Rodeo Professor on the Bear Palmer Project: The Forest Service is Really Good at Managing Trees and Wildlife

There is an interesting character on X who calls himself Rodeo Professor.  I’d guess he’s a faculty member in wildlife at some Mountain West land grant university.  In this tweet,  he takes on an article in Inside Climate News about the Bear Palmer project on the Custer-Gallatin.  My observations are.. first, what does this project have to do with climate, other than possibly being adaptation to climate? These are the kinds of things that make people skeptical of the “climate” movement.   If climate is really a reordering of the importance of everything, or everything that used to be “the environment”, or everything that “climate” audiences might be interested in.. it makes it hard to understand what anyone means when they say climate.

Second, the way the story is written makes the FS look bad, and as RP says:

Whose interests are served by making the American people think the Forest Service is bad at managing trees/wildlife?! It’s actually, in terms of its science and management plans, really good at that.

I get that the CG didn’t answer questions, but reporters can actually quote supporters as well as folks who don’t want the project.

Below is Rodeo Professor’s tweet.

Articles like this are meant to you blackpill because we are “chopping down trees in Yellowstone.” But don’t worry this is completely fake.

First, it’s meant to panic you about timber extraction when the National Forests were created in the 1890s for timber and watersheds. The Multiple Use mandate (a law passed in the 1960s) requires we manage American national forests for co-equal purposes: outdoor recreation, timber, grazing, watersheds, fish and wildlife. This means one “use” under the multiple use framework cannot, by law, preclude the others.

Timber harvest under multiple use should be a source of American pride in conservation. Multiple use is a uniquely American innovation that gives many different types of people and businesses real skin-in-the-game in public land conservation. The 2026 Forest Service is pretty great at balancing conservation science, outdoor recreation, and extraction based livelihoods.

Funny enough, despite what the article is trying to mislead you into thinking, the planned clearcut isn’t really even for timber, it’s mainly to remove dead down trees caused by insects/disease to prevent wildfire. The Biden era emergency declaration they’re using to speed this fire mitigation up is to prevent endless lawsuits from crazy NGOs that make management next to impossible. The proposed Bear Palmer project is less than 1 percent of the 3 million acre Custer Gallatin National Forest. It’s a tiny, localized vegetation removal project. The type of clearcut proposed here *sounds* bad to people who know nothing of Mountain West forests, but it’s well within the Custer Gallatin’s own Biden-era 2022 management plan. Forest management plans are documents that take years of science, manager, and public input to establish a sustainable management strategy including vegetation and timber plans.

The management plan itself says a clearcut like this is the ideal path to regeneration for species like lodgegpole pine because these trees are shade intolerant, meaning they need sunlight.

In some cases, removing dead lodgepole is handy because otherwise seedlings will grow up among jackstrawed dead LLP and become toast in case of a fire.

So regeneration is best after what’s called a “stand replacing disturbance” or a clearcut.

Bear Palmer is a prioritized stand because there is a lot of deadfall due to insect issues or big wildfire risks. Beyond all that, no clearcut happens without an additional NEPA and special assessments of wildlife, old growth, listed species like griz, and so on, beyond the requirements of their own plan. You can read hundreds of pages of these assessments on their website today. Clearcutting is literally *the* preferred regeneration method for lodegpole to reduce wildfire risk and disease within the forest’s own plan and meet ecological objectives for regrowth!

It’s just crazy to me that supposedly environment focused publications can miss the mark so egregiously. Whose interests are served by making the American people think the Forest Service is bad at managing trees/wildlife?! It’s actually, in terms of its science and management plans, really good at that.

I was so astounded by how terrible this article was that I had to look into the author, who is an “award winning Bangladeshi journalist” who recently moved here to do a degree in journalism at the University of Montana. Maybe before writing an article so strangely out of touch with the way we manage national forests like the Custer Gallatin this guy should probably learn a little more about the American system? Who funds the demoralization propaganda website Inside Climate News? Of course it’s the same opaque network of foundations (Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller) pushing climate extremist degrowth nonsense everywhere else. Only in America do massive foundations push panic agitprop to undermine our own public land agencies/demoralize Americans about our national forest system written by people who got here 5 minutes ago.

I also thought that this was interesting..

Forest Service representatives did not respond to a request for comment or answer questions from Inside Climate News about the project’s goals, wildlife impacts and emergency designation.

So thank goodness that someone knowledgeable is stepping up to tell the Forest Service (and others, to be sure, who were not quoted) side of the story.