and house—and it's free, and they can come out there and help anybody to come up with a plan and help implement even the protection. However, it's not mandatory, which, of course, that would be an extremely difficult problem on its own, to make mandatory the protection and treatment of your own yard. But also the other problem that I see is that they're not implementing the protection with the severe cutting right up against the houses, and then the lesser cutting out in the ring outside of that, that is going to provide the actual protection for those developments, subdivisions, or whatever.
And again, all of this is moot if you haven't actually protected your house, because even miles out of town, any fire that gets big enough can send up firebrands and ashes—that is, burning sticks and ashes—that can come down in your yard, setting on fire, or starting a fire that could then potentially be able to burn down your house. So until each house is protected by the homeowner, then all of this fire protection, all of this forest treatment, is not going to assure that houses are protected from fire. And that's another point that we've just be hammering on. It really has to start at home.
Garcia Hunt: You keep speaking about restoration and restoration projects, like a little bit and a little bit. What is happening with restoration?
Nowicki: Well, the Southwest [Forest Alliance (Tr.)] appears to be one of the leading points of fire protection and wildland-urban interface treatments in the Southwest. It also appears that a lot of the forest restoration, [is studying here?] in particularly. That's ponderosa pine-type forest restoration. In Arizona and New Mexico, a pretty large portion of the communities that are wildland-urban interface communities are within ponderosa pine type. And what we've seen here in Flagstaff, we have the Fort Valley Ecosystem Project, again, that was billed sometimes as a wildland-urban interface project, and sometimes as a forest restoration project.
And without going, again, into how those are two distinct objectives, and how I think that those really need to be handled separately, and then put together on a landscape scale, but the Fort Valley project, which, as I said, stretches the seven miles out of town, has much experimental forest restoration prescriptions implemented within it. And the Forest Alliance, along with several other environmental groups, actually appealed that Forest Service decision to implement the project at Fort Valley.
And the main reason that we did that was that the mean prescription that was being used—that is, the presettlement prescription that was developed by the Ecological Restoration Institute, and before that the Ecological Restoration Lab, headed by Dr. Wally Covington—the presettlement prescription that is being implemented is the most extreme method of forest restoration that has been proposed or implemented or just brought up yet in this debate and this developing technology of forest restoration. It removes an extreme number of trees.
In the case of the experimental plots that were cut out at Fort Valley, it removed up to 90 percent of the trees in the blocks, and often left a very evenly spaced structure, so that it looked very much—it was very extremely open, but also looked very even and almost tree-farm-like, especially in some of the earlier blocks. And the problem with that is that not only are you severely changing the current structure, the structure that's out there, removing 90 percent of the trees, and severely reducing the biomass—but it leaves an interim structure, that is, the immediate structure before the development of the understory, and before the growth of the trees and the development of some other tree structure, canopy structure—that the interim habitat for wildlife—well, basically that we don't know what those effects are going to have on the wildlife. And done on small scale, especially the early parts were just experimental to gather data, and to see how the structure changed and what effects this appeared to have—but done on a larger scale, that the effects on wildlife could be extreme, could be severe, and possibly disastrous for particular species.
Now, I'm not a wildlife biologist, but looking through the literature, we certainly know that the squirrels, the Abert squirrel that we have here, is not going to be able to utilize that particular forest structure very well. And then there's a lot of songbirds that currently—there's experimental data coming in—or, not experimental, but monitoring data coming in from Mount Trumbull where the Ecological Restoration Institute is also implementing the presettlement prescription—the monitoring data that's coming down is showing that there may be very harmful impacts on songbirds.
But besides that, in the interim, directly after cutting, you've also opened up the structure, you've opened up the canopy, so that much more sun hits the forest floor, and you have a much drier forest floor, and you've got higher wind speeds because you've opened up the structure so that the wind can move quicker through the stand, and you also have a tremendous amount of slash residue after the implementation of this thinning treatment. So actually, in the time directly after doing the cutting for restoration, you have much higher risk of fire and the risk of extreme fire behavior, because you've set up these conditions that can lead to such extreme fire behavior. So done on a small scale, is not as risky as doing it on a large scale…that when you implement this prescription on a large scale,you have that entire land base that you've just treated at the high risk for fire. You've also got the same risk that we just talked about for disturbing the wildlife, or not providing the habitat for wildlife.
