Secretary Jewell announces wildlife and climate studies at Southwest Climate Science Center

    Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced the Interior’s Southwest Climate Science Center is awarding nearly a million dollars to universities and other partners for research to guide managers of parks, refuges and other cultural and natural resources in planning how to help species and ecosystems adapt to climate change.
    “These climate studies are designed to help address regional concerns associated with climate change, providing a pathway to enhancing resilience and supporting local community needs,” Jewell said. “The impacts of climate change are vast and complex, so studies like these are critical to help ensure that our nation’s responses are rooted in sound science.”

    The six funded studies will focus on how climate change will affect natural resources and management actions that can be taken to help offset such change. They include:

• Studying the link between drought and tree death following fires in the Southwest to better estimate the effect of fires on Southwestern forests in the future.

• Understanding the joint impacts of cool-season precipitation and increasing spring temperatures on snowpack declines and runoff to help address future water management challenges. 

• Examining the impact of increased storms and sea-level rise on connected coastal habitats to support future planning and conservation of nearshore natural resources.

• Identifying a chronology of extreme storms, especially atmospheric rivers, over the past 30 years and their effect on the Sierra Nevada and western Great Basin ecosystems.

• Providing customized climate data from across the Southwest region to inform decision-making by private landowners, public agencies and natural resources managers.

• Assessing climate change vulnerability and adaptation in the Great Basin

The press account also includes this:

The eight DOI Climate Science Centers form a national network, and are coordinated by the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center,located at the headquarters of Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey. CSCs and LCCs have been created under Interior’s strategy to address the impacts of climate change on America’s waters, land, and other natural and cultural resources. Together, Interior’s CSCs and LCCs will assess the impacts of climate change and other landscape-scale stressors that typically extend beyond the borders of any single national wildlife refuge, national park or Bureau of Land Management unit and will identify strategies to ensure that resources across landscapes are resilient in the face of climate change.

Jeez, this cowboy is behind on all this stuff.  8 CSCs and 22 LCCs?  Go here for more info on Climate Science Centers. And just what is a Landscape Conservation Cooperative? 

LCCs are applied conservation science partnerships with two main functions. The first is to provide the science and technical expertise needed to support conservation planning at landscape scales – beyond the reach or resources of any one organization. Through the efforts of in-house staff and science-oriented partners, LCCs are generating the tools, methods and data managers need to design and deliver conservation using the Strategic Habitat Conservation (SHC) approach. The second function of LCCs is to promote collaboration among their members in defining shared conservation goals. With these goals in mind, partners can identify where and how they will take action, within their own authorities and organizational priorities, to best contribute to the larger conservation effort. LCCs don’t place limits on partners; rather, they help partners to see how their activities can "fit" with those of other partners to achieve a bigger and more lasting impact.

More info on LCCs and SHCs (uh, Strategic Habitat Conservation) is here.

One can only conclude there is a huge demand for more government plans, and this system has been created to give those plans to us good and hard.

I've noticed that over the last decade or so the terms "landscape" and "landscape planning" have entered government speak, sparingly at first and now its in virtually every government document.  Reading about the LCCs last night sent me on a journey I really didn't want to take.

What the hell do these terms mean?

Follow me through Wikipedia and you'll find the definition of landscape.  Then you can go to landscape planning where you will discover:

Landscape planners are concerned with the 'health' of the landscape, just as doctors are concerned with bodily health. This analogy can be taken further. Medical doctors advise both on the health of individuals and on matters of public health. When individuals take actions injurious to their own health this is regarded as a private matter. But if they take actions injurious to public health, these actions are properly regulated by law. The collective landscape is a public good which should be protected and enhanced by legislation and public administration. If, for example, mineral extraction has a damaging impact on the landscape, this is a proper field for intervention. Negative impacts on the landscape could include visual impacts, ecological impacts, hydrological impacts and recreational impacts. As well as protecting existing public goods, societies are responsible for the creation of new public goods. This can be done by positive landscape planning. There are, for example, many former mineral workings (e.g. the Norfolk Broads) which have become important public goods. Medical doctors are trained in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry etc. before becoming practitioners. Landscape doctors are trained in geomorphology, hydrology, ecology etc. before becoming practitioners in design and planning.

So the next time you’re in a meeting with government planners, just think of it as an appointment with a doctor…whose about to give you a rectal exam.

You will also notice that landscape planning for energy "is concerned with designs and plans to mitigate the impact" of energy projects, landscape planning for recreation "is concerned with mitigating the environmental impact" of recreation, and landscape planning for mineral extraction is to "minimize" its impact.

That doesn't seem to be the case when it comes to forestry or agriculture.  Notice in both instances the planning is for "non-timber objectives" or "non-food objectives" such as scenery, wildlife, water quality, biodiversity and other "environmental goods."

Of interest too is a reference to NEPA:

The principles of landscape planning are now incorporated in various types of legislation and policy documents. In America, the National Environmental Policy Act was influenced by the work of Ian McHarg on Environmental impact assessment.

Go to the link on McHarg and you will find this:

 In 1971 McHarg delivered a speech at the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Portland, Oregon, called "Man: Planetary Disease". In the speech he asserted that, due to the views of man and nature that have infiltrated all of western culture, we are not guaranteed survival. Of man, McHarg said, "He treats the world as a storehouse existing for his delectation; he plunders, rapes, poisons, and kills this living system, the biosphere, in ignorance of its workings and its fundamental value." ^[4] To this end man is a "planetary disease", who has lived with no regard for nature.

Aren't you pleased to know the philosophy that "influenced" NEPA?

And there we go with the disease thing again.  Apparently we must go to our government doctors to be cured.  Just think of your Forest Service or BLM landscape planning as ObamaCare for cowboys.

There is a cure though.  Please read The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future. by Randal O'Toole. This whole "journey" has made me sick so I need to visit Dr. O'Toole immediately.