Small towns like Ouray, located in the San juan Mountains in Colorado, lost their connection with the U.S. Forest Service when the agency moved regional offices to more urban areas. Photo © George Wuerthner.
Walt Rule joined the U.S. Forest Service in 1957, beginning his career on the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota as a junior forester. He later worked as a district ranger on the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota, and in Colorado on the Roosevelt and the Uncompahgre National Forests, where he was responsible for the administration of two wilderness areas. He spent nine years as a public affairs officer for the national forests in North Carolina before his retirement from the agency in 1986.
Walt was with the Forest Service during years of great volatility. From varied positions in different forests, he was able to observe how changes affected both the land management and the public’s perception of the agency.
I was on the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota in 1960 when the Multiple-Use Act was passed. At the time I thought, as many in the Forest Service did, that this would solve the disputes between the various permittees—stockmen who grazed cattle and lumbermen who purchased national forest timber—and members of the public who were increasingly disturbed by the appearance of national forests after excessive grazing and clear-cutting.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, sustainability and environmental consequences were not popular concepts in the Forest Service. Careers had been built on the philosophy of “getting the cut out,” meeting quotas of timber production set by regions and the Washington office. Timber sales totaled 10 to 15 billion board feet during these years, but in the late 1980s, they fell to below 5 billion, where they remain today. Environmental lawsuits challenging the agency’s resource management came at the same time the agency was experiencing internal conflict. Resource managers were having trouble rationalizing the sacrifice of water, wildlife, recreation, aesthetic and other values in order to meet the targets the Forest Service had set to satisfy the extractive industries. These changing philosophical concepts reached from the lowest ranks up to forest supervisors and regional foresters, some of whom staged a revolt against meeting “timber quotas” even though clear-cutting a tract was the most economical method for the loggers. Many of those who had been hired to do wildlife management ended up marking timber instead, and wound up resigning or transferring to other agencies in hopes that they would be able to use their skills to better advantage. Other resource management issues during this time also created conflicts: Grazing in the West became a major political and resource management issue, especially as it negatively impacted soil and water values.
THE FOREST SERVICE LEAVES TOWN
In Colorado in the 1970s, where I was the district ranger for the Ouray District of the Uncompahgre National Forest, we organized a public meeting to explain national forest management and wilderness. I experienced little or no hostility from the local participants. I attribute this partly to my familiarity with the interests of the small town of Ouray and its people. I gave personal invitations to more than half the attendees, which resulted in the highest percentage of attendance per community in the region.
In many small towns in the West, the relationship with the Forest Service was mixed. Many district headquarters had been moved to more urban locations in the 1950s, supposedly to make communications better with the supervisors’ and regional foresters’ offices. But abandoning the ranger stations cut the personal contact with the rural public and buried the Forest Service in the complex streets and buildings of larger towns. If this decision had been postponed for a few years until communication technology improved, and the rural ranger stations had remained, the connection with the people wouldn’t have suffered. The moves transformed agency representatives into office-dwelling bureaucrats, located far from the resource and its dependent users.
About this time forest recreation began to grow—from 5 million annual visitors in the 1920s to today’s 214 million. The need for a forest ranger–type presence grew, for maintenance as well as surveillance. The local recreation aides, usually temporary summer employees who returned year after year, became a vital link between the agency and the public. These local employees became stand-ins for the Forest Service as the rangers and district staff concentrated more on reports and paperwork in distant offices.
Now, with concessionaires running the larger, more profitable camping areas, the public’s contact with the Forest Service—the rangers from whom they gained their rapport with the agency—is largely gone.
PUBLIC DISTRUST
The next story illustrates how strongly politics has infiltrated the agency. In the 1970s, Bo Callaway, the developer of Callaway Gardens and other assets in Georgia, purchased the Crested Butte Ski Area on the Gunnison National Forest (now consolidated with the Grand Mesa and Uncompahgre National Forests).