Now lastly, when talking of our appeal for the presettlement prescription—our appeal against the Fort Valley project that included the presettlement prescription—was our critique that there is no real evidence, and that there is actually a lot of holes in the belief that a particular prescription is going to leap to the old growth structure that is being proposed, or being held up as the goal—that is, the old-growth ponderosa pine, the big yellow-bellied trees, and the clumpy structure that were open and parklike in many areas in the Southwest. And the thing is that doing this particular cutting method, this prescription, which is supposedly leaving the same number of trees to develop into the same number of trees and spatial distribution that appeared back in the 1870s, before fire suppression, before cattle grazing, before all of the timber cutting that happened in the past century. That going back to that particular structure is going to lead to this old-growth structure that was seen back then; and I actually don't see how that is necessarily going to happen.
Certainly by opening up the canopy and opening up the spaces in between trees, you're increasing how much rain and sunshine they get, so they are going to grow faster, but that's just plain old [soba?]culture, like has always been. If you want to grow trees faster, we know how to do that. However, to develop old-growth structure is possibly a much different thing. And particularly, looking at the earliest, or, the demonstration plots that are out there at Fort Valley, that the spatial distribution appears to be very evenly spaced, single trees through there, instead of this groupy, clumpy, structure of the large, yellow ponderosa pines that we see in the areas that we would specifically call old growth.
Also, the year 2001 is very different from the year 1870. And there is a lot of reasons to believe that the forest structure of the ponderosa pine forest in the Southwest would not look exactly the same today as they looked back in 1870. We had a regeneration boom in which many more trees than usual, ponderosa pine seedlings, got a start back in the late teens of the past century. But there's also been changes in the landscape scale of fragmentation. There's also been changes in the climate. There's been changes in our atmosphere and global warming. There's been a bunch of different impacts that bring into question whether we really want to attempt to restore to the exact same spatial conditions that existed back in 1870.
And since there are so many questions being held up about the presettlement prescription and its use, that the Forest Alliance appealed the Fort Valley decision, because that particular prescription was actually being implemented over 72 percent of the area that was being silviculturally treated—that is, areas that were being cut in Fort Valley. Notice there's different variations on the theme of that presettlement prescription, but in one variation or another, it was being implemented on the vast majority on 70-some percent of the acres that were being treated at Fort Valley. And we thought that with forest restoration, restoration ecology being in its infancy, and all of these being mostly just experimental ideas, and the impacts of these different prescriptions being so unknown at this point, and risky, that using it at that scale was inappropriate. And that was the basis for our opposition to Fort Valley, the project as a whole.
Now, the Southwest Forest Alliance also has been working on forest restoration, and actually has a plot out at Williams, one down in the Gila, and one that was supposed to go into the Fort Valley project. And it implements a cutting prescription as well, and the difference between our vision and the vision of the presettlement prescription is that the Forest Alliance, which has what we call the "natural processes restoration model." Instead of attempting, like the presettlement prescription, to get the forest back to the conditions of the number of trees or the spatial distribution that you had back in 1870, the Forest Alliance's prescription looks to do the minimum amount of change that is the smallest amount of a risk in implementing cutting and thinning in order to put the forest structure and processes on a trajectory that can lead up to basically a better ecosystem integrity, to allow those ecosystem functions, such as fire tree growth, the reestablishment and growth of the ground vegetation and so on, in order to put those functions back on track to operate as they would with the forest structure that is currently out there. But the way that the structure currently is in the forest, it's not possible for fire and tree growth and the understory vegetation to be growing and to be functioning the way that it used to be.
