The day after the first snow, a wave of black birds sweeps across the flat grey sky and heads south, as if to flee the dull palette of upstate New York. As former U.S. Forest Service botanist and ecologist D.J. Evans and I make our way out of the thieving cold to find refuge in a local coffee shop, dead leaves crunch beneath our feet. It is here, far from the Michigan forests where she spent nearly a decade working to protect native plants, that Evans begins to unravel her story. It is a tale of grit and frustration—and ultimately of flight.

During the 1990s, Evans surveyed and managed rare and endangered plants for the Hiawatha National Forest. Often, she would recommend that certain areas remain off-limits to logging in order to protect tracts of plants. For this, her superiors labeled her a “roadblock” and a “crazy environmentalist.”

“I never saw myself as an aggressive person, I just wanted to do my job,” says Evans, shrugging. Yet, as she counts on her fingers the six botanists and ecologists who left the forest in eight years, she explains that the problem was clearly not about her as an individual.

Her colleagues were told to either keep their mouths shut or lose their jobs. Whole sections of their environmental assessments were regularly edited to make proposed timber sales sound less damaging. They weren’t invited to meetings; some had responsibilities taken away. Under such pressure, some became clinically depressed. Eventually Evans, like many of her peers, left the agency in search of work at state agencies or in the nonprofit sector.

“Things were not always friendly. I would leave meetings because I was about to break down and I knew that wouldn’t help,” says Evans, her pale blue eyes reflecting the thin light of the day. “It was really stressful and discouraging. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed up so many nights.”

Botanists and ecologists around the country report stories similar to the one that Evans tells. Stories of being disenfranchised and ignored, and in some cases, outright intimidated. The situation is so bad that few of the former and current Forest Service employees contacted for this story were willing to talk on the record, for fear of retaliation. Yet from their muffled voices a clear message emerges: many botanists in the agency are routinely pressured to not do their jobs, to not stand up for the resource they were hired to protect so that timber, the old cultural icon of the agency, can continue to fall. Despite the fact that in the past decade the Forest Service has decreased its cut and is pushing a recreation agenda, there are still seven times more foresters in the agency than there are biologists, botanists and ecologists. The result is a distressing outlook for our native plants, our wildlife and our national forests.

“Many botanists feel very disenfranchised when they’re trying to get things right from an environmental perspective,” says Jim Furnish, a former deputy chief of the National Forest System. “I think it happened fairly regularly that the agency would say Ôlet’s ignore these people.’ A lot of botanists came in as real idealists but ultimately they felt like they were prostituting themselves, because the only reason they were there was to approve timber sales. They weren’t real happy campers.”

Hiking through a national forest, what do you see? Maybe you notice the way broad ancient trees fracture sunlight, creating dark pools of shadow. Perhaps you strain to hear the call of a favorite bird or search for animal tracks left in mud or snow. Most likely, you do not notice the ferns or moss clinging unobtrusively to rock.

Walk the land with a botanist, and your perspective may shift.

“I think Pitcher’s thistle and ferns are really cute, but I realize they’re not the most charismatic species,” says Evans. “Rare ferns just don’t get most people that excited.”

Maybe they should. Plants, she explains, are the building blocks of our wildlands. They provide biomass, protect the soil, provide habitat and food for wildlife. They are fundamental to the functioning of this planet.

“These rare plants are a critical component of biological diversity. They are our barometers of ecosystem health,” says Evans. “The more of them we lose, the less we can hope to understand about our environment; we basically lose a piece of the puzzle.”

It was her drive to protect and research these rare species that prompted Evans to join the agency in 1989. She was among the first wave of botanists—a wave that was filled with other idealistic young women. Prompted in part by the environmental and women’s movements of the 1970s, many women went to school to study biology and botany, disciplines that could make a difference.

With the passage of the National Environmental Protection Act in 1971, for the first time the Forest Service needed employees trained in natural sciences to assess the impact of any activity—such as timber sales—on native plants and animals. Simultaneously, a host of new Equal Employment Opportunity laws shone a bright spotlight on the Forest Service’s male-dominated ranks. The agency, eager to remedy its existing gender gap, began to hire women for botany and ecology positions, according to a 1991 study by Utah State University professor James Kennedy. It is a persistent trend: today, up to 70 percent of all botanists are women.

