Today calls for writing that creates powerful word-pictures and evokes strong emotions. Unfortunately I haven’t found the right piece out there, so here are my own thoughts. As always, others are welcome to share.
Sure, National Forests weren’t around when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Still, we can celebrate this country as having the ideas that led to the establishment of the National Forests, and in some aspects, the BLM, and the structures that allowed the ebb and flow of dealing with interests and issues over time. The Executive branch, Congress, the Courts, the States, local governments and so on all have roles to play as well as employees, permittees, any people who use or recreate on the Forests, and so on. All balancing and blending over time as issues and challenges change. And here we are at TSW, discussing these dynamics as they present themselves today.
National Parks have superior marketing, for whatever reasons- probably the corporations involved in concessions help out. I currently see National Parks honored on my six-packs of Sierra Nevada- corporate Parkism seems fairly common. Yet, I also remember the problems associated with the Subaru Forester marketing- somehow related to Lamar Beasley’s efforts? It would be interesting to hear that story from someone who remembers. In my view, “America’s best idea” perhaps was not designating areas for public enjoyment and Park-ness, but the idea that locals and states and feds could somehow work out their disagreements over how best to manage or not-manage various pieces of land. Land that is uniquely open to dispersed recreation of all kinds, and that depends on -more than law enforcement- the good behavior and character of Americans (mostly)- for its success. Think of hunting season- thousands of people out there with guns and alcohol, and yet.. So that is one key thing about the National Forests – a certain amount of freedom, to pursue whatever. A basic trust in the goodness of people to behave -perhaps mediated by the fact that fencing people out would be practically difficult or impossible.
A second key thing for me is the “use” idea, that miners, oil and gas folks, ranchers, forest products folks, firewood, mushroom and berry collectors, , ski areas and summer camps, pipelines and cell towers, all can go on National Forests subject to constraints. Perhaps we inherited from our British forbears the idea that producing food, experiences and products is somehow lower than leaving things alone, perhaps a bit of a classist undertone. An innovation by Americans was to develop practical education for people who do things via the Morrill Act of 1862, education “for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanical arts” . As this article in the National Archives says “Nevertheless, land-grant support became a substantial factor in providing education to most American children who could never hope to attend private or charity-supported schools.” Many TSW readers, including me, can resonate with that, even today. While many have criticized the financial origin of the land-grants (selling Native lands), certainly private universities are not necessarily morally superior.
Finally, while many ideas have changed about the Forests through time, they are still there, and not going anywhere. Which is to be celebrated! When you think about the changes in organizational structure and technology over time, and yet, the Forest Service is still functional and still adapting.
Last winter, American Affairs Journal published a historical piece by Kevin Hawickhorst called Personnel is Policy: The Fabric of Government Organization, which describes some of the post WWII organizational changes that reduced the importance of what he called “vocational communities”. What’s interesting to me is that given the changes that Hawickhorst describes, the Forest Service, for whatever reason, has retained “research, regulation, and grants under one roof” ; in that sense, it is a relic whose ultimate wisdom is now being revealed.
At the turn of the twentieth century, agencies followed a distinct blueprint: they were organized by subject matter, not by abstract function. Each bureau focused on a single domain—such as soils, mines, or forests—and combined research, regulation, and grants under one roof. In the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Bureau of Entomology, for example, studied insect-borne diseases, issued rules to contain them, and funded farmers to protect their crops, all as part of a single mission. This structure helped agencies recruit experts by offering broader, more meaningful work than corporations could, and it built a shared sense of mission rooted in a vocational community.
Today’s agencies look very different. After World War II, reformers dismantled the integrated subject matter bureaus and reorganized government along what they called “functional” lines. In this system, regulation is one bureau, research another, and grant administration still another; each bureau covers a wide range of subjects and is defined by its activity rather than its mission. It is the model we now take for granted. The Bureau of Entomology is gone, and USDA now houses all agricultural research in a single unit. New agencies were built this way from the outset: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, created in 1965, was designed as a grantmaking machine, never a vocational community.
The shift was a well-intentioned one and backed by a wide coalition of reformers, businessmen, and interest groups. Functional departments looked modern, rational, and efficient: they simplified charts, tightened chains of command, and promised to reduce duplication. But what seemed like sensible reform gradually hollowed out the structures that had made expertise durable. Once government agencies lost their vocational missions, they stopped drawing on networks of expertise and started looking like paper mills, less able to command political respect, and more vulnerable to capture and drift.
