Fire suppression, recreation management, timber harvesting and facilities maintenance are some of the varied roles which the agency has taken on over the years. Photos, left to right: BLM, George Filgate, George Wuerthner, George Wuerthner
The U.S. Forest Service is in trouble. Its many external critics have said as much over the past century, but the latest charge came from a credible, inside source—some of the agency’s 29,000 employees. As one of them bluntly responded in a recently released and controversial survey: “Are we a timber organization? Are we a fire organization? Are we recreation-based? Are we just cleaning toilets now? I mean, what are we doing?”
This plaintive query—however anguished—is neither new nor surprising. The Forest Service has been asking the same question for nearly fifty years, dating back to the enactment of the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act (1960). That it has not been able to resolve it is troubling, but not a shock. This distinctly American institution has been buffeted by the same forces sweeping through the broader culture; its self-doubts are ours.
The current uproar began behind closed doors. Stunned by a series of fire-related fatalities in 2005 and 2006, notably the Esperanza blaze in Riverside County, California, that killed five firefighters, then-Chief Dale Bosworth lamented: “We have grieved too often for those who lost their lives in support of our mission…At the end of the day, I want everyone to go home to their families.” Developing plans for achieving what he called “a safety culture for the twenty-first century,” Bosworth contracted with Dialogos International to conduct workforce surveys to learn employees’ opinions of their work, its demands and its dangers. That’s when things got interesting.
Given a chance to vent, forest rangers, line officers and scientists did exactly that, startling agency leaders who in April received the forty-six-page Dialogos report, “Integrating Mission Accomplishment with Safety at the U.S. Forest Service.” By September, the curiously titled document (were its authors evoking President Bush’s bankrupt victory slogan?) and its disquieting news had surfaced on employee blogs, bringing the internal turmoil to light.
What is most illuminating about the many reactions the document captures is how many survey participants took dead aim at three key strands of the Forest Service’s “cultural DNA”:
Decentralization: Some asserted that the agency’s many top-down directives mocked its historic commitment to ground-level decision making; others complained that in ceding authority to those on the ground, it has fragmented lines of communication and power, creating some head-scratching moments: Who’s in charge?
Pragmatism: The Forest Service’s much-lauded “can-do” attitude—its historic assumption that there was no harvest too big, no fire so immense and no scientific conundrum so puzzling that its dedicated people could not resolve it—also creates a crippling dilemma. Now, staff is balking when pushed to do much more with less—much less money, fewer people and decreasing public support; yet these same employees know that their hesitation violates a sacrosanct principle.
Family Values: Despite the Forest Service’s size (it is the largest bureau in the Department of Agriculture), and its outsized responsibilities (it stewards nearly 193 million acres, making it one of the nation’s largest landlords), agency personnel are proud of the outfit’s close-knit professionalism; many refer to it as a family. But in family systems, questions about leadership intensify when decisions appear muddled, contradictory or hazardous. Bosworth’s keening desire that his coworkers make it home safely—a parent’s most fervent wish—was belied when this father figure sent hotshot crews to battle wildland infernos.
Admitting that this crosscutting commentary is not “easy for most of us to hear,” Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell, who replaced the retiring Bosworth in February 2007, urged an agency-wide discussion of the report. “Our culture creates the results we get; we cannot expect different results until we do the hard work to change it,” she wrote in a memo attached to the report.
She’s right, but cultural transformation is never simple or unilateral, especially when the concerns voiced in the Dialogos survey reflect tensions inherent in American society. The clash between the agency’s centralizing and decentralizing tendencies, for example, is consistent with the centripetal and centrifugal forces that since the late eighteenth century have inflamed national politics. The Constitution institutionalizes these tugs of war: sovereignty is split between the federal government’s three branches; resplintered via the Tenth Amendment, which reserves states’ prerogatives; and shaved finer still with “home rule” charters that secured community self-governance. The Forest Service, under founding Chief Gifford Pinchot, deliberately replicated this tripartite division of power with the creation of the Washington Office, Regional Offices and Ranger Districts. At no time in the nation’s or agency’s histories have these structures been conflict-free—nor could they be.
