National forests are essential for preserving wildlife diversity, such as moose habitat on the Shoshone National Forest. Photo ©James Johnston
The Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics came into being in 1989, at the beginning of President George Herbert Walker Bush’s first and only term of office. U.S. Forest Service employees who were concerned about the state of our national forests were convinced we had to do something. After eight years of environmental neglect and resource exploitation under President Ronald Reagan, we knew that conservation voices internal to the federal government desperately needed to join those coming from the environmental community and other concerned citizens. We feared that a continuation of Reagan-era environmental policies would bring the country’s public forests to the brink of environmental disaster.
We were hopeful that our leadership would stimulate a groundswell of environmental concern within the Forest Service—that by providing a media outlet and a support system, many more agency employees would join our cause to reform the backwater agency and return to the principles of being stewards of public lands. To a degree, we were overly optimistic and naïve.
What we didn’t realize was that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, employment in the Forest Service was never the high moral calling dedicated to conservation and “wise use” that founder Gifford Pinchot had envisioned. Eighty years after its inception, the agency had morphed from a rough-and-tumble frontier operation to a hidebound institution, insulated by layers of bureaucratic directives that were a cover for ever-increasing logging to feed dollars to the agency. Although younger, low-level employees, along with some older professionals who somehow had stayed true to their callings, still hoped for an agency that would be a model for environmental conservation, most Forest Service personnel were content to do the bidding of powerful western senators and congressmen who were calling for more and more logging.
In the 1980s, Reaganomics, which called for decreased government spending and economic regulation, encouraged mainstream America to live high on borrowed money and to give no thought to tomorrow—or to the state of the natural world. This philosophy continued through subsequent decades. In those years, government was widely perceived as the problem rather than part of the solution. For those of us Forest Service employees whose careers spanned this epoch, it was not a time destined for reform. The Clinton administration offered a new, hopeful direction for public lands, but much of progress made was undermined by eight years of another Bush presidency.
Maybe—just maybe—we have entered a new era. The Obama administration seems hell-bent on government reform, and if that becomes a reality, FSEEE is in a position to ride that wave to the dream we imagined twenty years ago. It won’t be easy. The new administration has an ambitious agenda and substantial challenges. The economic meltdown, military action overseas, spiraling health care costs and climate change all require massive attention and major reforms. But should the administration be even partially successful—particularly in the energy arena—the door should be ajar enough to invite substantial change. America’s forests ought to be near center stage as global climate change continues to take its toll on the planet’s ecosystems. Given the twin fears of financial and environmental meltdown, no better reform opportunity has presented itself in generations.
Forest Service reform will—and to some extent already has—aligned the agency’s agendas with those of other organizations coping with broader environmental threats like global climate change. The increased awareness of the role forests play in carbon sequestration makes forest preservation essential. To enhance our national forests’ role as repositories for carbon will require that we allow forests to cycle their nutrients over very long periods, with tree rotation ages that are similar to those seen before Americans began our industrialized forest campaigns.
Forests will continue to serve as storehouses for biological diversity, playing key roles in essential conservation corridors that require protection and expansion in the face of continued human population threats. FSEEE will need to join with others in championing the cause of an increased network of unfragmented conservation reserves.
In addition to high-profile environmental efforts, FSEEE will need to champion basic Forest Service reform, forcing the agency to follow environmental laws regarding natural resources and the environment. For this reform to work, legislators must define core environmental responsibilities and take measures to build a structure that will allow professionals the space to operate and innovate.
Beyond legislative agendas, the first reform steps ought to include clear-cutting the bureaucratic red ink stacked in volumes of Forest Service manuals and handbooks. But more than just throwing out the old, the reform effort will need to rekindle the desires of agency personnel to work within the regulatory framework—adapting and adjusting procedure and protocol as needed. Somehow, we must make government work both rewarding and highly esteemed if we are to get the kind of government professionals we need at all levels in the Forest Service. Retraining and rethinking must start in the Washington office. We have seen too many past efforts where high-level bureaucrats blamed the problem on field managers and staff rather than taking a hard look at themselves and their own policy and program directives.
During the last two decades FSEEE helped stop some of the worst environmental abuses perpetrated by the Forest Service. We look forward to continuing our work to preserve public lands for future generations and to encourage building a better workplace environment for our Forest Service colleagues.