So what is the minimum amount of risk, the minimum amount of change that we have to incur, and that we have to risk for the wildlife and the trees and plants in order to allow those processes to start functioning again? And then, since we are taking more of a—it's a very much precautionary principle approach, meaning you move slowly, gathering data, gathering information as you work, but helps to inform it, and also doing the least—if you're not sure what the impacts are going to be, then you're implementing the minimum at first. And the best advantage of that is that you can always go back and cut more trees and change the management that you have. If you go out there and cut all the trees, but exactly the number that you want to leave, and then you find out that you've cut too many, there's no way to put those trees back into the forest, back on the ground. However, if you find out, well, okay, we were being very cautious and we cut too few, you can go back and reimplement a different prescription or be a little more aggressive in taking out trees. So that is the vision that we currently have in this time when forest restoration is still in the very much early stage of development.
Garcia Hunt: Also, on sort of that same subject with restoration, how is the infection of trees looking also, in the forest?
Nowicki: For dwarf mistletoe?
Garcia Hunt: I was going to ask you [about the] moth infestation, the bark beetles.
Nowicki: Beetles would probably be the next biggest worry. But neither of those have been the primary problems, the primary focus or driving forces in the forest restoration that we've seen here in Flagstaff also, primarily, but also throughout the West. The main driving force behind restoration is that the forests have a very high density of small-diameter ponderosa pine trees, and that not only is that high density of small trees not allowing those particular trees to grow into the larger yellow pines, but it is also at higher risk of a high-intensity fire. And also, in some cases, is competing heavily with the yellow pines, the old-growth trees that are out there. So those are the main driving forces.
Now, the dwarf mistletoe, we do have in ponderosa pine, and that's throughout the West and you will see it here and in Fort Valley, and in places. And the prescriptions that are used can be modified in order to take that into account. And certainly there are particular prescriptions that are relatively extreme when the main objective is to control for dwarf mistletoe. And the main thing I'd like to say about that, about dwarf mistletoe, is that one of the reasons why it is currently infecting or infesting stands at a level that appears to be so damaging is partly because of the lack of fire in the ecosystems. Fire actually used to be able to selectively kill groups, stands, and individuals that were highly infected or infested with dwarf mistletoe. And that's because, first of all, a lot of the branches are dead. In some cases the individuals are dead.
And dwarf mistletoe also causes brooming some. The brooms—big bunches of needles and branchlets—you'll see them when we go up to the forest, certainly—are very highly flammable, and those would be really good for the fire to catch on, start that broom on fire, and then the fire would crawl up the rest of the tree, throughout the rest of the tree, killing the tree. Without the host, the dwarf mistletoe is unable to spread. It's an obligate parasite, and obviously, in a ponderosa pine forest it can spread from neighbor to neighbor. But the fires would come through the forest and be able to take out specifically—or selectively take out—a lot of those trees and groups that were highly infested. Well, by removing fire from the system, we've taken out that particular agent that was able to do that.
As far as the bark beetles go, both dwarf mistletoe and beetles have been around as long as the ponderosa pine has been around—or almost as long, but certainly as long as these forests have been around. And they're both natives and are necessary parts of the ecosystem. However, the management that has changed things in the past hundred years, certainly has its impacts. Like I said, just like with dwarf mistletoe. I think more with the beetle that we're talking about risk that severe amounts of thinning and these very open structures and the changes in the diameter structures that we're talking about with these trees may change how the bark beetles react and interact with these forests. And I think that it's something that we're going to have to learn, and another reason why we need to proceed with caution and not just headlong, before we have all of our information.
Garcia Hunt: What kind of strange fire behavior have you noticed in the Flagstaff area since you've been here?
Nowicki: I actually have not done—I'm not a fire ecologist as such, and I certainly haven't been down out on the ground, fighting any of these fires. We've had the Horseshoe and [Hochderffer fires back in 1996, which started Flagstaff's campaign to provide protection from, to do the projects that the partnership, the Grand Canyon Forest Partnership, has come up with to build that ring of treated areas around Flagstaff. That was '96, and then last year we had the Kendrick Fire, and then this year we just had the Leroux Fire. And as far as extreme fire behavior or strange fire behavior, remember the Horseshoe and Hochderffer fires, they were both pretty severe, pretty severely burnt areas. And the 16,000 acres of Kendrick, there were areas that were pretty intensely burned, and where it is largely black stick [through?] those areas.
