During its twenty years, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics has defended embattled employees, enforced environmental laws, helped pass good bills, kill bad ones and made tolerable ones better. We’ve published more than 100 issues of Inner Voice and its successor Forest Magazine, bringing news and issues on national forests to the public. We produced a movie, developed a forest ecology curriculum for middle schools and published a map showing the density of roads across the United States. FSEEE’s unique personality—a cross between a labor union, a conservation group and an ombudsman—has created a tapestry of advocacy accomplishments disproportionate to our size or budget. Here are a few of my favorite anecdotes from our twenty years of activism.

SOMETIMES IT ONLY TAKES A PHONE CALL

This one came from a long-time colleague who, although now retired from the U.S. Forest Service, would prefer to remain anonymous. The call was to alert me to the fact that the Forest Service had neglected to update its analysis of economic demand for Tongass National Forest timber—a requirement of the 1990 Tongass Timber Reform Act. The oversight appeared intentional because, as my caller explained, the existing demand forecast was based on two pulp mills in operation on the Tongass and both had by then been shuttered permanently.

That phone call led to one of my own, to a Clinton official (now retired and also preferring anonymity) who was in a position to make a difference. Within twenty-four hours, the Tongass National Forest was told that it needed to update its timber demand forecast to account for the pulp mill closures. The revised forecast showed that demand had plummeted, as the original caller had predicted. When Tongass forest planners subsequently misrepresented the new forecast’s results (they double-counted the trees to inflate timber demand by 100 percent), a federal court stepped in and slapped them down. The Tongass now logs one-tenth its former timber harvest and is poised to protect more old growth and wilderness during this congressional session than we’ve seen in a generation.

THE INTERNET IS FSEEE’S FRIEND

Everyone knows that the U.S. Department of Defense created the Internet’s backbone. But did you know that the Forest Service was the first federal civilian agency to assign an email address to each employee? That distinction has been a blessing to FSEEE and a bane to the Forest Service’s bureaucrats. When Clinton-era Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck needed to show internal agency support to help gain White House approval for his proposed Roadless Area Conservation Rule, FSEEE used public information to digitally compile an email list of thousands of Forest Service employees. Using the list to circulate an employee petition supporting the protection of roadless areas, FSEEE presented Dombeck with the endorsement of hundreds of agency professionals at every rank throughout the nation. Their support jumpstarted the Roadless Rule. Today, FSEEE uses email access to provide every Forest Service employee with an online copy of Forest Magazine.

A NOSE FOR POLITICS SMELLS TROUBLE

I knew that FSEEE had to hire Amelia Jenkins—who then worked in Washington, D.C., as an environmental activist—when she called me, with irritation in her voice, a day after I had agreed to write, but still not produced, a letter to Agriculture Secretary Daniel Glickman commenting on a bad bill. After joining FSEEE’s staff in 1998, Jenkins’ diligence paid off when she smelled something fishy in the timber industry’s enthusiasm for legislation that would compensate local counties for lost timber revenue due to declining federal logging. What, she wondered, could be motivating the industry to spend countless dollars creating a huge coalition of rural school governments, counties, businesses and others?

Her instincts proved spot-on. When the House Agriculture Committee chairman round-filed the public version of the first county payments bill and pulled out of his hip pocket a new, secret bill for the House to vote on the next day, FSEEE took a hard look at the new bill. By following the trail of money in the bill, we found a sophisticated scheme to give local commercial interests sole control over the Forest Service’s entire $1 billion annual revenue stream. On the day before the Senate voted in 2000 on the bill, our campaign persuaded Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and one of the bill’s key managers, to add a sentence that put an end to the industry’s scheme. Since that time the timber industry has generally opposed county payment legislation because weaning counties from federal logging revenue is not in the industry’s interest. Jenkins is now a senior policy advisor on the staff of the House Natural Resources Committee.

A QUIET LAWSUIT CAN BE CATALYTIC

Many lawsuits are public happenings with press releases, news stories, cameras on courthouse steps and occasional dramatic judicial opinions. But it was a secret lawsuit FSEEE filed that helped spur big changes on the Tongass. When the Forest Service abruptly dismantled its Timber Theft Task Force in 1995, several of its investigators contacted us. The story they told came from a former Tongass district ranger who began to suspect a major pulp mill was engaged in widespread log-scaling fraud. The ranger brought in a trusted out-of-state log scaler to check the log measuring work. The new scaler uncovered a pattern of massive log theft rivaling the frontier timber thievery that spurred Gifford Pinchot to establish the Forest Service 100 years ago. The timber theft investigators believed that their initial inquiries into the Alaska theft explained why they had been summarily disbanded and reassigned.

FSEEE staff visited the district ranger in his new posting (well outside of Alaska) and spent a day in the Colorado backcountry cabin of the now-retired log scaler. Each had kept detailed records they were willing to share. The records showed a pattern of log theft by the pulp mill, including missing log rafts and log scaling fraud on a massive scale. We decided that a rarely used law, the False Claims Act, provided the best remedy to address the problem. The False Claims Act allows any person with firsthand knowledge of a fraud committed against the United States to file suit for damages on behalf of the government. The suit is filed secretly, under court seal, and given only to the government.

So I found myself assigned as a “forestry advisor” flying to Alaska with two FBI agents to investigate the alleged theft. The Los Angeles Times had assigned its Pulitzer Prize-winning team to follow the same leads. Meanwhile, the Forest Service’s Alaska Regional Office was working as fast as it could to cover up the theft. It was the complicity of the Regional Office that had led the original district ranger and his boss, the forest supervisor, to call in the Timber Theft Task Force in the first instance. Shortly after we filed suit, the pulp mill closed its doors in Alaska forever.—Andy Stahl