[RWG] FIRE 07 Great Basin and Southwest conditions Costs for restoration and management Plan? Re: Costs for restoration of arid Western public lands, for fires & weeds

[Wayne Tyson]

What do you mean by "opening bid?"  What are the sources for the figure?

Please respect the convention of maintaining the discussion thread on 
each message, and retaining the original list addressees so that all 
may participate and no one need search their back emails for relevant 
text.  I suggest that we all use a consistent and descriptive subject 
line, so that future review of the thread can be facilitated by 
clicking on the "Subject" head on the email program.  (I selected 
FIRE 07, but any general, descriptive, or relevant subject-line lead 
will do.)

Sincerely,

WT

At 07:36 PM 10/15/2007, you wrote:
>Dear Wayne and All,
>
>Thanks for your email.
>
>The opening bid is $10 billion a year for 20 years.
>
>That's the price, for say, 100 million severely degraded acres of public
>lands in the Great Basin and arid Southwest, times a minimum of $2,000
>per acre---and that's just to get the intershrub understory
>kick-started, and replenish the arid-land phosphorus-mining deficit that
>the cattle and sheep have created, over the last 100-150 years.
>
>To get the rarer native species restored, like the native legumes,
>Indian paintbrush family, the rarer herbaceous species of the sunflower,
>that help hold the arid non-forest ecosystems intact, it could cost as
>much as $60,000 per acre.
>
>Doing ecological restoration of our western arid public lands, would be
>the best permanent fix for the exotic weed and the fire issues that we
>have in the Great Basin.
>
>The cheap alternative that the Federal government agencies have been
>doing for decades, however, is to sow millions of pounds of perennial
>exotic invasive seeds, instead of restoring the local native species,
>like the wonderful results that can be accomplished at
>http://www.ecoseeds.com/greatbasin.html
>
>Sincerely,  Craig Dremann, Redwood City, CA (650) 325-7333

Dear Craig and all:

Well, this is quite a contribution! I'm going to try to take on one 
issue at a time, as that's about all my poor brain can handle.

I'm going to advance the proposition that more direct anthropogenic 
effects may be more important than those which might affect climate 
change, and that changing our habits will have many other benefits 
beyond climate change.

I don't have good data about Great Basin and Southwest fire history, 
but even if I did, the standard measurements might not be adequate 
for any kind of real understanding of the phenomena involved, and 
might even be misleading. Data over a long period would be necessary 
to see any trends, and the complexity of the issue might still be 
more confusing that revelatory.

But, for starters, I would like to see the theoretical foundations 
and the data from which the " . . . $10 billion a year for 20 years . 
. . " was derived. I don't necessarily doubt those figures, I just 
want to know how they were constructed.

I will attempt to respond to other points under different subheadings.

WT

At 10:13 AM 10/15/2007, Craig Dremann wrote:
>Dear Penny, Wayne and All,
>
>Weeds and climate change may be only two of the issues causing the fires
>in the Great Basin, and the huge fires experienced in the last 10 years,
>and the Great Basin and desert Southwest fires will continue to be
>fueled, by at least six separate reasons:
>
>1.) FEDERAL MANAGEMENT & LACK OF MONEY FROM CONGRESS. A large percentage
>of the lands in the Great Basin where the fires are occurring, are
>Federally managed, and Congress currently only gives BLM a few cents per
>acre per year, to restore native ecosystems or conduct exotic weed
>management.
>
>Perhaps someone on one of these lists can give us the FY 2008 per-acre
>figures?
>
>The costs to restore the Great Basin native ecosystems, to make them
>more or less "fireproof" would probably be about $10 billion a year for
>20 years.
>
>It's an issue of delayed costs of ecological restoration and management,
>of not making any ecological restoration or weed management investments
>over the last 100 years, and then the ecosystem is so broken down, that
>all of a sudden, you have to spend a huge amount of money to save it
>from going over the cliff.
>
>2.) GRAZING CAUSING EMPTY SPACES - Cattle and sheep grazing have created
>huge empty spaces the Great Basin and Southwestern arid ecosystems,
>where the perennial grasses used to be, like what my 1997 Megatransect
>measured at http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html or you can see
>photos of at http://www.ecoseeds.com/desertgrass.html
>
>3.) EMPTY SPACES GETTING EXOTIC-FILLED - Those cattle and sheep created
>empty spaces in the ecosystems getting filled by annual fire-fuel
>exotics, like cheatgrass in the Great Basin or Saharan mustard in the
>Southwest.  See some spectacular pictures showing how nicely the Saharan
>mustard burns at http://www.ecoseeds.com/mustards.globeARIZ.html
>
>4.) EMPTY SPACES & DESERTIFICATION - More cattle and sheep-created empty
>spaces and bare soil in arid areas, and less vegetation causing
>desertification of the soils, and ultimately less rainfall.
>
>There's a MIT professor, Prof. Elfatih Eltahir, doing a very interesting
>study of the relationship between arid-lands vegetation and annual
>rainfall, at http://web.mit.edu/eltahir/www/dhofar/content/fdi.htm
>
>5.) PERPETUAL DROUGHT - Changes in the weather patterns, like perpetual
>droughts, that you can see on the national weekly drought map at
>http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html -- perpetual droughts
>combined with continued sheep and cattle grazing, causes more bare
>areas, creating perfect spots for those exotic annual weeds to colonize.
>
>6.) LONG-TERM ARID LAND GRAZING MAKING THE SOILS TOO POOR, where only
>the exotic annuals can survive?  Long-term arid-lands grazing can drop
>soil nutient levels below what the native local plants need, to survive
>as seedlings. Arid lands have naturally-low nutrient levels to begin
>with, but what about the phosphorus that is removed by the sheep and
>cattle grazing, and is taken out of the ecosystem in their bones?
>
>When I measure soil phosphorus all over the arid West, the mineral has
>been mined out of the soil by 100-150 years of grazing, with the sheep
>and cattle having walked away with it, leaving the soils too poor to
>sustain a native ecosystem---producing lands where only the exotic
>annual weeds like cheatgrass and Saharan mustard can now survive.
>
>For example, the BLM-managed Mojave desert of California, for the whole
>rainfall year of 2006-2007, got less than 1/2 inch of
>precipitation---but BLM is still signing long-term sheep and cattle
>grazing leases, despite the extreme drought, low vegetation production
>even in normal rainfall years, low soil nutrient levels and the
>objections of ecologists.
>
>Unless we start making a serious investment in restoring our Federally
>managed lands, and make progress with these issues, like soil nutrient
>levels, and start filling in the bare-empty spaces with local native
>plants, we may produce another "Empty Quarter" like what they have on
>the Arabian peninsula. See pics at
>http://www.confluence.org/confluence.php?lat=19&lon=43
>
>You can read a protest of three of the 2007 California BLM leases from
>an ecological and phosphorus-perspective, at
>http://www.ecoseeds.com/blmprotest.html
>
>Sincerely,  Craig Dremann, Redwood City, CA (650) 325-7333