This is a guiding principle in the world of environmental regulation, where state and federal officials do their best to protect and maintain natural resources that regularly thwart those efforts. But sometimes, it works out anyway.
This was not part of the plan. (Photo via the Virginia Mercury)
That’s the case this year in Virginia, where wildfires have torched nearly 20,000 acres of vegetation and wildlife habitat since the middle of February. In the immediate aftermath, that seems like a tragedy. But it may prove beneficial in the long run, experts told the Virginia Mercury.
“In the public’s eye, it is a natural disaster,” said Michael Downey, assistant director for wildfire mitigation and prevention at the Virginia Department of Forestry. “But it does play an important role in the ecosystem.”
In fact, forest blazes — whether from unplanned wildfires or pre-planned burns managed by wildlife agencies — provide a host of benefits, from reducing the spread of invasive species to clearing vegetation to make room for new growth. When taller trees burn, sunlight can more easily reach the forest floor, creating a mosaic of old and new foliage that attracts an array of animals and organisms, diversifying the ecosystem over time, said Lane Gibbons, fire management specialist at Shenandoah National Park.
“If you kind of think of it in terms of investing, you don’t invest all of your money in one thing. That’s too much of a gamble,” said Gibbons. “You really want a diverse portfolio. It works very [similarly] in forests. If you have more of a diverse portfolio — tall versus short, young versus old — then you have a greater variation of types of organisms using those resources.”
This fire — a prescribed burn — was part of the plan. (Photo by Sarah Vogelsong/Virginia Mercury)
It’s not all sunshine and baby trees, of course. Wildfires pose a number of risks to wildlife, including habitat displacement and smoke inhalation. Blazes are particularly dangerous for box turtles and other small amphibians that can’t move fast enough to escape the encroaching flames. Larger species can flee the area, but roaming to and from impacted areas has grown more difficult as development continues to encroach on wooded habitats, said Misty Boos, U.S. conservation policy manager at Wildlands Network.
“This underscores the importance of protecting large, connected landscapes and wildlife corridors so species can move and adapt,” she said. “It also demonstrates the importance of wildlife coexistence.”
Residents in Ohio are doing their best to coexist with a fracking operation in Salt Fork State Park, where serene night skies and peaceful solitude have been replaced by rumbling trucks, new cell towers and power lines, and periodic flares from injection wells, the Ohio Capital Journal reported.
“I’m past the sadness,” said Terri Sabo, who’s lived in a ranch home next to the park since 1983. “I’m into acceptance now. And it’s gonna happen.”
An earlier stage of grief. (Photo by Graham Stokes/for the Ohio Capital Journal)
Fracking — the process of extracting oil or gas by injecting high-pressure liquid into the ground — has been legal in Ohio’s state parks since 2011 under a law signed by then-Gov. John Kasich. But only technically. Per the law, drilling projects could not proceed without a signoff from a newly created Oil and Gas Commission, whose members were appointed by Kasich — except that Kasich never appointed any, essentially preventing the law from taking effect.
That changed in 2022, when Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law a bill that revamped the permitting process by requiring the state Department of Natural Resources to approve drilling projects on public lands, including parks. The policy took effect last April, allowing oil and gas companies to submit bids for a number of leases on state-owned property. The now-functional commission awarded those contracts in February, granting exclusive drilling rights at Salt Fork to Infinity Natural Resources, a West Virginia-based corporation that placed a $58.4 million bid for two parcels of land.
Sabo cried when she heard the news.
“It’s just a very sad day,” she said in February. “My biggest immediate concern, obviously, is the loss of the park to (reindustrialization). I’ve really seen it grow and come back.”
A “before” photo of regrowth in Wisconsin. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
Regrowth is a struggle in a state forest in Wisconsin, where shoreline trees have been repeatedly harvested in what residents say is a violation of mandatory best management practices for logging. An international auditing firm validated those claims last year but said the culling did not violate the Department of Natural Resource’s “flexible” rules, allowing the agency to maintain its certification as a responsible steward of state forests, per the Wisconsin Examiner.
Under the state’s best practices, environmental regulators are required to maintain a certain level of tree density within a 100-foot buffer of the water. The policy does not preclude harvesting trees near the shoreline, but it does recommend leaving most of them in place to minimize erosion and provide habitat for plants and animals. Best management practices are generally guidelines, but they’re mandatory for logging projects on public lands, as well as for certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, an international nonprofit that helps determine whether timber was harvested responsibly.
The department’s alleged infractions were first reported in 2020 by Ardis Berghoff and John Schwarzmann, who noticed bare spots near the water during a hike in the Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest. The pair filed a complaint with the DNR after observing similar conditions at nine lakes; after receiving no reply, they escalated their concerns to the agency’s third-party auditing group. A final report, issued after a series of decisions and appeals, sided with the state, claiming that Berghoff and Schwarzmann had been “confused” when they stumbled upon a previously unmentioned “equipment exclusion zone” rather than the shoreline buffer.
Unsatisfied, Berghoff and Schwarzmann took their case to a second auditing firm, which eventually concluded that sure, the state may have removed too many trees, but it doesn’t matter under best management practices, which are intended only “to provide flexible guidance.”
Just checking the legal definition of “flexible guidance.” (Photo by Getty Images)
“When the [Forest Stewardship Council] standard refers to such documents as ‘mandatory,’ it is ASI’s opinion that this does not turn a set of flexible guidance into a set of clear, technically specific, performance-based minimum requirements,” reads a public summary of the report by Assurance Services International. “The [practices] remain flexible — and in several cases vague — guidance, so the need to ‘meet [them]’ in order to comply with [the council’s policies] is simply the need to consider them, as the flexible guidance that they are.”
And that’s basically all we know about that, because everyone involved with the audit was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that precluded media interviews. (Only the Department of Natural Resources, a state agency required to comply with public records laws, declined to do so. As such, the agency has no information.) A spokeswoman for the auditing firm said the non-disclosure is standard and designed to protect client information and business interests. But environmental groups see it more as a blatant attempt to hide whatever machinations led to the conclusion that state management practices are nothing but toothless suggestions.
“The idea of secrecy to protect trade secrets, it’s imbecilic, it’s bulls—t,” said Dave Zaber, an environmental consultant with years of professional experience in Wisconsin’s Northwoods region. “You need to prove you need secrecy rather than everyone gets it. And with that kind of policy, you have to assume that there is damage being done that’s not being seen.”