However, there are lots of areas within both of those—well, all three of those, Horseshoe and Hochderffer, and the Kendrick fires—where the fire did not act catastrophically—in fact, to call the entire fire catastrophic fire, any of those, to call the entire areas catastrophic is certainly, I think, a mistake and misleading, because there were areas in the Kendrick Fire last year where the fire fingered out as it came down out of the high slopes of the mountain, the steep slopes of the mountain, and did not burn completely, did not burn out the crowns or drop to the ground in some places. It burned patchily in other places, like groups would be burned but surrounded by not [killed?] trees.
Now, it was on an extreme slope, there was a lot of erosion involved, and those areas are going to take a long time to rehab, to regrow, to restore. But there are also parts of those fires, all of them, where it looks like it was behaving in those areas, in some areas, the way that the fire is supposed to behave—everybody that's really putting some anthropocentric values on this—the way the fire is supposed to behave and the way that we want the fire.
But it did in those areas follow those values that we see reducing the fuel loads, not killing all the trees, reducing the density of trees, though, with this lower level of mortality, and some places having a high level of mortality so that there's actually openings that were opened by the fire, and so on. And while in some places it burned with a very high intensity and it's going to take a very long time, in contrast to those we had the Leroux Fire that just finished up earlier this past weekend—when the [Marines?] put it out, put out the last of the inner parts.
And the Leroux Fire, it looks, and from what I hear, the Forest Service is already saying that it looks like it was a pretty good fire. And that is that it acted the way that we [were] hoping [it would work], [the way] that fires used to work, and that can work to reduce fuel loads. It blasted a few holes in the canopy, areas that are probably going to be developed into either meadows or aspen over the next however many years. And it was a very mosaic-looking burn—some places intense, other places very light, on the ground. It only went up into the canopies at the group and individual level in some small areas, and so on.
So the funny thing is, throughout the duration of the fire, there was a series of articles—I would guess about a half a dozen of op-ed pieces, or editorials in the [Arizona] Daily Sun paper, that were criticizing Southwest Forest Alliance and other environmental groups, like the _______ Network, and also using very vague words to describe who it was that was blaming for opposing the Fort Valley project, saying, "Look, you environmentalists, this is what happens. Now the mountain is gonna burn, and we blame you. This is horrible, horrible, horrible!" And then as the fire winds up, even the Forest Service comes out and says, "You know, this looks like this was pretty good." But everybody was very quick to blame the Forest Alliance and environmental groups that have been working on behalf of the forest, blaming them for the fire, that they thought was the most awful thing in the world, and turned out to be probably not.
Garcia Hunt: Could you discuss how animal grazing affects forest ecology after a fire?
Nowicki: Certainly—and before a fire. The "three stooges" that brought about the forest conditions that we have today is logging, fire suppression, and cattle grazing. Logging, obviously, has removed a lot of the large trees that made up the old-growth structure that we used to have around Flagstaff and throughout the West. In many places, there's just not.... In some places it's not there at all, or if it is there, it's at a much lower density, much smaller component of the forest than it used to be. It's big yellow pines in those open areas, and also [groupy?] structure, and groups of big, fat trees that were taken with the railroad logging and the timber sales since.
The fire suppression allowed all of the seedlings that got a start to pretty much make a go of it and develop all the way up into the small-diameter blackjacks that we see throughout the forest now. Because before fire suppression, fires would come through and kill those smaller trees, and the larger yellow-bellies were more resistant to those ground fires and wouldn't be burned up or killed like the seedlings and saplings would. So fire suppression allowed them all to grow, and now we have a very dense forest full of very small trees.