Callaway wanted to expand the ski area. The local ranger at the time was Neil Edstrom, a tall lanky Swede who knew his forestry and the people in Gunnison—the nearest sizeable town—and the smaller village of Crested Butte. Edstrom had written an environmental impact statement which recommended against the ski area expansion. At the time, Callaway worked in the office of the secretary of defense in Washington, so I guess it seemed logical to him to cross the river and speak to someone in the secretary of agriculture’s office about the issue.
I was the ranger on the nearby Uncompahgre National Forest at the time, and had established a working relationship with the local media. I had been in the area long enough to know my way around. Edstrom was replaced—transferred to the San Juan National Forest, apparently because his report didn’t coincide with the Washington office’s objectives to expand the ski area. The new supervisor of the combined forests and the district ranger who both had just transferred—from Georgia, it was rumored—lacked the background or inclination to understand the situation. Among the locals, they became known as “the Georgia Mafia.”
The new ranger wrote an EIS recommending expansion, which did not go over well with the public, already angered over Edstrom’s removal. When knowledge of Callaway’s meeting with the higher-ups in the Forest Service—and the subsequent approval of the development project—became known, the public’s outrage increased.
As a nearby ranger familiar with the people and the press, I was charged by the new supervisor to find out what had gone wrong with the “Georgia” ranger’s approach in writing a revised EIS. To exacerbate the situation, the public’s and the media’s reactions had escalated. Forest Service personnel had withdrawn the new EIS and were wondering what happened.
By coincidence an old schoolmate, Bruce Robertson, had just purchased the mule barn in Crested Butte, and I went there to get a first-hand account of what was happening. When Bruce came down the stairs, fresh out of bed, he didn’t recognize me—we hadn’t seen each other in twenty-five years—but we were soon at a local watering hole talking about old school days over a cup of coffee. When the conversation turned to the ski area expansion, he gave me an earful. The Georgia Mafia had made themselves personae non gratae in town. The editors of the nearby Gunnison and Crested Butte papers shared their outrage about this example of corrupt government influence which had forced the withdrawal of Edstrom’s first EIS. The editor of the Crested Butte paper went as far as taking out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal exposing the nefarious dealings in Washington.
Considering the opposition in the press and the lack of local support for the expansion, I recommended delaying the rewriting of the EIS and working with local interests to regain public confidence. I estimated that this would take at least a year and a half, depending on the skill of the local ranger and his representatives.
Maybe as punishment for making a recommendation they didn’t want to hear, I was selected by the supervisor to write the new plan approving the ski area’s expansion and was ordered to have it done in a matter of months. Consequently I applied for, and secured, a position as public information officer on the national forests in North Carolina, rather than take the reassignment to rewrite the plan to expand the ski area, which I had just recommended against. After a year or two the expansion went forward, with some modifications.
Perhaps there could have been challenges and lawsuits, but the compromises in resource management that the Forest Service makes to satisfy special interests have eroded public trust and confidence in the agency, and cast doubt on its professional ethical standing. The community never forgot being sold out for political reasons.
GETTING BACK ON TRACK
Until the politics in Washington change and a more environmentally sensitive administration takes over (and Congress becomes less susceptible to corruption by lobbyists), I can see no significant change occurring in national resource management practices. In the meantime, environmental advocates and their organizations must continue to use the courts to balance the game. While there are still some conscientious, honorable and resource-driven—rather than politically driven—national forest managers in the agency, their ability to change management direction is limited. District rangers, supervisors, regional and Washington office staff all know that to achieve promotion and transfer to more desirable positions (especially those in the federal executive service), they must cater to the current administration’s political objectives and values.
The answer to the question about getting the agency “back on track” is largely political. As long as administrations (like the current one) strong-arm agency management decisions to conform to industry or corporate pressure and special interests, natural resources will be exploited. Vote for local and national officials who have positions on resource management that are compatible with sustainable conservation of our public lands resources.
Since his retirement from the agency, Walt Rule has been an active observer of Forest Service policy. He was a founding board member for the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, now FSEEE, and continued serving on the board until last year.