Guest Post: Karl Brauneis’ Review of Burchfield’s 2014 “The Tinder Box”

This is “A Book Review and Associated Thoughts” regarding Christopher Burchfield’s 2014 book, The Tinder Box – How Politically Correct Ideology Destroyed the U.S. Forest Service. It was written by Karl Brauneis, posted here with his permission, and published last year in Smokejumper Magazine. Karl is a retired USFS Forester and Fire Management Officer and “Missoula Smokejumper Class of ‘77” member.

Here is a link to Karl’s new book, The Blackwater Fire and the Men Who Fought It: How Firefighters Turned Tragedy into New Beginnings: https://warnercnr.source.colostate.edu/karl-brauneis-blackwater-fire-book/

Here is his review of Burchfield’s book:

The Tinder Box is a must read for those who struggle to understand what happened to the U.S. Forest Service in our lifetime. Burchfield begins with a short background of the why and the how. He breaks open the Bernardi Consent Decree (1981) that required the Forest Service to reach the goal of a 43% female work force in just a few short years.

This is how, in part, Chief Max Peterson and his Pacific Southwest (California) Regional Forester Zane Grey Smith destroyed the U.S. Forest Service. There was no need for the Bernardi Consent Decree because the Forest Service had done nothing wrong. The Justice Department, representing the Forest Service, could have easily won the case brought by plaintiff Gene Bernardi. However, Max Peterson wanted to re-make the Forest Service and he certainly did. Once a stellar organization it is now ranked among the worst of the federal agencies to work for.

As an older man I feel some compassion for men like Zane Grey Smith. The consent decree made life a living hell for not only those who were affected by it but by those who proposed and initiated it. Burchfield uncovers the trauma experienced by so many.

The root of destruction is found in the Frankfurt school of Germany and its quest to spread their neo-Marxist philosophy throughout the world. In short, communism could claim only limited  success in countries where the masses attempted an overthrow. The only true success had been in Russia with the Bolsheviks.  And it was bloody.  The neo-Marxist philosophy taught that the destruction of western civilization could only be accomplished through the elites via an insidious takeover of western institutions. A demolition from within. From the top down. We see this everywhere today from the destruction of the middle class and open borders to a 32 trillion dollar national debt.

The Frankfurt school of thought was first imported to Columbia University in the 1930’s and soon spread to other institutions of higher learning. We might call this the same spirit that sparked and drove the Nazis in their quest for world domination.

When reading The Tinder Box my thoughts affirmed the psychological study of the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. An Army psychologist assigned to the trials arrived at this secular conclusion: “Evil is the absence of empathy.” This also confirmed what I experienced in my forest service career. I began under a Christian culture and set of norms. A strong Judeo-Christian work ethic existed. This was soon taken from us and replaced with neo-Marxist dogma. Their tenants violated not only the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution (equal protection of the law) but also the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Title VII), as passed by the US Congress, and the Civil Service merit promotion standards. But the law was ignored and twisted in policy by our leaders. Their absence of empathy only accelerated. Discrimination against white males became a corporate manifesto. Part way through my career, candidates for promotion were no longer evaluated by their knowledge of forestry, fire and range but rather by their adherence to affirmative action and multiculturalism. Consideration for promotion was now based on race, color, sex and creed. Females were given privileged and preferential treatment. When I left the agency all of the forest supervisors and park superintendents in the greater Yellowstone area were female.

Christopher Burchfield writes about the Plutonium Rule:

“Implicit with the extralegal incorporation of 43 % (Females by Consent Decree) was the extinction of the Golden Rule, the universally accepted premise, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Dead too was the notion of reciprocity – that everyone has a right to just and equal treatment and a responsibility to ensure that others receive the same just and equal treatment.

In their place the agency introduced a lethal plutonium rule. Incoming employees would not be required to adapt to their senior employee’s expectations or traditions – so essential to meeting mission objectives. Rather, the new employees would see to it that the seniors adapted to their expectations and innovations.”

Then there was the clandestine back room development and enforcement of quotas by the agency, unknown to Samuel Conti the federal judge presiding over the case. When he learned that the Forest Service had gone behind his back the judge had enough. He then held the agency to their arrogant stupidity and labeled it “consent decree as amended”.

