The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
Community Sourced, Shared and Supported
Here’s an article by Rob Chaney of the Missoulian about them..
Here’s an article by Katherine Mozzone of KTVM.
Click here and then click on the sidebar that says Whitham to see the photos. Thank you Museum of the Rockies for posting them online!
Here’s the link, and below is an excerpt.
Yet for all Pinchot’s love of the political rough-and-tumble, he repeatedly argued that democracy functions best when the citizenry and their representatives pursue the collective good; when they negotiated their differences, not exaggerated them; when they worked together, across the street and aisle.
This was especially critical for public servants: “Learn tact simply by being absolutely honest and sincere,” he told Forest Service employees, “and by learning to recognize the point of view of the other man and meet him with arguments he will understand.” After all, “a public official is there to serve the public and not run them.”
In no other way could the Forest Service achieve the mission Pinchot had set for the land-management organization at its establishment in 1905: “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.”
This maxim became the mantra for Pinchot’s gubernatorial campaigns in the mid-1920s and early 1930s. Because conservative Republicans despised his progressivism and Democrats controlled the state’s large bloc of urban voters, Pinchot had to construct an odd (yet winning) coalition outside the usual party apparatus. Feminists, minorities, miners and mill workers, the dispossessed and impoverished, prohibitionists and small farmers turned out in force for this well-heeled man of the people.
Between vacation and retreat, I had a moment to share this with you. I am a fan of the Center of the American West and they are offering these Pinchot t-shirts from a highly appropriate person at a highly appropriate time of the 4 year cycle. IMHO.
Here’s the link.
All I can say is “Amen, Giff, wherever you are!”
Also a note from them:
Call 303.735.1399 to order yours today!
Proceeds from the sale of these shirts go toward supplementing the activities of the Center of the American West. All sales are final. Please note: these sizes tend to be smaller than standard – you may need to order a size larger than usual.
And a note from Char Miller.
Who is Gifford Pinchot?
Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), who speaks so movingly of the high calling of citizenship, knew partisan politics inside out.
His family’s financial success came coupled with distinguished political activism at the local, state, and national levels – and he embraced his progenitors’ intense engagement with the body politic.
As founding chief of the U. S. Forest Service (est. 1905), he wheedled Congress into expanding the agency’s budgets and its authority to protect, regulate, and steward the national forests and grasslands. After President Taft fired him in 1910 – for insubordination! – Pinchot became a driving force behind Theodore Roosevelt’s insurgent Bull Moose 1912 presidential campaign, writing some of the candidate’s most blistering speeches. His zealousness later haunted his electoral ambitions: to win two terms as Pennsylvania’s governor proved a Herculean task, given that state’s take-no-prisoners political environment.
Being tough went with the territory, he assured his nephew Harcourt Johnstone in 1927, then standing for Parliament in his native England. Losing did too: “I’ve been licked so many times in so many ways that I’ve sort of become immune to it.”
Yet for all Pinchot’s love of the political rough-and-tumble, he repeatedly argued that democracy functions best when the citizenry and their representatives pursue the collective good; when they negotiated their differences, not exaggerated them.
This was especially critical for public servants: “Learn tact simply by being absolutely honest and sincere,” he told Forest Service employees, “and by learning to recognize the point of view of the other man and meet him with arguments he will understand.” After all, “a public official is there to serve the public and not run them.” In no other way could the Forest Service achieve the mission Pinchot had set for the land-management organization: “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.”
This maxim became the mantra for Pinchot’s gubernatorial campaigns in the mid-1920s and early 1930s. Because conservative Republicans despised his progressivism and Democrats controlled the state’s large bloc of urban voters, Pinchot had to fashion an odd (yet winning) coalition. Feminists, minorities, miners and mill workers, the dispossessed and impoverished, prohibitionists and small farmers turned out in force for this well-heeled man of the people.
Once in office, his supporters cheered as he tapped the first woman and African American to serve in the state’s cabinet; intervened on behalf of striking workers; and secured passage of an impressive array of social-service initiatives and environmental protections. Still, this legislation only became law because Pinchot dealt faithfully with his opponents (and they with him). His was a conscientious pragmatism.
He believed deeply, too, in a binding, reciprocal relationship between the governed and their government. At the 1889 constitutional-centennial celebrations in his hometown of Milford, Pennsylvania, 24-year-old Gifford Pinchot assured his fellow citizens that while “we have a share in the commonwealth, … the commonwealth has a share in us.” As such, it has first claim “to our service, our thought, and action,” a credo that citizen Pinchot lived to the fullest.
Char Miller
W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, and author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism.
I’ve noticed many stories about this but here’s a link to one and an excerpt below. It’s nice when we can see the world getting better..
In the meantime, Obama has instructed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the Interior Department and the Agriculture Department — parent agency of the Forest Service — to “ensure temporary federal firefighters who are bravely battling fires have access to the health insurance they deserve,” the official said.
The official added that the president acted after the issue was brought to his attention following his trip late last month to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Obama toured damage caused by that state’s most destructive wildfire on record.
