This is Forest to Frame, where we explore how restoring forests creates beautiful spaces. A podcast dedicated to conversations with industry leaders, shaping the future of the forest industry. And now, here's your host, Russ Vaagen Russ here. Another episode of the Forest to Frame podcast. Recently in the news, there was some talk about selling off some of our public lands, Forest Service, BLM, et cetera. But I saw a lot of the comments online and social media, and I couldn't help but think that so few people really understand what comprises our public lands. And so I did a little research on top of what I already know because I've managed on all kinds of federal lands, state lands and others. And I've got a pretty good grasp of our federal lands in particular in the West where most of them are located. And the idea that we think of with our public lands are national parks, national forests, monuments, beautiful wilderness areas. In many cases, that's accurate, but there's also a lot of other lands out there. And we've acquired lands as a federal government in many different ways, some of which stems from the early days of our country. Others, we've done different things in terms of trading land and buying land and other things. So when it came up that first I heard that there was gonna be around half a million acres sold and then I heard that there was gonna be 1.5 million acres sold and I see that Congressman Zinke from Montana put out a thing that said that this is a red line for him of selling public land and I respect that viewpoint and there were all kinds of people mainly there's a combination of conservationists and sportsmen that I saw commenting, and then a bunch of environmentalists that I saw on other platforms. It's not something I normally dig into, but I did make a few comments on there. I did it more to see where people were at. One of the questions I ask is, what number of acres is appropriate from our public lands to consider selling? Most people were like, zero, none. Well, what if the federal government ended up with a parcel of land that is now, if it wasn't before, but is now essentially an urban development area? Is that important that the federal land still be federal land and managed that way? You know, in other areas, there's federal land that is completely landlocked by other landowners. Well, you can't even get to it unless you're the private landowner to use it. And there's a lot of issues with that that people have. Then there's this talk I saw on MeatEater, where they were talking about corner crossings. Corner crossings are where you have a piece of property that comes to an edge, and then it meets the other edge like this, and then the argument, can you cross that fence legally? There's just a lot of issues with land ownership, private and public And I think that a lot of those issues could be solved if we, you know, there's, there's been land trades in the past, my family's been involved with some of those, where we own timberland in an area that was a very coveted, highly coveted resource for the Bureau of Land Management or another land, land manager, the federal government. And they had other lands over here that weren't really tributary to their forests or where they were managing. So it made sense to swap those and trade those. And sometimes it was just a swap. Sometimes there was money that changed hands. But I don't think people even knew that publicly that that was really going on. And there were always a lot of people that were upset about it. But the order of magnitude of this proposed land sale got me thinking too. So I checked to see, I know that there's 193 million acres of Forest Service, there's about 244 million acres of Bureau of Land Management, then you have your Park Service, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and then you have Department of Defense, and then there's some other federal ownership. Well, it totals about 640 million acres. So that's a lot of land. So You look at that, and that means that 1.5 million acres represents about 0.3% of that total. So it's not a lot in percentage, but a million and a half acres, I mean, shoot, the Colville National Forest is only 1.1 million acres, and it's in about three or four major blocks in the Tri-County area in which we live in Northeast Washington. So, I mean, if the government wanted to sell the 1.1 million acre Colville National Forest in the scheme of things, it's nothing, but I understand specifically where it's at, it's something. But I think we need to be able to have some of those discussions. And I think to me, I mean, the sale of those lands, it's hard for me to really care about until I know where they're at. Much bigger than that is how are we managing our federal lands? We just had a huge shakeup with the Forest Service. Even people that want to get things done and don't want to play games with our federal lands, still, I'm sorry, but they've spent the last three or four decades inside of this bureaucratic nightmare that you know, made a living at not getting anything done. And they say they got stuff done, but it wasn't the things that you would do if you were really managing a forest. You know, I don't even think they knew who their customer was. They acted as if their customer were the other members of their team and everything was internal. And they never got judged. in terms of their job performance by somebody outside of the agency that they worked with. And so I think there was a lot of opportunity for disruption and fixing. I just hope we get there. My belief is a couple of things. Number one, I think the Forest Service, this will be controversial for some, especially the way they've been doing it the last couple of decades, but the Forest Service should get out of the business of fighting wildfire, period. They are horrible at it. A lot of people got upset with me when I blogged about that a number of years ago and took some video at some camps of these fire camps that were