In contrast? Hubert Humphry vigorously declared when addressing the wealth of Civil Rights laws passed by congress:  “I will start eating the pages of the law, page by page, if anyone can find a clause that calls for quotas or preferences of racial balance in jobs or education.”

Pete Barker was one Forest Service fire engine captain interviewed in the book. Asked about the performance of the Forest Service from when he began in 1977 until he retired in 2007. His answer? He guessed the agency was running at 50%. Later, Randal O’Tool in “The Rot Starts at the Top” would evaluate the agency at 20%.

This is my second reading of The Tinder Box. Burchfield explains so much in detail that I had to read the book again.

Christopher writes; “It was not simply the numbers Stewart (Pacific Southwest Regional Forester replacing Smith) and Chief Forester Robertson (replacing Peterson) were seeking to transform. Lace curtain radicals almost without peer, they were determined to uproot by trencher, bulldozer and front end loader, every last vestige of the forest service culture advanced by Pinchot, Silcox and McArdle.”

The women of the forest service even filed a class action suit separate from the men against the leaders of demolition de-construction. The women were then called in a very condescending way by court monitor Jeannie Meyer “good old boys in women’s clothing,” There was no end to their arrogance and subterfuge.

Burchfield surmises;

“Postmodern forestry’s real mission was the tree by tree, acre by acre, employee by employee destruction of a male dominated institution that since its inception had performed with such striking success. If dismantling that male institution injured the interests of more women than it benefitted, that was unfortunate but incidental to the task.”

When the South Canyon (1994 – Death of 14 Firefighters on Storm King Mountain) tragedy unfolded the subsequent investigation brought new concerns to congress. Why was so little of the money allocated to finance fire preparedness ever seen on the ground? Tired of lip service congress forced the agency to develop a fire budget process that would ensure that the money sent from Washington went to the field. Our small fire budget on a “cowboy ranger district” in Wyoming went from $7,000 to $77,000 dollars overnight. The bureaucrats had scammed 90% of the districts fire budget to finance their social agenda. I was not alone. A hot shot superintendent told me that 60% of his operating budget had been siphoned off the top. It was an eye opener for me.  But the betrayal only continued.

Arlen S. Roll of the Northern Rocky Mountain Region was bold in his zeal to usurp federal law with forest service policy.  He seems more a patron of the Goering – Goebbels inner circle than a forest service official. Already the agency had lost 500 cases in court that required backpay and promotion to individuals suing the agency for discrimination due to affirmative action quotas. The costs alone in California for these losses ran at around 2 million dollars. It is estimated that another 500 cases were settled out of court in favor of the plaintiffs. But Arlen pressed on claiming there was no such thing as reverse discrimination and that employees must follow policy or find another job. While others worked in the shadows to break the law Arlen was bold in his proclamations. Christopher Burchfield states “What is so astonishing about him was his Hitlerian bluntness.” The real power in government no longer resided with its elected officials or in the rule of law.

It was the dawn of an agency weaponized against its own employees. Policy would now usurp the law. But the new Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas cried foul when he took over. He told his employees to tell the truth and follow the law.  The entrenched ignored Thomas and continued to undermine their own chief. The culture change was now complete and further sealed with the early buy outs of the late 1990’s that gutted the agencies’ remaining resource management expertise. When Jack Ward Thomas left he noted nine matters he never wanted to deal with again. The top of the list included political correctness, the violation of civil rights and dismissal of equal employee opportunities.

A deep state, a shadow government or fourth branch of the government was now reality. While the agency consolidated field units and closed ranger stations, guard stations,  forest fire lookout towers and some forest supervisors offices it also added 300 new employees to the Washington headquarters. In Wyoming I counted six small town district ranger stations closed. Two forests and one national grassland (Routt – Medicine Bow – Thunder Basin) were combined across the Colorado and Wyoming state lines and their respective congressional districts to promote centralization. The forest service soon became irrelevant in rural America as the Washington office seized more power to promote their policies of social re-invention, environmentalism and off forest hiring practices.