The so-called Waldo Canyon, which broke out June 23, killed two people and gutted nearly 350 homes and forced the evacuation of some 35,000 people. Ranked as one of worst conflagrations to date during the 2012 wildfire season nationwide, it was finally declared 100 percent contained late Tuesday.
At that time, the White House said that more than 8,800 firefighters were at work against dozens of wild-land blazes burning across the country, most of them in the West.
Some 15,000 firefighters are on the federal government payroll, but 8,000 of them are classified as temporary, seasonal employees and thus ineligible for federal benefits such as health insurance, according to Rachel LaBruyere, an organizer of the petition drive on the nonpartisan social action website Change.org.
“It’s a huge deal, and there’s going to be a lot of really, really happy firefighters out there tonight,” said John Lauer, 27, seasonal member of a “hot-shot” crew from Custer, South Dakota, who initiated the petition drive seeking health benefits. “I’m sure they’re all very thankful for what the president’s done.”
Much government policy and some law resides in a realm philosopher Henry Frankfurt labels “bullshit”—in earlier times called humbug or balderdash. Much US Forest Service policy falls here too: regulation, manual and handbook directives. At least that’s the way I’ve seen it for a very long time.
Early in my Forest Service career, a colleague and I were conscripted into a week-long Forest Service Manual/Handbook writing exercise, specifically focused on the Forest Planning sections. A quick survey of the materials led us to conclude that our week had to be spent making sure that there was nothing in the FS planning manual that could possibly harm anyone. We knew that we could not ‘fix’ the manual, so we spent our week in a second-best endeavor.
A few years later a FS Planning Director asked a group of us for policy ideas at an economists conference. I suggested a bold move: Throw the Forest Service Manual and Handbook in the Potomac. I made the recommendation in the main because both the FS Planning and Economics Manual/Handbook materials were pretty much bullshit. Note that I immediately added that people should be able to swim out and retrieve portions of the policy manuals they deemed useful, and then upgrade them as necessary to help advise program development, project design and work generally. The point was to decommission the whole mess, and free the agency of both the manuals/handbooks and the mini-bureaucracy that oversaw them. Of course I didn’t believe that the FS would act on my suggestion, at least not then. But one can always hope. [Note: I wish there were electronic copies of earlier FS Manual/Handbook materials to point to for historical (hysterical?) purposes. ]
I suggested “tossing” the FS manual and handbook to both Chief Dombeck (via Chris Wood) and Chief Bosworth. Both were somewhat warm to the idea, but nothing happened. I’ve once again raised that issue with FS top brass, suggesting that collaborative adaptive governance can’t work if everybody shows up with several yards worth of “holy writ” that must be followed.
Later I called bullshit on the Forest Service’s initiative to tie planning (and pretty much all else) to environmental management systems—chronicled in my Forest Environmental Management Systems blog (Oct. 2005 – April 2007). That particular mess went away, with EMS rightfully retreating to a minor place (facilities and fleet management) in Forest Service administration. I’m sure my blogging did not influence the outcome. But at least I left a record, so that we might learn from the mistake.
Common wisdom says, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Let’s pause a moment and explore special characteristics of what we are digging through.
What is ‘bullshit’?
Before anyone gets too upset with my BS terminology, maybe we ought to delve into Frankfurt’s little book On Bullshit—an essay really, which you can read online. Frankfurt’s little book adorned a special shelf in my FS office bookshelves, accompanied by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Something Happened, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and some other classics. Frankfurt begins On Bullshit with,
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. … In consequence we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.
Frankfurt attempts to tease out a ‘theory of bullshit’ for us. I’ll not bore you with all Frankfurt’s building blocks, but I at least we need to know that he distinguishes bullshit from lying, in part as follows:
The essence of bullshit is not that it is false, but that it is phony. … The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. [But it does mean that they don’t quite ring true.]
How much FS policy falls in this realm? Politicians tend to create bullshit to pander—to curry favor. Bureaucrats create bullshit for very different reasons. Frankfurt says,
Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. … [This is] common in public life, where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.
Think about how Forest Service teams are put together, often without asking for volunteers and without too much regard for seeking out the most knowledgeable team members. It always seemed to my jaundiced eye that team members were selected to construct manual and handbook materials in the main because they were ‘good soldiers’, and particularly not ‘radicals’ who might rock the boat too much.
Why I’ve tried to stop the BS
I know that it is pretty much a fool’s quest, but I’ve always tried to get the Forest Service bureaucracy to ‘swing for the fences’ and pull itself up from the morass of its own policy, manuals and handbooks. But, like many American institutions the Forest Service will not take a hard look at itself. Maybe it’s due of fear. Maybe it is due to ennui—stuckness, lack of hope. Maybe it is something else. Maybe it is just because they don’t realize that bullshit might be outright harmful, even toxic to the organization.
This proves especially true when bullshit policy is brought into court, “for the record,” when people challenge federal actions, which must be based on federal policy. At the point federal policy bullshit makes an appearance in court, federal judges are not pleased to have to wade through it—so we too often get strongly-worded federal decisions against the Forest Service.
