For people who joined the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in its infancy fifteen years ago, the present carries a resonant echo of the past. As I write, I am looking at a 1990 membership plea by AFSEEE founder Jeff DeBonis during the George H.W. Bush administration.

“In just the last few months, AFSEEE has been contacted by many individuals in different parts of the country who wanted more information on what their rights are and how they could proceed to stand up for the resources they work with—and yet still be protected from reprisal,” wrote DeBonis, AFSEEE director and a U.S. Forest Service timber planner who had spent a dozen years with the agency.

“Our Forest Service members are the people who work long hours every day to protect and preserve OUR lands,” he added. “They have watched the land being slowly destroyed by the same agencies formed to protect it. In other words, they are sick and tired of watching their hard work to preserve public lands being destroyed by the very agency they work for. They helped me form AFSEEE to forge a coalition to work within the Forest Service and change things for the better.”

DeBonis was hailed as the Lech Walesa and Vaclev Havel of the Forest Service, waging a crusade against repression and trying to reform an agenda long dominated by timber production. He and other dissidents circulated copies of the Inner Voice—AFSEEE’s sounding board for whistleblowers—to each of the 30,000 Forest Service employees.

It was DeBonis’s original, albeit idealistic, dream to birth an unstoppable movement that would make the need for groups like AFSEEE—now known as Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics—obsolete within a decade. But given the reality of land management in the United States, the fact is that today this organization is in no position to declare “mission accomplished.”

According to Jeff Ruch, executive director of a sister organization to FSEEE called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in Washington, D.C., the new millennium has not, despite its once-promising potential, brought forth a golden age of liberty and enlightenment for stewards of the natural world.

During the Clinton years, PEER received an average of three calls a day from federal and state employees, mostly in natural resource fields, who were concerned about violations of environmental law inside their agencies. A proportionate number of Forest Service workers turned to FSEEE. But since this Bush administration came into power, that number has grown.

“The biggest difference isn’t just the increase of total numbers, which is itself significant,” Ruch says. “The most dramatic indicator is that the complaints are coming from people with higher [government service] levels. Under Clinton, we routinely heard from Park Service biologists, for example, who were being pressured. Now it is park superintendents and deputy regional directors and other high-end managers who are being squeezed. I see the same trend in other agencies.”

Ruch says what’s troubling is that managers in key jobs where ethical stewardship is crucial are either being silenced or becoming so frustrated that they are leaving government service altogether. Former Montana Representative Pat Williams says that during his nine terms, once-routine oversight hearings on ways that public lands were being despoiled to accommodate industry—often starring whistleblowers—have turned rare in the face of unprecedented pressure from the timber, mining and energy industries.

But, Williams says, the role of whistleblowers exercising their free speech, as America attempts to seed democracy in foreign nations, has never been more important at home.

During the early 1990s, Tom Devine, the senior legal counselor for the Government Accountability Project, authored The Whistleblower’s Survival Guide: Courage Without Martyrdom, which spelled out the rewards and liabilities of going public.

Ironically, it was one anonymous Justice Department employee working for the very office in charge of safeguarding civil rights who stated the sobering truth: “Suffering through whistleblower retaliation teaches you a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses, about what really matters in life, about who your friends are and about what human beings are capable of doing to each other in even the most civilized of settings. It is a life-altering experience.”

DeBonis is living proof. His defining career move began when he was asked to rubber-stamp a proposed timber sale on Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. After suggesting that adjustments were needed in order to comply with environmental laws, he was ordered instead to look the other way and expedite the sale by ignoring the science and re-writing an environmental assessment.

Although DeBonis complied with his superior’s demands, he kept a copy of his original conclusion and leaked it to the public, which nearly got him fired for insubordination. His defiance ignited a revolt among the rank and file. It led to public acknowledgment that the Forest Service’s timber program was unsustainable, ecologically damaging and a drain on the treasury. In the end, DeBonis left the Forest Service and founded FSEEE.

In recent years, with controversies involving timber management, wildfire prevention, endangered species recovery and a host of other issues, agency scientists have been told they can voice their opinions only with the approval of their superiors.

Forest Service employees who came into the agency propelled by a genuine love for the resources they are charged with stewarding have been criticized for being advocates of wildlife, wilderness and habitat.

“I don’t view advocacy as being at odds with scientific objectivity. I think we want passionate people in government who believe they are acting in the public interest,” Ruch says. “Rachel Carson raised the issue with DDT, which was having a devastating and insidious impact on nature that the public wasn’t aware of. In my mind, whistleblowers are people who, for the most part, are on the inside disclosing information that is otherwise not publicly available.”

What is the atmosphere like today in land management agencies? Insiders and observers say that morale among conservation-minded civil servants has never been lower.

“The Forest Service is in trouble, politically, economically, ethically and leadership-wise,” says Tom Kovalicky, longtime supervisor of the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho. Kovalicky was a mentor to both DeBonis and Gloria Flora, whose rebellion against local harassment of public employees on the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest during the late 1990s is now almost legendary.

Together, environmental laws and scientifically informed management mean nothing unless those overseeing the administration of resource protection step forward and speak up when they see those things subverted, Kovalicky says.

What are the tangible implications for career civil service employees in the field? “You need only count the ways,” says Ruch. “Apart from the struggle whistleblowers face today, accountability is very much an ongoing battle and things are uneven in the balancing test between environmental protection and accommodating the wishes of industry. Congress does almost no oversight anymore and a large part of that is due to regime change.”

Today, world events and the state of the nation have caused us all to wonder aloud what “radical” means. Is it radical to demand honesty and integrity from those in charge of safeguarding the environment?

I think back to a recent conversation with Andy Stahl, the executive director of FSEEE, about the culture of whistleblowing in America. “Is it a problem of evil people, or is it one of an evil institutional system?” he asks. “I’ve seen some of each, but more often than not what I’ve seen are boring people acting stupidly and ignorantly because of the institutions they work for. We the people in part made these institutions by condoning the way they do business, and now it will be up to us to bring about meaningful change. In a democracy, people shouldn’t have to worry about losing their jobs for speaking the truth.”