Local individuals who knew their communities became difficult to hire under a new national and regional employment and review system focused on multiculturalism. This further separated the agency from what rural roots might have been left.  Forest service engine captain Tom Locker stated that the agencies subversive goal was to, “Out and out culturally cleanse the small towns of America.”

I have worked with some outstanding women in the forest service and fire. Woman that will be the first to stand up for civil rights and merit promotion. I have coached boys and girls in high school (Bonners Ferry, Idaho) cross country and track. I have sons and daughters and nine grandchildren so far. So, why should I write this review? Because I want an even and fair playing field for all of them. Discrimination based on race, color, sex and creed is against the law and has no place in our society. “Content of character” is what counts. We must also be confident that our federal agencies follow the law and not contrived policy.

We live in the present and not yesterday. Our actions speak for today. I also know that we are bound to repeat yesterday’s mistakes if we do not study the past. What happened to the U.S. Forest Service is history that should not be swept under the rug. In history you take the bad with the good. You learn from it.

The individual tragedy for many of us is that our boy hood dreams in the calling of  conservation at a once premier forest service lay dashed upon the rocks. As a hot shot, smokejumper and forester I went from the “golden boy” to the “black sheep” in a few short years. I never changed. But the agency did. I loved a forest service that I soon came to distrust. Tragically, I experienced the change from a highly decentralized conservation learning organization to a highly centralized politically correct environmental bureaucracy.

In closing. There are agendas and then there is reality. When the agenda does not match reality we call its proponents delusional. Thank you Christopher Burchfield for exposing the delusion of the Great Betrayal in The Tinder Box.

 

24 thoughts on “Guest Post: Karl Brauneis’ Review of Burchfield’s 2014 “The Tinder Box””

  1. Sisters, Oregon is a picturesque little town built in a tinder box.

    Jim Zornes became acting Black Hills National Forest Supervisor after Craig Bobzien retired in 2016 when the volume of shit hitting the fan and “timber mining” just became too overwhelming. Zornes believes Republican micromanagement ruined the BHNF and recently told an interested party that 70,000 hundred cubic feet (CCF) should be the allowable sale quantity (ASQ) for an extended period to to sustain the industry on the Forest. One cubic foot of lumber is six board feet.

    So, in 2018 after the Trump Organization gutted the National Environmental Policy Act then was thrown from the White House Hulett, Wyoming-based Neiman Enterprises closed their Hill City, South Dakota sawmill and is threatening to shutter another in Spearditch announcing layoffs and production cutbacks while blaming the US Forest Service. Neiman bought an Oregon mill in 2020 but lumber prices are depressed as wildfire salvage floods mills.

    Dave Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota’s lone US Representative Dusty Johnson when he sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. Cochrane was the sixth different leader in 2023 alone and 11th in the past seven years. Mertz just told an interested party that the ASQ on the BHNF should be about 40,000 CCF and that the mill in Spearditch will also close.

    I know a lot of people think that the Black Hills NF is a one-off, a place where there was more industry capacity than there was timber supply. The truth is that almost every National Forest with a timber industry highly dependent upon them for volume, is just one large fire and/or bug infestation away from being in the Black Hills’ shoes. Things are going along well and then in a short period of time, you have a timber industry crying for wood and blaming the FS, with the politicians jumping on and senior FS leadership that doesn’t have your back. [Mertz, blog comment]

    A fifth Oregon mill also in a Republican County has announced its closure so far this year citing:

    Lack of a willing and drug-free workforce.
    Lack of housing to recruit workers from outside the area.
    Unfavorable market conditions for lumber in recent years.
    High manufacturing costs due to inflation.
    Low and inconsistent production due to workforce issues.
    Continued layering of government regulations on small business in Oregon.

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  2. Would be interesting to peek into current “forest policy” college courses and see how they handled these revelations. I’m so old that most of what is discussed in the book happened AFTER I graduated! 🤣

    However, I see the evolution more clearly after reading just this review; I gotta get me a copy of this book.