But along with that we had cattle grazing for the past hundred years. What one of the impacts of cattle grazing is, is that it removes all of the grass, and ponderosa pine seedlings are actually so shade intolerant that they need full sunlight so much, that the grasses, the tall grasses that used to exist, would shade them out and they would not grow. So in open areas, you would have the trees encroaching or filling it up, because the grasses would out-compete for sunlight, the seeds and seedlings, and especially the small seedlings of ponderosa pine. Well, remove all those grasses, and they have a chance to go for it. On top of it, you have fire suppression, so they really have a chance to go for it. So the impacts of the cattle are evident throughout the forest as we walk through any of the national forests in the West.
Now, we have forest restoration projects and some large fires, and those areas are being grazed, in some cases directly after, meaning that the year after the fire and the restoration projects. Now, with the fires, the Horseshoe and Hochderffer, for instance, who had these catastrophic fires, and the fires came through and in some areas killed all of the trees in continuous blocks where you'll see dead trees, opening up the ground for a lot of sunlight and the rain, and allowing that ground vegetation to grow—except that you bring through the cattle, and the cattle are still grazing in those fires, eating all of that grass that's growing up. Well, let's not forget that these areas are being studied, and the studies are showing that after a fire, a catastrophic fire, that the grass just doesn't grow back—that not only does the catastrophic fire kill all the trees, but you never get the ground vegetation back. Well, maybe part of the reason the ground vegetation isn't coming back is because we're grazing it. And it's actually being studied by the Forest Service, and there's plenty of dissention about that management decision, but especially with the researchers that are there trying to determine what the effects of these high-intensity fires are, because they're not able to see what really would happen after a fire because the cattle are out there changing the structure of that ground vegetation so much.
Now in the restoration projects, it's largely the same, because you're opening up the canopy so much, with the intent to allow that growth of all that understory vegetation, of all that ground vegetation. And if you don't remove cattle from that system, then you'll never be able to have real restoration. That is, if cattle were one of.... The first thing you have to do in restoration is remove those impacts, those forces that are causing the degradation. So you have to stop logging all the big trees, you have to stop fire suppression, and you have to stop the cattle grazing if you are actually going to restore that forest.
The impacts of cattle go beyond the fact that they are just eating up all the native grasses. That also contributes to the ability of some exotic species, exotic grasses, to get the upper hand, because they're not as edible—thistles and mullein are not the "ice cream" species that cows like to eat. They also track, they carry exotic seeds—well, all seeds—with them, but spreading exotic seeds further into the forest. As you open up more forests further in that has been opened up by forest restoration and in go the cattle to get that new grass coming up, in go all of the exotics. And they also cause soil compaction, which is not a small problem, especially now that you have more sunlight beating down in these areas, and a higher water flow. The water flow would be able, once things are opened up, water flow would be able to move more soil around. At the same time, we also have the compaction, so that the water's not able to penetrate.
And that's also a problem I didn't mention before with extreme prescriptions of forest restoration that if you're driving up to every single group and tree with a bulldozer, that you're compacting the soil on a very large scale, a huge percentage of the soil that's in each of those areas in every restored area. So if you compacted all the soil, then you're obviously complicating, and possibly doing more harm than you are good. I think that we certainly need to be looking at ways of doing the restoration and the thinning by hand and by moving them without running multi-ton tractors all over the forest.
But back to the cattle. It's not an issue that is being really addressed by forest restoration folks so far, partly because it's a social issue, not a scientific-biological issue. But it obviously has biological and ecological impacts that need to be addressed. And also, I'd like to point out, talking about the cattle, that it's funny that here we are, looking at a forest that's been highly degraded because of logging, cattle grazing, and fire suppression. And we did those things—especially the fire suppression—was done because we wanted to grow bigger trees, more trees.
When they first started, back at the turn of the century, there was some differing opinion and controversy within the Forest Service and within the managers that said, "I don't think it's a good idea to suppress fire." And they did some studies and looked, over the short term, the ten years that they looked at, they said, "Wow, it does help growth to have fire suppression because otherwise fires would come through." But they were looking, and fires would come through and impact the trees, kill all the trees. And obviously it's better to have fire suppression. They looked at a ten-year scale. Well, now we're looking at a hundred-year scale, and it was obviously a bad idea. But it was done to grow more, bigger trees.