This history carries lessons for anyone hoping to rebuild government competence. First, organization is not a technical detail but the core of state capacity. The way agencies are structured determines who they attract, what work they privilege, and whether expertise can endure. Second, organization is never neutral. Every reorganization embodies political choices about whose voices count and which functions dominate, driven by coalitions bargaining for influence and control. Third, competence endures only when agencies are organized to draw upon professional networks and put that technical expertise to use for politicians. When functional reorganizations stripped agencies of that role, agencies lost talent and prestige. For government reformers today, the task is to design agencies that anchor vocational communities and make excellence indispensable once more.
Yes, the feds or the states (laboratories of democracy) can go off on tangents and do things that don’t turn out well. And our governments have the capacity to notice that and change, or change back.
And so we perhaps can disagree about organization, about the importance of vocational communities (and their professional societies), and, of course, exactly what should be done, or not done, on any particular piece of the Federal landscape. Dynamism plus disagreement yields both change and some stability (think NFMA). And yet, the land is still here, and will be for the foreseeable future. One of the many blessings of living in the USA.
Well said!
Thanks for sharing and joining with many of us who are celebrating America’s 250 Birthday and our public lands and the people who care for them.
Corvallis, Oregon, had a war surplus USDA quonset hut on Airport Road that housed a small USDA entomology research science group. I went to K-12 with Andy Roth and Gaines Eddy’s kids. Eddy family lived in one of 8 houses on our short street. Roths lived on the other side of town.
Eddy had come to run the DOA Entomology lab from Orlando, FL, where he landed when he ran out of Depression era funds to continue his PhD degree at Oklahoma State University. Post 1937. He landed a job with DOA working on New World Screw Fly issues and basic biology of the insect and its habitat needs and its hard wiring. That was truncated by the needs to protect GIs from Pacific Theater insects harmful to human health and life. He was a pheromone and chemistry of the life stages of insects from breeding to egg laying to the instar development stages (apple does not know “instar” as a word! AI and apple minders suck!) of development stages to larvae to pupa to adults ready to feed and breed. Gaines would take the time to tell me all about it, in detail. Santa Isabella Island , Florida, basic New World Screw Fly biology. Gaines wrote the paper that lays out the environmental basics of NWSF habitat needs. Post WWII. If you wanted to know the research, it is evidently in hundreds of boxes warehoused in some USDA warehouse. Like hundreds of boxes.
Never referred to as having been digitized and AI available…However, in short, Gaines came to Corvallis to do mosquito research. All iterations of the species. PNW. OR and WA. Memory recalls him telling me he had identified over 400 variants of the mosquito species. Including some flood plain species that can exist decades until the next abnormal weather and runoff spring event flooded those lands and the eggs hatched and the life time of standing water resulted in adults that got whatever was needed to breed and lay eggs in water that dries up and stays not saturated for years.
From all that it appears to me that for the present reappearance of the NWSF now found inside the US border on the with Mexico in beef cattle. All a result of semi tropical nations with unsettled governments from Mexico south to Columbia. Nobody is spending the money to control the insect. Including the USA until 11 months ago when USDA went full on attack. First order of business was to take over a moth balled USAF airbase in West Texas. Moore Air Base, Edinburg, TX. Joint venture with War Dept and US Army Corps of Engineers. Massive breeding program. No idea if they still will use Gamma rays to sterile the adult insects. Males can breed 300 females. Females breed but once. I assume half the flies born are male and half female. Likely there is ongoing research to find a way to have only male flies. But the math is simple. A sterile female or one bred to a sterile male, ends both female and male NWSF population growth. The exponential decline is almost like nuclear fission in nature. The old Walt Disney mouse traps and ping pong balls, a thousand of each on the floor in a room. Slow motion black and white movie film. Toss a ping pong ball in the room. Watch the ball bounce, setting off another and in seconds it is a sea of airborne white ping pong balls. Same deal with sterilization in short lived insect reproduction and the introduction of sterile flies; drops the population to zero in weeks.
USDA started the race, fully funded, to introduce sterile flies 11 months ago. 24/7/365 project. At a time of widespread drought. Interior and USFS are reducing livestock numbers on grazing allotments. Ranchers reducing herds to match the available and affordable feed. No beef imports for live animals from the Americas. Period. Quarantine. Farm state congressmen fighting importing beef. Why? Processing monopoly is having to close facilities. Lack of beef numbers slaughtered. Lack of illegal alien labor with fraudulent SSI #s and phony ID which is all the potential need show and companies fined if they dismiss the fake documents. A mess! A Purposeful Mess. But we all see the beef prices. I am eating pork. I cook pork loins. $1.99/lb. Wife, I and two rat terriers eat roast pork. No seasoning for the dogs. Same with the steamed sweet potaoes, carrots, broccoli, yams they also get. Sleek and vital. No rodent or snakes survive. No snattlerakes here. Bark at people walking the alley to the convenience store to buy coffin nails.