set up. But I've had conversations with people, quite honestly, on the Democratic side of things out of DC, where people at the Forest Service presented them what they said was efficient, keeping people busy. when they essentially had two full fire crews on one fire because the fire season wasn't going strong enough at the time, but they were keeping everybody busy. Well, newsflash, all those people they were keeping busy in those camps, and we were paying not only super high overtime, but because of that rule, there's a lot of danger pay or whatever they call it. It was not an efficient use of those dollars. they weren't really fighting the fires. That's the other thing. Everybody wants to say, I love the firefighters. We all love firefighters, but are you fighting fires? If the fire has already burned past you and you're out there putting out stumps with a little water can where everything else is burned around it, is that fighting wildfires? Because that's not what most people envision is fighting wildfires. That's the Forest Service was doing. I'm not saying everybody, but I'm saying it was a problem. But the other thing is, all those people that are working on those fires, they have day jobs. They're supposed to be setting up stewardship projects, collaborating with the community on how to restore and thin more forests. But no, when it's wildfire season, they become a logistics specialist. They train to do that. They're spending more than half their time training and fighting wildfires instead of doing their jobs, which are fixing the forests that have created the problem because now they're all full of such inordinate amounts of fuel that they burn like powder kegs late in the summer when we get our dry lightning. These are forests that are supposed to have wildfire in them. They're not all supposed to burn to the ground. Forest Service should get out of firefighting. We should take the funds that the Forest Service has been spending over, I don't know what you want to average it at, last five years, 10 years, whatever. We should knock that down by 30, 40%, maybe more, do a little analysis, make that money available to the states and tribes to fight those fires. Let them build it up because they actually care about where they're at. A lot of these firefighters are not even from the areas they're fighting fires. So I would like the states to take charge in that. And I'd just like to give a shout out to the Washington State DNR and former commissioner, Hilary Franz. She worked really hard. to try to take control of that and get on initial attack. Because the Forest Service, quite frankly, they're incentivized to have bigger fires, become complex fires, build these camps, and do all these things. I know there are people in the Forest Service that I really care about and respect that are going to disagree with me. Some of them will agree with me, but they won't talk about it. But it's a problem. And we have a chance to totally disrupt that. OK, the other thing, the Forest Service does a lot of work on the ground trying to set up timber sales, set up stewardship projects, figure out where we should be managing, put their five-year plans together, do all this stuff. Well, if you go to places like British Columbia or other parts of the world, they have their state, federal, their land managers out there. And those land managers are in an oversight role. They are not in a specific actionable role. And the way I tell people this is like, that would be like the electrical inspector in your community or city or state or county that has to come look at your house while you're building it to inspect the electrical to make sure it was done right. but also they were responsible for doing two-thirds of the electrical work before they actually did the inspection. You're constantly waiting for them. You can't move your project. You can't sit there and go, okay, I'm waiting for inspection. That'd be painful enough, but you're waiting for them to schedule and do the work. And then they're constantly moving their people around, because they're trying to climb their own government corporate ladder and their government stages of government service levels that dictate not only what they make, but their retirement. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in here that's a problem. we should make the agency much smaller, much leaner in an oversight role, take a lot of those things like the NEPA work with all the specialists to do all that work and the public outreach. Let's have the Forest Service oversee that but have private contractors do that work. If we did that, the Forest Service was always struggling saying, we don't have enough money and we don't have enough people, okay? You don't need as much money to do that and you don't need as many people. And by the way, they were saying they couldn't hire people. At the same time, other agencies, the state, others, had plenty of applicants and quality people to do that work. So there's a lot of excuses out there because of the just size of the bureaucratic mess that's been created at the US Forest Service. So when we talk about selling land, I think we need to be talking about how do we manage the land that we have? I mean, how many people that go out there and hunt and fish and hike feel like our forests are in good condition, that they are healthy? I mean, nobody benefits from a 2 million acre wildfire that destroys ecosystems that we know through history never burnt that hot because we didn't have that much fuel out there in the forest. So you guys want to get all excited about us selling some public land. Which, you know, I like our land to be public, too. I'm a big proponent of public land. But why don't we get excited about the way we're managing that land? It's not being managed properly. And it hasn't been for a long time. And we need to get to work like there's a real problem, because there is. Because we haven't done what we need to do for 40 plus years. We