James D. Petersen Speech, Nov. 18, 2003
What is the Forest Service doing right and what is it doing wrong? by James D. Petersen Executive Director, The Evergreen Foundation and Publisher, Evergreen Magazine.
USDA Forest Service Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs Conference, Embassy Suites Hotel, Phoenix, Arizona, November 18, 2003.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
When Joe Walsh called to ask me if I would come to Phoenix to – in his words – “tell us what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong” – I wasn’t entirely sure I should accept his invitation. The question tugs at the roots of problems that have been festering both within and beyond the Forest Service for at least 30 years. That I did accept his invitation – and am here this morning - attests to my own concerns about the future of our nation’s federal forests and the future of the Forest Service itself. I confess there are times when I think that the federal government should get the hell out of the land business. I raised this point in a roundabout way in a one-page essay in the August issue of Evergreen Magazine. Here is what I wrote: “Does anyone know what our federal government’s forest management objective is? I don’t – and I’ve been trying to figure it out since 1985. My friend Jack Ward Thomas, who was Chief of the Forest Service during the Clinton years, once told me he thought the objective was to conserve plant and animal species associated with old growth forests. That would be fine if we were doing it, but we’ve lost so much old growth to wildfires in recent years, without attacking the underlying causes of this calamity, that I am no longer sure what our objective is.” …
An old Tennessee biologist friend described the problem to me in exquisite words in a 1995 Evergreen interview. He said, and I quote, “The problem with leaving forests to nature, as so many seem to want to do, is that we get whatever nature serves up, which can be pretty devastating at times. But with forestry we have options, and a degree of predictability not found in nature.” Let me put my Forest Service relationship in context in both place and time. I am the founder and publisher of Evergreen Magazine and the executive director of the non-profit Evergreen Foundation. The Foundation exists for only one reason: to help advance public understanding and support for science-based forestry. To this end we publish Evergreen, a periodic journal designed to keep our members and others abreast of issues and events impacting forestry, forest communities and the forest products industry. So far as I am able to determine, Evergreen is the most widely read forestry magazine in North America…
I think it is time to for a course correction – time for each of you to consider rededicating yourselves to what I believe is the Forest Service’s true mission: the stewardship and care of America’s National Forests. These forests were not established to be off limits to public use. Quite the contrary, they exist as sources of economic and social well being for the country. They were never intended to be the playthings of special interest groups – and those who were involved in their formation – conservationists in a vastly different meaning of the word - would be appalled by what is happening today…
I think you need to talk publicly about this predicament, because taxpayers have a right to know what a mess we all have on our hands now. As I’ve said so many times, minus technologically advanced processing infrastructure and robust markets for products made from small diameter trees, restoration forestry will remain a distant dream. Which means your job will continue to consist largely of announcing body counts: 10,000 acres burned here, 100,000 acres incinerated there. Sooner or later, someone in this room is going to make it to the Big Dance: a one million acre firestorm accompanied by horrific loss of life. The San Diego colossus was just a warm-up. And I don’t think press relations were handled as well as they might have been. I know it was a big fire with lots of early confusion, didn’t hear anyone challenge the environmentalist claim that it was “just a brush fire.” What about the more than 3,000 homes that were destroyed? What about the 22 people who lost their lives? What about the thousands whose lives turned upside down by this tragedy? The “just a brush-fire” assertion is absurd beyond words. There are hundreds of aerial photographs on the Internet showing thousands of acres of dead and dying forests in the San Bernardino National Forest and the Lake Arrowhead area. Millions of TV watchers know this wasn’t a brush fire. But the claim went unchallenged. Why?…
Are big wildfires and the mop-ups that follow your last remaining products? I hope not, but it has become increasingly difficult for the public to figure out what you do. Maybe it is time for a super-agency, but merging the Forest Service and the BLM without fixing the litigation mess we’re in would be tantamount to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…
But before we throw the Forest Service and the BLM on the trash heap, I’d like to try something. I’d like to decentralize these agencies – return power to the local level where men and women like you can again become the community ambassadors you once were…
I find it effective to talk and write about what forest legacy we leave to future generations, our grand babies. And the most effective place to do this is in the forests, not the conference room, especially around a campfire. There is still magic in campfires.” Based on my 30 years in the business I will add this: Where truth thrives hope abides. Where there is no truth, there is no hope. Good public relations consists of speaking the truth and listening for its’ hopeful echo in the communities you serve.