Contention has been the hallmark as well of Americans’ tough-minded pragmatism. Without minimizing the damages—environmental, political and social—that Manifest Destiny wrought, it’s clear that the oft-violent westward movement depended on a can-do conviction that seems inseparable from late-nineteenth-century American identity. To this, Pinchot swore allegiance when affirming that a selfless Forest Service would safeguard the nation’s natural resources. “It is a question of seeing what loyalty to the public welfare demands of us, and then of caring enough for the public welfare not to set personal advantage first,” he declared in The Fight for Conservation (1910).
Pinchot reasoned that the creation of a vibrant esprit de corps would offset such sacrifice. Its cohesiveness would give significance to the isolated efforts of those managing distant terrain, a cohesion that could be convivial as well as coercive. As Herbert Kaufman observed in his classic study, The Forest Ranger: A Study in Administrative Behavior (1960), dissent was rare in this culture of collaborative conformism.
Many retirees counter that their experience was more like working for a big fraternity. This yearning to belong impelled one current employee to confide that “We do not picnic together as we once did.” Eating alone—that’s a haunting image of disconnection, and it feeds a desire for the Forest Service to function once more as a face-to-face community. Yet this heartfelt statement is not unique; lots of Americans feel cut off from once-extant communal networks of sustenance and support. As Robert Putnam argues in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), our hunger for connection is in reaction to our declining participation in neighborhood organizations, sports leagues, town associations and familial rituals (such as breaking bread together). Civic and family life have atrophied.
A weakened sense of collective engagement also permeates the Forest Service. This is a consequence of an organizational structure that divides employees between standalone entities like State and Private Forestry, Research and Development, International Forestry, and Fire and Aviation. As an associate deputy chief acknowledged, “we are really a collection of different tribes.”
How can we reweave those who have spun away? How can we rebuild the organization’s social capital? Not by investing in the past. The Forest Service, which grew out of a late-nineteenth-century quest to reconstruct civil society amid the corrosive Industrial Revolution, stands as one of the Progressive Era’s great democratic experiments, altering the conditions of American life by regenerating the landscapes on which the country has depended. What is now needed is an agency whose institutional arrangements will respond to contemporary crises as successfully as Pinchot imagined they would be able to.
The need for reform cannot be overstated, for the national forests and grasslands are reeling from an array of forces that are beyond their control. Take just three: The surging population in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Seattle, like the stupendous development occurring in once-small communities from Anchorage to Bend to Flagstaff, is consuming open space, sprawling to the edge of national forests and accelerating recreational pressures. Global climate change is intensifying and lengthening fire seasons. Radical shifts in timberland ownership pose difficulties for the future of landscape-scale public-lands management.
Although the Forest Service cannot halt these bewildering transformations, it will be expected to clean up their manifold and interrelated consequences. As the wildland-urban interface becomes more populous, the agency will be compelled to fight more fires at an increasing cost. Clarifying to itself and the public which fires it can and will extinguish, and at what expense, seems an essential step in defining its twenty-first-century mission. The same holds for recreational management. Much as it did one hundred years ago, when it began to minimize grazing’s deleterious environmental impact, the modern agency will need to fashion a strong set of regulations to ensure that off-road vehicles do not continue to pound its lands into submission, and then regenerate those lands that have been damaged.
These complex situations, in tandem with the equally complicated personnel issues that are consistent with an aging workforce, suggest that the Dialogos survey was conducted at a critical juncture in the Forest Service’s history. Knowing that the agency’s next steps will shape its immediate future, it makes sense to recall another of Robert Putnam’s insights about how the Progressive Era reformers like Pinchot built up social capital “not as an alternative to, but a prerequisite for, political momentum and reform.” The fuel for their ambitions was a “practical, enthusiastic idealism,” a creative energy and experimental ethos that “should inspire us.”
Tapping these vital Progressive roots will aid the Forest Service as it works its way out of trouble, once more blazing a trail for the nation to follow.