Forest Service Already Tackling Pine Beetles, by the Book

Governor Dennis Daugaard sees pine beetles as a "grave threat" to the Black Hills and has launched a state program to help landowners clear infested trees. Congresswoman Kristi Noem believes the beetles imperil health and human safety so much that we should declare an emergency and ignore federal regulations.

When I travel through the Hills and see all those dead trees, I can certainly feel alarmed. But Black Hills Forest Supervisor Craig Bobzien suggests that the Black Hills may not be as bad off as our eyes and our alarm-raising elected officials may lead us to believe:

"I'm of the belief — and I will say this is a shared belief among a lot of people who are working on this — that in the Black Hills, we have the ingredients in place to have the best chance of being successful in having a healthy forest, of really any place that I know of in the West that's being threatened right now," Bobzien said.

...Bobzien said the Forest Service treats for safety first, in areas like campgrounds, trailheads, roads and the wildland/urban interface where public communities meet forestland.

He added, though, that many of those areas aren't facing serious public safety threats right now.

"(Safety) is our first priority, but it's the smallest part of what we do on the Black Hills," Bobzien said. "We don't have many areas like that because we've been able to manage so much of the forest in advance of the beetles [Mark VanGerpen, "Forest Service 'Optimistic' about Success Against Pine Beetles," Black Hills Pioneer, 2011.11.17].

The Forest Service has been working to stem the spread of pine beetles since the current infestation began in 1998. As USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack notes, the Forest Service has implemented beetle mitigation measures on more than 500,000 acres of the 1.2-million-acre Black Hills National Forest. Vilsack notes that the Forest Service sold 25 million board feet of lumber from beetle-killed trees just in October and is planning to mark more trees for sale and removal over the next several months.

Secretary Vilsack says the Forest Service's approach is right, and Rep. Noem's is wrong:

Some have offered procedural shortcuts as the answer, but our experience shows that an adaptive management approach will enable us to move quickly to address hot spots and the highest priority areas [USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, "Forest Service Responding to Pine Beetles," Rapid City Journal, 2011.11.19].

Supervisor Bobzien says there may be other strategies to help tackle the pine beetle, like taking volunteers to clear beetle-killed trees, but we still have to study and implement those strategies by the book:

While O'Byrne and Bobzien said they are impressed with that effort forest wide, it's not as simple as handing a volunteer a hardhat and chainsaw and setting him loose in the forest.

Legal questions need to be answered first: what degree of training will volunteers need to undergo? Who will pay for it? If a volunteer is injured on the forest, who is liable?

"We are trying to find some instrument that will let the Forest Service work with these other entities ... so that the timber sale contract isn't our only option," O'Byrne said.

"Right now we're looking through law regulation policy that affects the Forest Service, seeing if there's some way that's legal out there for us to be able to do it. We really want to be able to work with them, but it's the mechanics of trying to be able to do that ... All the federal processes, the laws that we have to meet, they're there for a good reason, but it takes time to get through them" [emphasis mine; VanGerpen 2011.11.17].

Rep. Noem is busy orchestrating her little letter-writing campaign to pressure the White House to pay attention to the Black Hills and lift regulations. Rep. Noem wants the federal government to act now... but the federal government already is acting. Secretary Vilsack's list of specific activities the Forest Service is aiming at the pine beetles seems more detailed than any of Rep. Noem's vague suggestions. The only thing distinguishing Rep. Noem's calls for action seems to be her certainty that we can rush into action without studying the complications and consequences.