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  3. Breaking News: The Forest Service served as God’s Infallible Christian Logging Army and bravely excluded fire from fire dependent landscapes until the Women, Nazis, Communists and the Deep State turned it into a woke Satanic cult bent on the destruction of Western Civilization.
    -The Onion

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  4. Why are they posted this garbage? What I want to see is a discussion on fire control and fire planning in light of the recent devastating fires we have incurred. How much is due to weather, how much to human error, governmental decisions and most of interest to me the role of the average citizen in promoting or thwarting good public policy.

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    • Hi Wally,
      High winds and dryness, plus vegetation and houses leads to fire.
      As Front Range Coloradans know, aggressive initial attack when fires start is the best way to deal with them. But this doesn’t always work when there are too many at once.
      Like so many things, there are lots of little factors that add up when things go wrong. We will only know the full story when the reviews are done. In the case of the Marshall Fire, it was two years or so.
      “don’t live there” is one answer, obviously not satisfying..”stop using fossil fuels” probably not a go either since fire suppression requires quite a bit. I’d guess lots of little thing.. managing vegetation near to communities, managing vegetation and other burnable things (houses and other infrastructure) within communities; better technologies for ignition detection and response, and finally lots “how suppression folks can work together better” which involves both management and budget. Part of the problem may well be “we never expected the fire to get this far” so previously non-engaged communities need to up their building and evacuation game. This is in tension with current efforts to densify and use public transportation, so that tension will have to be worked through. There’s certainly lots to deal with, but much of it in cities needs to occur at the local level. At least that’s my two cents.

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  5. Yow. I vowed not to respond to your fevered imagination before, but this is too nutty to let pass. Doc, your statements and hateful bias are ridiculous and have no bearing in reality. It would be great if you could add to the discussion, but this is just silly, bordering on concerning.

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  6. Did I just read that the downfall of the USFS was the late 1970s Consent Decree? Insulting nonsense based on my personal experience of the work environment for women pre-CD (very bad), during CD (worse), and post-CD (gradually better). The stories I could tell. Isn’t it time to get over it?

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  7. I fail to see how this can spur any kind of serious discussion, when it has nothing to do with policy or science, and is clearly one authors highly agenda driven, high biased, rant, being posted by another author as something serious and worthwhile.
    It tracks with the posters general agenda and frame of mind, but seems to have no place on TSW other than to inflame and generate stimulus is certain individuals dopamine centers.

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  8. There is so much about this post that I so disagree with, I better just KMS. It’s safe to say that the USDA Forest Service has not been “destroyed.” I will acknowledge that the world’s best conservation agency has become stodgy. This can easily be corrected with a few selected leadership adjustments and a dramatic change in the current DMU Syndrome. I am convinced that the USDA Forest Service can again be great. I just cannot agree with the conspiracy theories outlined in the book review.

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  9. Part of the problem, which no one seems to want to talk about, is the lack of entry-level permanent jobs, during the 80s and 90s. Certainly, if there was a regular program of hiring at the bottom, women would have been more represented in the workforce, and especially, promoted more. I’m not saying that it would have fun and easy for those women. I’ve certainly worked with/for outstanding women, who were in leadership positions.

    USFS leadership in the 80s and 90s, along with the rank and file, decided that intensive use of Temporary Employees was better than ‘doing the right thing’. The Permanents of that time KNEW that it was wrong to treat people like that. The practice of canceling advertised vacancies (because the preferred candidate wasn’t at the top of the list) became common, as well. Even after the 1039 decision, leadership was still OK with what that meant for operations, rather than telling Congress what was really needed. Of course, Congress is now going back to that mindset of the 90s. I don’t see success on that horizon.

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    • Need to back up another 20 years there Larry, I worked as a “temporary” in the early to mid-‘70’s. We had no leave of any kind, work started at the work center, not the office and if it rained we went home with no pay. Some of these folks were holdovers from the 1960’s, too. Even at that, folks lined up to work for the FS, and work was hard! Planting trees, injecting (herbicides), surveying, timber marking, it was intense work. Of course hiring was local and identified with, and represented community support.

      I worked many a seasonal crews (1039’s) and they also jumped to work for the FS. As I moved up, more and more forester/forestry students were hired to gain experience. But holy crap, the FS was hiring “bundles” of new professionals into 5//7/9 positions, and very diverse. I guess it was situational, but Regions 8 and 6 were going gangbusters in new employees….

