The death of a friend or loved one evokes a cascade of emotions, beginning with denial and progressing through anger, bargaining (“I promise to be a better person if…”), depression and finally, to acceptance. The death of an agency’s mission has the same effect on its employees.

The U.S. Forest Service’s fifty-year-old raison d’etre of supplying timber products for the nation died in June, 1985, although few within the agency realized it then. At that time, Dr. Russell Lande, a world-class population geneticist, produced a new scientific analysis of the northern spotted owl. His paper demonstrated that most, if not all, of the owl’s remaining ancient forest habitat must be protected to ensure this creature’s long-term survival. Lande’s analysis was the foundation for a series of lawsuits that stopped ancient forest logging in the Pacific Northwest, the source of half the Forest Service’s timber harvest.

Today, with national forest logging levels a scant 13 percent of their 1980s amount, some Forest Service employees and leaders are still in denial. Others are angry, a few are depressed, many are hoping to bargain for a return to the past, and a handful are cautiously and quietly trying to articulate a new mission to make sense of their jobs.

Former Chief Jack Ward Thomas took the first steps toward that new mission by naming it “ecosystem management.” He also felt the pain of angry employees, gave voice to it and identified the scapegoats as those nettlesome “professional gladiators.” Notwithstanding my own gladiator status, I respected Thomas’s need to empathize with his angry troops. But Thomas’s tenure ended abruptly with his sudden resignation, well before he could put flesh on the bare bones of ecosystem management and convince employees of its merits.

Thomas’s successor, Mike Dombeck, did not understand as Thomas did the agency’s grieving process. Dombeck was a policy wonk, not a people person. He sought to impose a new mission on a still-angry and depressed workforce. The more he tried, the more employees resisted, further isolating Dombeck from the rank and file. Notwithstanding the wisdom of his major legacy—the roadless area protection rule—Dombeck’s shortcomings as a leader mean that the rule enjoys little support today within the Forest Service. Few, if any, employees are outspokenly mourning its dismantlement by the Bush administration. Some have applauded publicly.

Which brings me to the current chief, Dale Bosworth. Bosworth has eschewed articulating any bold new mission for the Forest Service. Bosworth’s strategy is to bargain the agency’s way out of embracing a new mission by convincing the public that we must log the forests to save their health. His active management approach has a receptive audience within the Forest Service, where many employees wonder what they would do for a living if nature were more often left to her own devices.

Twenty years after the death of its timber mission, the Forest Service is still struggling with denial, anger, bargaining and depression. It will take a leader who combines Thomas’s empathy with Dombeck’s vision to embrace a new purpose that will carry the agency into the future.