These young women arrived at the steps of a male-dominated agency and a culture modeled after the military. The old guard of the Forest Service wasn’t exactly friendly to these new botanists’ environmental concerns.

“Even in the twenty-first century they haven’t been able to get away from the attitude that you do as you’re told. You don’t step out of the chain of command. I can’t tell you how many times I was told, Ôgo along to get along,’” says Lesa Donnelly, a twenty-five-year agency veteran who is now the national vice president of the Department of Agriculture Coalition of Minority Employees. “Failure to follow orders—to speak out, even if, [as] in the case of botanists, that’s your job—will result in disciplinary actions.”

Yet these women were forced into a role where, if they wanted to protect the resources, they had no choice but to clash with timber-driven managers. They were expected to conduct research and surveys that the agency had never done before—and that many traditional foresters were loathe to do. Once they were in the office they were faced with piles of surveys, slim budgets and no mentors. The fact that they were women didn’t help.

“The other divisions were dominated by men. I remember district rangers saying, Ôyou don’t fit in with our agency,’” says Eunice Padley, a former Forest Service ecologist who now works for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

“There was a huge conflict and culture clash with age and gender between these new employees and the old guard,” says Kennedy, who was hired by the Forest Service periodically during the 1990s to provide weekly trainings for wildlife biologists and botanists. Calling them “Peace Corps trainings,” Kennedy taught people how to find good mentors, to confront authority without alienating themselves and to change the values of the agency in a subtle, self-sustaining manner. Often, the trainings were too late. “I remember women who would tell me, ÔI go home and curl up in the fetal position and weep three times a month,’” Kennedy says.

The dynamic played out in miserable ways. Often, resentment toward women for filling traditionally male roles escalated into sexual harassment and discrimination. In 1995, 6,000 female Forest Service employees filed a class action lawsuit in California on the grounds of sexual harassment, hostile work environment and reprisal issues. A settlement agreement implemented in January 2002 appears to have failed: female employees continue to be sexually assaulted, physically assaulted, stalked, threatened and retaliated against for making complaints of sexual harassment and sex-based harassment, according to a recent press release by Donnelly’s Ag Coalition.

“The majority of women I know at the Forest Service have experienced retaliation,” Donnelly says. “I’ve watched people’s lives be destroyed by what they’ve faced working for the agency.”

Regardless of their gender, botanists in the agency face a host of challenges—the largest of which is that they are understaffed. Although the National Environmental Policy Act requires environmental analysis, it doesn’t specifically say that agencies must hire botanists to do the work. The upshot? There are 179 botanists in the Forest Service and of those, fewer than 100 are out walking the ground.

In comparison, there are more than 10,000 foresters and forestry technicians. There is no agency requirement to have a botanist on every forest, or even every district. Consequently, there is an average of one botanist per 1.5 million acres. In the Rocky Mountain region, a 22-million-acre area that spans five states, there are only seven full-time botanists.

With so few specialists on the ground, wildlife biologists and even foresters often conduct botanical surveys prior to industrial activities. These employees are not required to attend botany-specific trainings or even to have any educational background in plant knowledge.

“That’s just not right. There would be a big stink if the botanists were trying to write wildlife biological evaluations,” says a Colorado-based botanist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s so critical to have areas that are preserved. If you don’t care for the plants, there’s no wildlife, but nobody else seems to be looking out there for these sorts of things.”

Aside from the scant number of employees, funding for the botany program is as dry as the Mojave. There is no specific national botany budget; rather, plant funding must compete with more established fish, wildlife and rare species programs. Despite the fact that plants make up 61 percent of listed endangered species, the federal government spends less than 4 percent of recovery funding on them.

“It’s a miniscule amount. People in D.C. and even many local supervisors don’t have a sense of the importance of botany,” says Teresa Prendusi, a regional Forest Service botanist based in Ogden, Utah. “There’s a huge disparity in emphasis. We’ve spent a fortune on saving wildlife like the goshawk, but there are lots of plant species that are down to one or two populations. No one pays any attention to these glaring botanical issues.”

It must be hard to be a botanist in a nation of people obsessed with mountain lions and grizzly bears. And that seems to be a large part of the problem.

