When I was asked in the spring of 1993 to edit a newsletter on biodiversity, I said, ³Iıd love to. Whatıs biodiversity?² Being new to the Resources Agency, I wasnıt sure. Before long, however, I was crowing about the beauty of biodiversity to my friends and trying not to feel superior when they, too, asked, ³Sounds great, but what is it?²
California Biodiversity Council chair Doug Wheeler, Californiaıs Secretary for Resources and Ed Hastey, state director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), wanted to start a Council newsletter. The BLM and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (thanks to Roger Patterson and Jeff McCracken) put up the money to get the publication going, and Pat Foulk at the BLM put her considerable talents to work laying out the first issue on her Mac. Andy McLeod of the Resources Agency provided guidance and advice. Over the years, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) has contributed enormously with mailing list services and postage, and many other Council agencies have kicked in with support in various ways.
After five years of participating in Council activities and writing the newsletter, I look at nature differently. I see that each piece of the natural world is part of a big picture, from the tiniest organism to human beings. I understand that it is up to each of us to protect biodiversity, whether or not we work in the natural resources field.
I appreciate what the Council has accomplished pulling together local, state, and federal administrators of natural resources policy in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration. As I see it, the Councilıs greatest achievement is its ability to bridge barriers among governmental departments, boards, and agencies.
Each entity has its own agenda to push and differing political influences to deal with. But the fellowship the Council engenders helps create a congenial, focused atmosphere for members to get acquainted and communicate informally about resource issues of mutual concern. The Council has no power to make regulations; itıs strictly a forum, and thatıs the beauty of it. Thanks to the commitment and support of Wheeler, Hastey, and the DWR, the newsletter flourished, and the Council developed from a handful of members into an entity with more than three dozen agencies and the University of California. Behind the scenes, staffers like Joanne Cemo of the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Susan Cochrane of the Department of Fish and Game, Carl Rountree of the BLM, Janine Stenback and Rebecca Fawver of the Resources Agency, Mike Chapel of the U.S. Forest Service, and many others keep the Council running smoothly, in addition to their regular jobs at member agencies. The talented team at CERES, the stateıs excellent environmental web site, puts biodiversity programs on-line. (Kudos to Sheila Hurst, Effie Milionis, Deanne DiPietro, Lowell Kepics, and their leader, Gary Darling.)
Wheeler and Hastey believe in developing policy from the bottom up, listening to people and giving them a say in creating policies that affect their communities. The newsletter reflected this attitude in its focus on local projects and community interviews.
Editing California Biodiversity News was a labor of love. From issue No. 1 until issue No. 20, my last as editor, the newsletter was the most significant task my job entailed. I am grateful for having had the opportunity, and I hope that it will be published for years to come, evolving and changing with each editor, as it should.
New Hope for the Tahoe Basin
In the basin surrounding beautiful Lake Tahoe, a deadly disaster is waiting to happen. Years of drought weakened the Basin's forest allowing bark beetle attacks on those weakened trees. As much as 30 percent of the trees have died as a result of the drought and insect attack--leaving dangerous amounts of tinder-dry fuel that need only a lightning strike or a careless match to send a catastrophic fire exploding through the Basin.
The fires that ravaged Yellowstone National Park a decade ago remind us of the danger facing Tahoe today. From June 23 to September 11, 1988, raging fires charred 1.6 million acres of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. In Yellowstone, as in the Tahoe Basin, forest fires had been suppressed for years. That summer, a huge inferno roared through the nation's oldest national park. Walls of flame shooting hundreds of feet into the air created huge firestorms that generated their own 80-mile-per-hour winds.
In their wake the flames left only black, skeletal trees, stumps and ash. More than 10,000 firefighters fought the blaze, at a cost of over $120 million.
“In the unique but fragile Tahoe Basin, such a conflagration would be even more disastrous than it was in Yellowstone National Park,” comments Resources Agency Secretary, Doug Wheeler. “With development throughout the area, the potential exists for property damage far worse than that caused by the devastating Oakland Hills fire of 1990. And as painful as it is to consider a High Sierra landscape blackened by fire, it is even worse to imagine the damage caused by rain and melting snow flushing hundreds of tons of ash, mud and charred debris into the clear waters of Lake Tahoe,” Wheeler said.
Under ordinary conditions, nature takes care of the problem of dead and dying trees. Frequent small wildfires sweep through the forest, burning away dead wood as it accumulates without harming the live trees. These periodic natural burns thin out brush and cause new saplings to grow from the pine cones that open with the heat, liberating and scattering their seeds as a result of the flames. Under ordinary conditions, the forest depends on fire for regrowth.