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      • The policy for Temporaries should have been truly temporary in scope. Do not use Temps for jobs that are required every year. If you have a temporary need for help, then use a Temporary Employee. In addition to a limit on yearly hours, there should also be a 2-year limit on their use. If you fill that position for 2 years, then you lose that position for the 3rd year.

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        • Larry: Full agreement. I never worked for the USFS, but I briefly contracted a few FS tree planting jobs in the early 70s for the same reason — their abrupt reliance on seasonal contractors when full-time work was (still is, more than ever) needed. Loggers were given years to complete a contract, but contracts were given weeks. Same with wildfire crews today. All used to be done locally, to better standards, before someone changed the rules and no one ever changed them back. So I never returned.

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        • Larry, you WILL NOT get any disagreement from me, it’s a terrible way to treat folks! However, it boiled down to “take it or leave it” for both the employee and the rank & file FS. Those decisions were Chief requests to the Department for any deviation from the status quo, for FTE’s. I guess not many Chiefs ever worked as a temporary?

          Thankfully, it is better now, not fixed but better. The cost to the government vs salary borders on the ridiculous, which drives too many of these decisions….

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          • The Forest Service even admitted to abusing their Temporary Hiring Authority, but no one was ever punished. It sure looks like the new Administration wants to go back to that policy, so they can give the rich more tax breaks. I would not recommend working as a Temporary to young people interested in natural resources. They are better off angling for a Permanent Seasonal fire position first (in any Agency), before wasting time as a Temp. We should no longer care about the Forest Service need for ‘warm bodies’ in Temporary jobs. Make those jobs TRULY TEMPORARY.

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            • Well, if you are going to make stuff up, I guess I’ll have to provide a bit of reality; the Trump tax cuts benefitted all tax brackets, but the middle class benefitted most! I was going to cut and paste the IRS results but it would be better to just paste the Title so folks can search and read the whole explanation for themselves…. “IRS data proves Trump tax cuts benefited middle, working-class Americans most”. This from “The Hill”, with reference to the IRS data. So, I hope Trump does not allow his cuts to expire, it certainly helped me!

              As for information to the contrary, just liberals blowing smoke! Read the dang response from the IRS! I saw another statistic that said 78% of taxpayers benefitted from the cuts. I guess if you pay no taxes it doesn’t help ya, eh?

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              • Soooooo, just where will ‘all that saved money’, taken away from the Forest Service, go?!? We can bet that Congress will be punitive upon the Forest Service, for their financial ‘sins’. I don’t see any way for the Forest Service to come out of this in a good way.

                I expect that future prospective employee candidates will be changing career plans. I certainly would.

                I hope the ‘Broligarchy’ fails. I remind you that the middle class is a shadow of what it once was, and the ultra-rich class is dominating the world.

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              • While we’re off-topic, some information to the contrary:

                “Households with incomes in the top 1 percent will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC).” https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-2017-trump-tax-law-was-skewed-to-the-rich-expensive-and-failed-to-deliver

                “The slivers of the population whose adjusted gross income was between $200,000 and $1,000,000 gained the most from their 2018 federal taxes.” https://donnellonlaw.com/blog/which-tax-bracket-benefited-most-from-the-trump-tax-cut/

                The difference? “The Hill” article was written about percentage tax cuts, not actual dollars. Which of these can you spend?

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                • Well, well; so you think the dollars should be the same for all tax groups? Good grief, tax laws are based on income bracketing, so just a common understanding of tax code would point that out. If your analogy was correct, everyone would pay the same amount regardless of income; the rich would pay little (in comparison) and the middle class would pay most of their income!

                  I was just opining to a close confidant (my wife) that surely folks understand the tax codes are based on percentages of income….🤣🤣. You must be picking tonight there Jon….🤣🤣

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                  • We’re not talking about the tax code. We obviously have different ideas about what it means to “benefit middle, working-class Americans most.” I think they like real dollars not paper exercises, and would prefer a system that gives them more money. (Sort of like the terrific Biden economy on paper didn’t win him the election.)

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