U.S. Forest Service employee Jeff DeBonis organized AFSEEE in 1989. Forest Magazine file photo
The incident that made me start my quest for U.S. Forest Service reform took place in 1988 on the Willamette National Forest. As a timber sale planner, I was asked to sign off on an environmental assessment for a timber sale in the McKenzie River watershed on Oregon’s Blue River Ranger District. I had been working for the agency for more than a decade, and had just moved to the district from the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho.
The assessment had been completed by a former timber sale planner. I was appalled when I went out to look at the sale. Roads were being built into spotted owl habitat areas, which was not legal. In addition, the unstable soils the roads were being built on would likely fail and dump tons of dirt into the upper reaches of the McKenzie River, a municipal watershed that served both Springfield and Eugene.
I came back to the office and wrote a report on the assessment, recommending we completely redo the sale, severely reducing both the amount of road building and logging. My advice was contrary to the agency mandate to “get out the cut,” and the district ranger, Steve Eubanks, instructed me to ditch my recommendations and present the report as it had been originally written. That was my welcome to what I began to refer to as “west side future shock.” My belief that the agency was trying to meet the spirit and intent of national legislation like the National Forest Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act was a joke. The only real mandate I was supposed to follow was “get out the cut.”
Since I was not the signing official, I passed on the original assessment. My ranger signed it, and I hand carried my copy of the rejected analysis, which recommended severely limiting the sale’s scope and size, to a local environmental organization, the Oregon Natural Resource Council (now Oregon Wild).
Using my information, the group sued the agency and stopped the sale. But I was in a quandary. I could continue to set up environmentally disastrous sales by day and undo my work at night by surreptitiously providing information to environmental groups, or I could use my position with the agency to voice my concerns out loud. I decided to go public.
On February 4, 1989, I wrote a seven-page letter to the chief of the Forest Service, Dale Robertson. I detailed my disillusionment with the agency, gave numerous examples of how we were breaking the law to get the cut out, and gave him my suggestions as to how we could change. I asked him: “Wouldn’t you like to be able to look back and say the Forest Service was a leader in the quest for a new vision of a truly sustainable society for the twenty-first century?”
I sent the letter to the chief and to several congressmen and friends in the Forest Service. I sent it electronically as well—the agency had a national email called Data General, which I used to send copies of my letter to all my friends and associates. The email ended up in the hands of most of the timber operators and environmentalists in the region almost immediately.
Media outlets nationwide, including the New York Times, followed up on the letter with stories and investigations. They interviewed Chief Robertson about the dissident timber planner in Oregon. To his credit, he said, “I may not agree with all his assessments, but I agree with his right to voice his opinion.”
With the chief’s acknowledgement, I wasted no time ramping up the pressure. I pulled together a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, and found a group of current Forest Service employees who were brave enough to join me and willing to become members of a board of directors for the group I called the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. During the next two years I continued to work as a Forest Service timber sale planner by day, but at night and on weekends I organized Forest Service employees around the country and published a newsletter called Inner Voice.
The pressure to stop me began early on. During an interview with the forest supervisor and the personnel director, I was ordered to stop talking publicly about my concerns. I told them I would be happy to curb my discussions during work hours, which they had control over, but I invoked the First Amendment and stated that I intended to continue talking on my own time. The issue of free speech for public employees would become a cornerstone of AFSEEE. I later learned that once Chief Robertson made his comment to the press, folks in the regional office told my forest supervisor to back off, that I was too hot to discipline. In 1992, to the relief of agency brass, I resigned to carry on AFSEEE full time.