Well, now we're looking at forest restoration, and one of the main objectives is to whack open the forest to grow bigger trees. And I'm not disagreeing that we have a lack of big trees out there. But here we are with the same mentality somewhat, that we had a hundred years ago: Grow bigger trees! And, the three things that led to the degraded conditions that we have today...
Garcia Hunt: That same issue, what type of policy changes would you like to see in the future? Would they be Flagstaff city-wise, or however your Alliance would work with that.
Nowicki: Well, currently the Forest Alliance is looking at policy on the national scale, and that policy is being set, in a large part, in the Southwest; and in northern Arizona, in some other ways. What I absolutely feel we need to see as soon as possible is the distinction between forest restoration and wildland-urban interface protection. On the forest restoration side, I would like to see that proceed much more cautiously, gathering the data, seeing what the impacts are, before going on at large scale. No, there actually has been the plan look, the Fort Valley project has been held up as the Flagstaff Plan for restoration last year following the fire season. And I think to come up with one way of doing things, one prescription, one method, and to implement that on a wide scale, is certainly a mistake—especially before we know if it even works here. But that would give us no evidence that it's going to work everywhere. In fact, it's very likely that because things are different everywhere, that it doesn't.
On the wildland-urban interface side of the coin, let's see, the national fire plan money that came out at the end of last year was appropriated at $1.6 billion, appropriated by Congress to be used only for the protection of communities and houses. And that would be done using a very narrow range of alternatives and methods that are directly adjacent to communities and houses, and provide the protection, and don't go miles out into the forest like we see some projects that are being proposed.
On top of that, or in order for that to happen, I believe that the congressional committees, the federal oversight, congressional oversight, and also the agencies that are involved in this, the state, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management really have to define wildland-urban interface, what that means, and how it needs to be treated, and to not use what currently is the most broad definition that you could possibly come up with—done, I think in good faith—in order to get as many protective projects started, instead of getting caught up in trying to decide which projects they started with the fire plan money being available for as many projects, for the widest range of projects.
But there's just too many risks, there's too many risks for the first ecosystems that are surrounding communities because poorly-designed projects, or projects that aren't really protecting communities are going out and cutting trees within those wildland forests, with possibly in some cases very confused objectives. You know, they're cutting miles into a forest in order to protect the community. But as I described earlier, the protection of communities is a very narrow set of treatments that are directly adjacent to communities.
So two problems with that very wide definition. One, you've got projects that are threatening ecosystem integrity and health by cutting out into the forest with incorrect objectives for the project. And secondly, you're spending money on projects that actually aren't providing protection for the community. But they're spending a lot of money and doing a bunch of cutting and not actually protecting any houses from burning. So in order to curb both of those problems, and to implement projects that are appropriate, that don't threaten or put at risk Mexican spotted owl habitat, goshawk habitat, and just general forest ecosystems, and do provide community protection, we need a definition from these agencies and with these agencies, and the appropriations, the federal government, that is going to allow or mandate the design of ag projects that will actually be wildland-urban interface projects.
Garcia Hunt: Do you have any campaigning going on with the Alliance in either Washington or elsewhere?
Nowicki: We sure do. And currently the main thing that we're campaigning on is Step One of what I just mentioned, and that is that there's a distinction between wildland-urban interface and restoration and forest treatment in general wildlands fuels reduction; and secondly that there is an established and understood way to provide community protection. But we don't need to look all over the West in a million different projects to find out what works, because the Forest Service has been implementing, for decades, projects that are protective of communities and houses. So that's the Step One that we're right now lobbying on, wildland-urban interface, how to treat communities and houses to protect them from fire.
But over this next summer, it certainly appears that environmentalists that we're associated with, possibly some of us in the Alliance ourselves, will be traveling to our senators' offices, our representatives' offices, and maybe to Washington to see what the level of understanding is, and what their ability or desire to really work on this, to make this a fire plan money, and to make these projects really work. So we'll see.
I know that there is going to be a congressional hearing here in early August, I think, in which Jon Kyl will be coming, and they'll be looking at, I think the Fort Valley project, and talking about wildland-urban interface. So we'll see what comes of that.