Changes to the natural pattern
Civilization changed this natural pattern by suppressing fire. Tahoe's pine forest was almost completely clear-cut 100 years ago to supply wood for nearby gold mining. Today, after nearly 80 years of fire suppression, most of the second-growth fir trees are a uniform century old, without younger ones growing to take their place. An unhealthy amount of dead wood has accumulated on the forest floor. The problem is severe enough to bring federal, state and local agencies together to find a solution to improve the health of the ecosystem without worsening water and air quality.
Simply burning the dead and dying forest material causes air and water quality problems. Collecting and transporting it long distances out of the forest also adds to air quality problems with increased truck and equipment emissions. It also damages and compacts the forest floor, while constructing new roads causes erosion and increases water run-off.
“Now, however, technological advances offer economical and practical solutions to improve the health of Tahoe's forest and create useful byproducts at the same time, ” states Wheeler. “;Instead of relying on cutting big trees for lumber, these new technologies use debris, smaller materials and dead trees -- the major part of the hazardous fuel problem. Healthy trees can be left intact and to thrive because they no longer compete for resources. ”
Introducing Biomass Programs
For years, residual wood, along with agricultural waste like rice straw and orchard prunings, have been burned to generate steam and produce electricity. Prior to the electric utility industry restructuring in March 1998, biomass facilities had contracts to sell their electricity at firm rates. These rates were significantly higher then the price of electricity in todayıs newly restructured marketplace.
For a pilot program to be cost-effective in the Tahoe Basin, newly developed “mini-biomass plants” will be trucked into the forest. Bringing the plant to the source of fuel lowers costs and minimizes damage to the environment caused by extensive trucking operations. The residual wood can be turned into ethanol and other chemical byproducts. Even small trees and scrap wood can be turned into useful wood products, and the remainder can be chipped into mulch, a valuable fertilizer and ground cover that can be used to prevent erosion.
To demonstrate the potential of newly developing technology, the Energy Commission and other state agencies with biomass programs are planning to host a trade show in the Tahoe Basin this summer that will highlight ways to convert forest waste into useful products in an environmentally compatible and economically feasible way.
A number of state agencies are supporting the project, including the California Energy Commission, the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the Integrated Waste Management Board, the Air and the Water Resources Control Boards, the Department of Conservation, the Trade and Commerce Agency and Cal-EPA. In addition, 23 agencies and organizations have come together to form Tahoe Re-Green, a project to remove as much fuel as possible from the 206,000-acre Lake Tahoe Basin before a disastrous wildfire results. The U. S. Department of Energy is being asked to help with this summer's trade show, recognizing that a successful project piloted in Tahoe Basin will be a model for state and national forest lands throughout the United States.
Tahoe ReGreen
The Tahoe ReGreen project has proven to be an excellent example of the application of biomass principles. Richard A. Wilson, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) was one of the co-founders of the program which focuses on the removal of dead and dying trees in the Tahoe Basin.
“We are very proud of the fact that none of the tons of material that has been removed from the basin has gone into landfills, ” said Wilson. “This material has been used for garden chips, co-generation power, soil stabilization, and composting operations just to name a few.”
That soil stabilization project is also an example of multi-agency cooperation within the Tahoe ReGreen program. The 1997 winter floods caused several large mudslides that blocked Highway 50 east of Sacramento. CalTrans, working in cooperation with the Tahoe ReGreen program used Tahoe Basin biomass material to stabilize the soil along the road sides.
“We simply must remove these thousands of dead and dying trees which present such an extraordinary fire hazard to the Tahoe Basin,” adds Wilson. “Through the Tahoe ReGreen project, we can also make good use of the material being removed from the basin. It is truly a win-win situation.”
New Technologies for Wildland Fuels Management
New technologies in biomass harvest equipment and in biomass energy production technology focus fuel reduction on smaller materials and dead trees that comprise the major part of the hazardous fuel problem. Typically, biomass materials are removed from the wildlands and transported, at significant cost, to large-scale biomass plants to produce electricity. Reflective Energies of Mission Viejo combines small biomass “gasifiers” and “microturbine-generator” power plants that bring clean-burning, low cost, portable power plants to the biomass. An entire microturbine plant can be mounted on a flatbed trailer.
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) will provide several pilot project sites, such as abandoned orange orchards in Riverside County and fire-prone stands in the Tahoe Basin for testing this technology. Microturbine systems and other small-scale “distributed energy” systems offer the promise of a cost-effective and cleaner alternative to controlled burns or piling and burning.
The portable plants use materials from wildlands, orchards and croplands, as well as biogas from animal manure and landfills. Since the fuel is low-cost or free, the electricity produced is competitive with other sources and qualifies for “green” energy special pricing. The microturbine generator project team includes Catalytica Combustion Systems Inc., a world leader in such combustion systems, and EnergyWorks, a PacifiCorp/Bechtel Corporation that is marketing small biomass gasifiers internationally. Several California universities are involved in the development.
Public and private partnerships, as well as, technological advancements are giving Tahoe new hope in its race to prevent disaster.