continued to suppress fire, and we did nothing to manage that landscape. So the fuels grew up, and we kept putting out the fire. They got bigger and bigger. And now when they catch fire, we can't put them out. But where we've proven it, like the A to Z project on the Colville National Forest and the A to Z 2.0, which is going on right now, and other small projects, the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition helped collaborate and get done. We should be doing that at scale everywhere. We should identify these areas. And I'll tell you what. We don't want to touch the wilderness. We don't want to touch the places that are in the back country. We're talking about the front country, where we have roads already there. We've managed there in the past. Why not manage there now? Improve recreation. And the way the federal government, the Forest Service specifically, had everything siloed, they had their budget for Wilderness, trails, recreation, aquatics, timber, vegetation management, what they called that. They tried to change the words because timber was such a bad word. I don't really care about the language. We just need to get it right. But why wouldn't we go out and fix hiking trails, mountain bike trails, motorized trails, non-motorized trails, whatever kind of trails, while we're out there with the equipment doing the forest health treatment, thinning the forest, thinning the trees, fixing the roads? Like, everybody got on this tangent for a long time of decommissioning and obliterating roads because the roads were the problem. Well, newsflash, we need the roads to fight the fires. It doesn't mean that the roads have to stay open and people have to use them, but what we also found is when we left those roads alone, years and years and years of heavy rains and a little flooding led to more flooding and then we wash sediment into the creek. If we're in there using the roads every decade and staying on top of them, you get a little flood, you blade the material out of the ditch back up there. So now only the little sediment goes in the stream, it's limited to that. But if you let it keep going, It's going to all go in there. You go obliterate the roads and make that soil all loose and you get a big rainstorm. All that's going to go in the stream. So we know how to manage these things and we should manage them. And it shouldn't be a bad thing. And we can still have wilderness areas. We can still have non-motorized activity. I think we should have a new backcountry designation, including motorized backcountry. There should be places where people are able to take dirt bikes, side-by-sides, four-wheelers to the top of a mountain peak and enjoy the same view in a different place of the same type of view that you have from a wilderness area. Now, I don't want to be on a wilderness hike in the middle of nowhere and then hear a dirt bike on the ridge next door. You can separate these things. It doesn't have to be in the same place. And people aren't even asking for it. But we treat it like, oh, I want wilderness, so I hate motorized activity. There should be no motorized vehicles on federal lands. That's just not realistic. Why don't we try to create abundance, create more opportunity for each, and do that while we're out there managing the forest? Because we already have the equipment there. You can see I get a little animated about this because I start the more I start thinking about it, the more frustrated I get and. I just wish the people that had the passion for their public lands, for don't touch my public lands, and they probably go out there two or three times a year. I don't know how many of these people can see public lands or see Forest Service land from their homes or from their place of work, but I can. And I understand it. And I love the Forest Service lands. I love our national parks. I love those things. I want to keep them that way. We don't want to sell them, but we shouldn't have a few special interests that are able to lock everything up from a legal standpoint, and then nothing happens, and then we end up with this powder keg. If we're all concerned about the environment and climate change, I'll tell you, and some people are going to say, hey, Wildfire, that's a result of climate change. Okay, maybe it's exacerbated by climate change, but if you look at the map and you say wildfires caused by climate change, newsflash, then climate change is happening disproportionately on federal lands because that's where all the wildfires are. Why is that? Because we haven't been managing those lands. The private lands, that it's not nearly the same issue. Until you get into places where the public lands have been locked up and there weren't enough private lands to support the mill infrastructure there. So now the private lands, public lands, state lands, everything in those areas, they have to actually go out there just to pay to cut the trees down that need to come out. where if we had infrastructure, guess what? They're not going to have to pay for it. And they may even get paid for that material. So we've got a lot of work to do here. We've got a genuine opportunity to fix it. And I'm excited that we do. I just hope people start to realize that selling a million and a half acres, it sounds bad. That's nothing compared to managing the 640 million acres we have. So I think we should focus on that. And Look forward to the conversation that this generates. And we've got some guests coming up in future episodes. So that's gonna be really neat to start talking about these things with people from different perspectives. And I've got a couple of folks that retired from the Forest Service coming up in future episodes. So we'll be able to talk some of these things specifically, but appreciate you watching and engaging and look forward to making an impact on the way we manage our federal forests. Thanks. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. 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