A very special thank you to the High Country News for generating, and allowing us to post, the images above. This is of interest because, while some of the recent attention to sexual harassment has been focused on the Forest Service, there are agencies with similar missions in Interior, so we can ask “are they about the same, better or worse?”. And since these agencies (at least BLM) trade employees with the FS frequently, and the fact that Fire is an interagency effort, does it make sense for all federal land management agencies to approach this together?
Unfortunately, I don’t have the Forest Service figures to compare, but hopefully someone can provide them.
HCN has had an interesting set of pieces on the problems in BIA. Apparently the Director Bryan Rice has resigned, and, while not mentioned in this piece, my sources tell me that he was formerly Director of Forest Management at the Forest Service in the Washington Office. This supports my argument that it makes sense to address the problem across the FS and Interior agencies.
Here’s a link to HCN’s ongoing coverage of harassment in federal agencies.
Thanks for sharing this. Great to see a more thorough analysis from Interior. The FS is planning to do a more in-depth survey to identify the scope and scale of the issue in the FS, but we haven’t seen anything yet. So far we have had “listening sessions” with agency leaders and there will be “stand up for each other” mandatory attendance meetings. Some of the experiences shared by co-workers during the listening sessions were appalling, to say the least. And these things have been going on for a long, long time and they continue to go on. In Region 6, an employee sent out a public resignation email stating that they were resigning because, after 8 years, their former harasser was returning to the region.
Bryan Rice left the FS to go to the BIA under something of a cloud – interesting that he has resigned from the BIA.