Seeing Like a Publicist

Chapter 1, Seeing Like a Publicist, locates the origins of public relations alongside emerging environmental narratives at the beginning of the twentieth century. The United States Forest Service, a federal bureau established during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, represented a vision of nature as resource for development, at odds with the romantic spirit of wilderness preservationists such as John Muir. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot developed sophisticated mechanisms and messages to promote his commitment to a distinctly American culture of nature, qualifying and transforming the character of environmental information to the news-reading public in the process. Pinchot developed foundational concepts and practices of public relations that would leave deep grooves in the American experience of environmentalism.

Managing for Resilience? Examining Management Implications of Resilience in Southwestern National Forests

The United States Forest Service 2012 Planning Rule prioritizes making lands resilient to climate change. Although researchers have investigated the history of “resilience” and its multiple interpretations, few have examined perceptions or experiences of resource staff tasked with implementing resilience. We interviewed Forest Service staff in the Southwestern Region to evaluate how managers and planners interpret resilience as an agency strategy, execution of resilience in management, and climate change’s impact on perception of resilience. Interviewees identified resilience as a main driver of agency response to land management but, when applying the concept, experienced barriers including ambiguity; scale; management specificity versus broad, adaptive landscape approach; and lack of metrics or examples. Interviewees found restoring ecosystem function to promote resilience while planning for future changed landscapes difficult. They desired landscape-scale collaboration to understand how to operationalize the resilience directive. Our findings revealed obstacles and opportunities for resilience in a managerial context.

Lichen species as element bioindicators for air pollution in the eastern United States of America

Lichen element (N, S, metals) indicators of local air pollution load (a widely used technique) are recommended for five predefined regions covering central and southern parts of the eastern United States. The final recommendations integrate the advice of regional lichenologists, information from regional floras, and species abundance data from a United States Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program (FIA) lichen database for 11 of the 21 covered eastern states. Recommended species were frequent in their region, easy for nonspecialists to distinguish in the field after training, and easy to handle using clean protocols. Regression models of species abundance in FIA plots from five southeastern states vs. climate, air pollution (both from a regional lichen response model) and type of nearby landcover (from the National Land Cover Database) identified species’ environmental limitations. Punctelia rudecta is recommended for cooler forested uplands of all regions, with three Physcia species combined and Punctelia missouriensis for isolated woodlands or urban areas of three regions. Parmotrema hypotropum and P. hypoleucinum combined (weak environmental limitation) or P. perforatum. and P. subrigidum combined (limited in more polluted areas) are recommended for warmer Coastal Plains in two regions each. Additional species are recommended for single regions. Each species must be quantitatively evaluated in each region, to demonstrate indication reliability in practice and to calculate element data conversions between species for region-wide bioindication.

Historical patterns of wildfire ignition sources in California ecosystems

State and federal agencies have reported fire causes since the early 1900s, explicitly for the purpose of helping land managers design fire-prevention programs. We document fire-ignition patterns in five homogenous climate divisions in California over the past 98 years on state Cal Fire protected lands and 107 years on federal United States Forest Service lands. Throughout the state, fire frequency increased steadily until a peak c. 1980, followed by a marked drop to 2016. There was not a tight link between frequency of ignition sources and area burned by those sources and the relationships have changed over time. Natural lightning-ignited fires were consistently fewer from north to south and from high to low elevation. Throughout most of the state, human-caused fires dominated the record and were positively correlated with population density for the first two-thirds of the record, but this relationship reversed in recent decades. We propose a mechanistic multi-variate model of factors driving fire frequency, where the importance of different factors has changed over time. Although ignition sources have declined markedly in recent decades, one notable exception is powerline ignitions. One important avenue for future fire-hazard reduction will be consideration of solutions to reduce this source of dangerous fires.

Bailouts and the Preservation of Competition: The Case of the Federal Timber Contract Payment Modification Act

We estimate the value of competition in United States Forest Service (USFS) timber auctions, in the context of the Reagan administration's bailout of firms that faced substantial losses on existing contracts. We use a model with endogenous entry by asymmetric firms, allowing survivors to respond to the exit of bailed-out firms by entering more auctions and for these marginal entrants to have lower values than firms that would choose to enter in any event, a selective entry effect. Observed asymmetries and selective entry contribute to us finding that the bailout may have increased USFS revenues in subsequent auctions quite substantially. (JEL D44, H81, H82, L73, Q23)