The rancher side of the coin. An Angus cow and calf pairs at auction sell for $3000 to $4500. So with half the herd size, due to half the feed available, the net return on double or more per hundred weight dollars, the ranch, farm, is able to pay down debt, reduce interest paid. Equipment is being paid off. Equipment is being upgraded. Equipment is being renewed to last another 10,000 hours. Mortgages paid. Importing replacement meat is not going to help AMERICAN growers and customers. And as soon as the fly is eliminated, again, and that involves total compliance by Mexico, the fly has to be controlled in Central America and in the Caribbean area. The export of live animals to muslim nations from Central and South America is dead for now. Game meat cannot be brought into the US.
Screw flies lay eggs in punctures, scratches, and the Sonoran deserts and Mexica are all about spiny plants and spines piercing wildlife hides. ESA listed or common as wharf rats, the living animals are the available host. Odd that the outbreak happened in the time same time frame with the unrestricted human migration from sub and semi tropical Americas north the US. Notable enough that Trump USDA was on it like stink on a skunk by May of 2025. Whole NWSF breeding and sterilization plan and funding for USDA was in play before the Congressional 2025 punt to exit the DC “swamp” of heat and humidity for h5ome, to return in September.
I have no end of admiration for the US Dept of Agriculture (50% of their budget is SNAP, which Interior ‘s USFWS, Park Service, has the answer: Don’t Feed the Wildlife) went to work as soon as personnel were in place in early 2025 to go after NWSF and have not had to “re-invent the wheel.” Institutional memory and attention to a dire need has been in play for almost a year. USFS is about 5.3% of the 2026 USDA budget. O.02 percent of Federal Budget. Who is holding the cyanide pill for USFS? Basic common sense and history reveal the pre 1950-1982 USFS budget supported over 35,000 employees. Many in some areas were planning and administering timber sales, and the sales generated dedicated funds to dispose of slash, to maintain roads, and 25% of the timber revenue was sent to the county in which the sold timber was grown. That paid for rural schools, and county roads from state and federal highways to the USFS boundaries. Now there is a tiny bit of Payment in Lieu of Taxes money to “the counties.” Not enough in my county to support the county fairgrounds missing timber money for 40 years. To have it (it is the woodland fire refuge for private lands being overrun by fires from the USFS. BLM lands contract with the State to fight BLM fire as the BLM is heavy to checkerboard sections with private and state land. If there is internal opposition to selling timber within the USFS, that is YOUR cyanide pill. PRIDE month posters and color books are not going to fund jobs and foster advocacy from the “users” of USFS lands. Selling permits to camp overnight in a R-6 Wilderness, which is one permit for every 6 day use permits, are sold out in an hour one day a year. Maybe making it a lottery would work. Sell chances. Buy all you want. Like the Elks Club tickets to win the Buick: Usually the wealthiest man in town won the Buick. Gave it to his wife to drive and he bought a Cadillac with the savings on paying for her car.
All that world salad above is my expression of fear, anxiety, worry (collective angst) that the USDA be able to identify the problem, find the solution that was the focus of research from 1936-38 mid 1950s, and the solution found and some of it a result of the mad nuclear dash to “built The Bombe” before “they” did. Gamma rays: ionizing radiation generated by nuclear materials.
Same Dept of Agriculture that has no idea yet how to keep fire out of neighborhoods or “special” places. And with the recent tragedy in UT-CO, likely falling back to address human frailty and fallibility once again when chaos is too normal. There is nothing heroic about taking fares at the ticket window. Nor does taking fares pay big wages. The whole of life is about risk and reward. Female seal leaves a pup on the beach to go feed. Pup is Orca and shark safe. Wolf walking the flotsam line looking for dead bird hits the seal pup bonanza. Life. Doing nothin is not doing the “best we can with what we have.” There is a game camera pic of 7 grizzly bears ( ?two sows and their 2025 cubs? running down a county road, the camera mounted on a ranch calving barn near Choteau, MT. Last week. Glacier NP bears now follow riparian areas way to the east on the north side of MT. Great Plains Grizzly reoccupation under way. All the bear numbers have increased. Not habitat enough and they have not trekked west where there is more habitat. But the feed is where there are no trees. Few trees. Cottonwood, diamond willow. While NGOs sue to stop fuel reduction that removes a conifer in overstocked conifer forests, where light does not hit the ground. I’m cutting a hazelnut tree this winter. Scrub jay buried a nut and a tree grew to shade out an apple tree. Squirrels eat the nuts green. Better the apples feed the city deer and squirrels find other food. But golly gee, the USDA in its first 7 months dementia free was building the know and proven solution in it was fully funded, all in 7 months from taking office in a hate filled polarized political climate. I am impressed. Now when does USFS find its way to put a lid on wildland fire. Trees older than the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence are being killed by the tens of thousands of acres annually. It can be done.