Garcia Hunt: Where do you see yourself five years from now?
Nowicki: Five years from now, I see myself doing pretty much what I'm doing right now. I went to the School of Forestry, I went through the master's of science in forestry because this is what I wanted to do, and going to school was a way to get that, nice bit of understanding, I guess, another piece of the puzzle, interaction with agency and academia, and all the things that are involved with forest management. And it was a good experience, and now I'm where I want to be. I love my job, and working with the issues of the moment, and yet because working with the Southwest Forest Alliance, but more with just the environmental community, there's something that we really.... There's a certain freedom that we have in that if we decided—if I decided tomorrow that we were really off base with forest restoration, or with this wildland-urban [interface], or with any of our issues, that we can change our minds and stand up and tell the world, our member groups, the folks that care in the Southwest - whoever- that, "Hey, we were wrong."
But we're not invested in the financial or political way, like you are in an agency and a bureaucracy in academia. But basically we can continue to make up our own minds, and be able to have or stand there as outsiders. And I think that's the greatest advantage and the most important thing that the Southwest Forest Alliance and environmental groups like that have to offer. That they are honestly there, thinking primarily about the forest, about the ecosystems, and able to really provide an outside view without the pressures that we all live with in other parts of our lives, and that you certainly have when you're in universities or bureaucracies or agencies or whatever; large organizations.
The other thing that—though I'm sure going to stay here—is that I'm actually interested in all sorts of things in the ecosystem—just "the great outdoors," I guess—and always have been, and I knew that this was what I was interested in. The reason I sometimes feel bogged down in policy and the technical side of management is because everything interacts with and lives in the forest, and it's something that we've been managing heavily for the past hundred years—the forest, the trees. And so step one to really coming to live more in balance with everything is to figure out how to live with that — let me start over.
The forest is the matrix somewhat in which the plants and the animals, in which all of the adjacent ecosystems are interacting. And our management of the forest, more than the other ecosystems here in the West, has been intense. And changing that management is the first step to, I think, starting to connect the different ecosystems, and starting to have the balance come back to a balance that I think is missing, but gotta start somewhere.
Garcia Hunt: Great. That was really good. (to Kern) Do you still want to ask a question about NEPA? Okay. (to Nowicki) Could you explain the NEPA process and when it was created?
Nowicki: Oh, when it was created? (chuckles) Maybe not when it was created. (pause) Endangered Species Act of '73, so I think we're talking a handful of years later that NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, was created. I guess it's appropriate that I have to explain it, because it's the vast majority of what I work with every day, the damned NEPA process—which is basically a set policy of how to implement a project.
It mandates that federal agencies must go through a public input process in order to implement a policy or a project that would impact the environment. And basically NEPA requires that first you send out the document in what's called scoping and tell the public that you're considering a project and what it would possibly do. And you collect comments from that. Then you would put out an environmental assessment or an environmental impact statement. And that would tell what exactly you're going to do, and have several different alternatives. And then you would collect comments on that. Then you have to analyze each of those alternatives to decide which is the best one, which one is going to achieve your goals and have the least impacts. And then you would put out a decision saying that okay, you've chosen which of those alternatives you are going to implement, and then there would be another chance for comment—in this case, an appeal of that decision.
Now, I'd like to mention a couple of things about the NEPA process. One is that that appeal process is absolutely and totally part of the public input process. It allows you to say, "Oh no, I think your decision was wrong, that you should have taken this other alternative," or that "you're making a mistake and not considering all of these impacts." It is not going to court, it is not litigation. What it is, is just saying to the regional forester that you think that a district ranger or a supervisor made the wrong decision when the Forest [Service] analyzed one of those alternatives.
Now, the funny thing is—ha ha—when we appealed the Fort Valley decision, and when groups have appealed the two Fort Valley decisions, that was treated as though we were, I feel, litigation hungry, just out of bounds and coming at them with a left hook out of nowhere. But it is the proper thing to do in the process if you don't agree with the decision. And it's absolutely necessary in order for the NEPA process to even remotely work. It is not something that is just—it has not been an extreme case or something that just never comes up. It's the way to say that you don't agree with the decision.