While biologists have the support of well-endowed and politically powerful nonprofit groups such as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the Audubon Society or Trout Unlimited, there is only one nascent national plant society that lobbies Congress, harnesses partnership funding or pushes for change at the national level. The two-year-old Native Plant Conservation Campaign has only one full-time staffer and a tight budget.

Without much public pressure, the Forest Service has little motivation to embrace environmental protection for plants—especially under the development-friendly Bush administration. During the previous administration, when the environmental community was concerned about local management decisions that affected rare plants, they could contact a friendly ear at the Department of Environmental Quality or at the Justice Department who would then call the Forest Service.

“They would call [former Forest Service Chief Mike] Dombeck and say, Ôwe’ve got a renegade situation. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of science, do you?’ and we’d say OK, and put pressure on local managers to do the right thing,” says Furnish. “Under the Bush administration, there’s virtually no pressure on the Forest Service to do things right so the agency just falls back on its base instincts.”

This lack of federal leadership has meant that local forest supervisors often choose to ignore botanists’ recommendations. In some cases, forest managers refused to listen to botanists’ appeals to use caution.

In 2002, a situation arose on a West Virginia forest that is a case in point. After an agency botanist urged caution on a timber sale, she received an e-mail from the assessment team leader reading, “We (the NEPA team) willno longer solicit your input or advice relating to NNIS, rare plants, fragmentation and old growth for Watershed Assessments of NEPA documents. Please don’t waste your time and ours until you can provide us with useful input on how we can better manage for the resources as opposed to skewing everything towards no harvesting or discussions about how wrong our management is.”

The upshot of situations like this is that morale for many agency botanists has sunk. Forest Service employees contacted for this story reported that they hate to come to work each day, that they are over-worked and burned out, and that, as one wrote in a 2003 e-mail, “it is such a sad time for botanists and plant ecologists in the Forest Service.”

Ragged and torn, the relatively tiny army of botanists is unable to sufficiently protect plant resources under such conditions.

There are approximately 750 plant species listed as endangered and threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but that’s less than 50 percent of the species that warrant such protection, says Emily Roberson, director of the Native Plant Conservation Campaign, a coalition of thirty-one native plant societies, gardens and arboreta. On top of that, the Bush administration has listed not one plant in the past four years, unless forced to do so by lawsuits.

“The Forest Service lands are becoming more and more the refuge for species as the rest of the country becomes paved over, yet without more botanists and more resources, these plants get neglected,” says Roberson. “If we continue to manage the way we are right now things look pretty bleak.”

Despite this dismal picture, there are forests where botanists are supported and are doing great work,says Washington, D.C.Ðbased Wayne Owen, former Forest Service national botany program leader who was recently promoted to conservation planning specialist for the wildlife staff. Owen knows of two women who are becoming managers and says he encourages other botanists to do the same.

“The best way to make sure a forest is a friendly place for our resource is to make sure our people, especially young women, are moving into positions of leadership,” says Owen. “To survive, you have to put botany in the perspective of the game we’re playing, and that’s multiple-use management. I have no illusions that I’m going to get my way all the time but these silly games are, in fact, how we end up doing good botany.”

Other botanists report that their recipe for survival is to keep their heads down, wait it out and try, in the meantime, to keep the worst of the worst decisions from happening.

While perhaps a good personal strategy, this silence does the plants few favors, says Buzz Williams, a former Forest Service ranger who now directs the Chattooga River Watershed Coalition from Clayton, Georgia.

“This is not an easy thing for me to say, because I was in this position and I left, but the silence is deafening,” says Williams. “The botanists who are working quietly behind the scenes to slowly turn the battleship are not going to cut it. They need to be more courageous, put their jobs on the line and speak out.”

It’s doubtful that this will happen any time soon. But, although they’re quiet, these botanists are committed, hard-nosed and willing to tough it out on the ground and do what they can to speak for the plants.

“It’s a real struggle, but I keep doing this because if we weren’t here our forest would just come unglued,” says an anonymous twelve-year veteran Forest Service botanist.

This sense of potential makes even dropouts like Evans nostalgic about the agency. As she walks into the winter wind, her voice grows strong.

“The public lands are really the only place where you can protect endangered species over the long term,” she says. “Private lands change hands; [owners are] not forced to legally protect rare plants. We can focus on saving these species on public lands.”

She smiles with chagrin and shakes her head. “Well, I think about going back to the agency, but I guess I probably won’t. It’s just too stressful.”