The other thing I want to say about NEPA is that it is certainly a bureaucratic, technocratic policy. And it has definite limitations. But getting down to the very worst-case, I suppose, scenario, or just to the bare bones of what NEPA is, is an agency must tell the public what it's going to do, and solicit comment. And then it needs to show that it analyzed all of the different possible impacts, and then it can implement the project. It doesn't exactly require, although technically you have to solicit comments, those comments do not hold the weight to really change the policies, the projects, that are being implemented—they just have to be collected. This is sort of a worst-case scenario, but take it as you will. Also, you can implement any project, as long as you analyze all the possible impacts and decide that yeah, you've analyzed them all and still decide that this is the best thing to do. They still have clear cuts up in the Northwest and other places in the West. Those have to go through NEPA.
So the agency still says, "We're going to clearcut this area," and then a bunch of people send their comments and say, "No, no way. No!" And then you say, "Well, here's our analysis, here's our environmental assessment, and here's all the different things that we're going to analyze, and how it's going to affect birds, how it's going to affect the soil, how it's going to affect the economy, how it's going to affect the people that live there." And then we're looking at what happens if we don't cut it at all, what happens if we cut it differently, what happens if we clearcut it? And then the agency puts out a final decision that says, "Well, it looks like it'll be pretty bad for the birds and everything else that lives there, and it'll be horrible to look at, and it'll just basically be a disaster, but we've analyzed all of these things"—that I just said—"that are going to take it pretty badly. And we still decide that this is the right thing to do." And that is completely and totally kosher within the NEPA process, as long as they adequately analyze all of the different things that they're going to impact—in some cases severely and negatively. So it's limited, and it doesn't stop any particular project from happening.
What often, though, happens, and why there are so many successful NEPA cases, is that even though it's set up totally in the favor of the agency to implement whatever project they want, as long as they go through the process, they still don't correctly move through the process. The first appeal that was won against the Fort Valley decision was won because there was not the proper amount of time allotted for comments after, I believe, the environmental assessment was released. And there's still plenty of time [to leave?] either comment, or they have to go to a appeal because the NEPA process itself, as weighted as it is on the side of the project of moving forward—of progress, if you will—as weighted as it is, the agencies still improperly move through that process.
And that's why you see so many NEPA process lawsuits. It's not because it's really working on the side of those opponents of projects, to stop the projects—it's just that they can stop the process and make the agency go back and take another look. And hopefully, when those happen, each time you've got another chance to make the case that the project itself is faulty, or that some of those premises, some of those objectives, putting economics in front of ecosystem health or what not, depending what the project is, that those are incorrect.
So that's what we have to work with, and that's what I spend a lot of my time working on. And it's somewhat discouraging, but it is the best way for us to see what's happening, what projects are going to happen, before they happen—even if it turns out that we can't stop anything, at least there's a chance to see what's going on, instead of before NEPA when you just would implement projects.
Kern: So the agency that will propose the project in the end can give themselves, like, the stamp of overhead? It's not another agency that's making the final decision.
Nowicki: Right.
Kern: So the Bureau of Land Management can propose a restoration project, go through the NEPA process and then they determine…
Nowicki: If their decision was right. Right. So you see why there's conflicts of interest, and certainly momentum for projects to happen, because it would take some severe conflict within an agency in order for things to change. The only time when you get another agency in is when you litigate and it goes to the Department of Justice. And so really understanding the NEPA process, and seeing specific examples of where it's not worked, you start to understand why a lot of people do end up going—why so many groups, why so many advocates—do end up going to court, because that's the first time that you actually get another entity involved in order to make some decisions.
Garcia Hunt: Well, thank you, Brian, and we'll continue our discussions when you take us out to the Williams plot and we'll have a few more questions for you, and we want to see exactly, physically, on camera with you in your environment what we need to put out there.
Nowicki: Sounds good.
Garcia Hunt: Thanks, Brian.
Nowicki: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]