In any case, meaningful links between process and outcome in the Forest Service often simply don’t exist in any practical sense. They are too encumbered by bullshit. For example, we often hear that if the Forest Service can’t fix the Forest Planning process (for example) in ‘rulemaking’ then we’ll fix it in forest plan implementation—as if that can happen. Isn’t such talk just administrative governance denial?
I keep the pressure on, hoping against fate that a miracle will occur, as it did with General Electric not too long ago, just before GE was to fall in to a bureaucratic quagmire from which it would not, could not escape. Make no mistake, the GE rebirth was brutal. But the company is arguably much better today than before—now that fierce conversations are standard practice innovation is center stage, and people are required to challenge each other to do better, and to be better. Maybe someday the same will happen in a government agency, even perchance to the Forest Service. But I’m not holding my breath.
I stumbled across this website for Federal employees, and it seems like buyouts are still in flux, for now. There seems to be plenty of interest in taking the buyouts but, delays are apparently reducing the possibility of it happening this fiscal year. I’d expect a headlong rush of Region 5 timber people to want out, now, after the Pacific Rivers decision.
http://federalsoup.federaldaily.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=41295&FID=41&title=forest-service-buyouts
On a side note, it appears there is a freeze on Sale Administration jobs, right now, here in California. With current projects needing MAJOR revisions, and the timber industry not wanting tiny trees, we’ve reached a true gridlock on forest restoration.
Could it be that with the Adventure Pass program, the Forest Service was once-again trying to emulate business interests it once sought to regulate. Not that this is wrong, or evil—at least not unless you firmly believe that “Money is the root of all evil.” But it is clearly not what I want from the Forest Service. I made this case last year in Forest Service Mindshift: From Regulators to Partners.
I believe that the move to “marketize”, say, an ‘Adventure Pass’ program comes naturally to those in the Forest Service who have been hobnobbing with ski resort owners, Disney people, outfitters, etc. and want to be part of that world. It is just a piece of a broader “Print Your Own Money” mentality that has become firmly entrenched I the minds of some Forest Service managers? Of course they want to be apart from that world too, they want to be recognized as government agents, civil servants, etc. Can they have it both ways? I don’t think so.
My ‘beef’ with the Forest Service in this is, and has been for a very long time, simply expressed via Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from A BIG YELLOW TAXI. (copied from a dialogue thread I put into Eco-Watch bulletin board back in 1999):
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
They took all the trees, put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em
Hey farmer farmer, put away that D.D.T. now
Give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees
please
Late last night I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi took away my old man
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot (choo bop bop bop bop)
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot
~~~~~~
I don’t want national forest trees put into a “tree museum,” where you “pay a dollar and a half just to see them.” I don’t want “swingin’ hot spots” and other overly luxurious recreation facilities on the public lands. Not that such is imminent, but it might be only a bit further down the road to ‘market land’. In short I want my experiences on public lands to be as far from Madison Avenue spin as possible.
So I was delighted that the Ninth Circuit slapped the Forest Service hard (pdf) on this one—particularly since the Congress put the Recreation Enhancement Act in place to give firm guidance as to how the Forest Service ought to administer fee collection programs. Questions remain. How/Why did the Forest Service come to believe that it was acting within the scope of the Recreation Enhancement Act (available here) when it continued to use the Adventure Pass program for general access fees in some areas after the REA was passed in 2004?
Extended Footnote on Framing/Blaming
In an earlier post, I argued that the there were various ways to frame arguments, building from one of Sharon’s posts. The frame I imposed was a bit extreme, and unfairly characterized the Forest Service as a villain. I did it in part to suggest that Sharon’s earlier post had unfairly characterized the Forest Service as a victim. I realize now that I was unfair in my framing and in my characterization of Sharon’s earlier framing. In short, the victim/villain framing was too harsh and a bit silly—but it did get some folks to think a bit. A better approach would have been to admit that villains are best left for fiction, and that better framing for real world situations ought to follow this advice:
“In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil. … There are no villains … rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them.” Ben Bova
In a recent book, Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz says, among other things, that people often put people they disagree with in one of three boxes: either they are “unformed”, else they are “idiots”, else they are “evil.” Schulz argues that there remains another possibility. People we disagree with may be quite well informed (have plenty of facts at hand), and they may not be idiots, neither evil. They might just view the world differently.
Incidentally, here is a link to a great little video presentation from Schultz at the 2011 TED Conference. Or, if you prefer, just browse the “first few pages” via Amazon of Schulz’s Being Wrong.
I challenge all to steer clear of the victim/villain framing that I used in my earlier post, as much fun as it is to frame things that way. But to so steer is to move away from much of the rhetoric used in the “industry/environmental wars” and other political arenas.
Finally, keep in mind that it proves very hard for any of us, particularly those in power, to admit error. Here is what Diane Ravitch said, when being interviewed on being wrong about her earlier championing of the “No Child Left Behind” program:
Schulz: If you could hear someone else interviewed about wrongness, who would it be?
Ravitch: That’s a hard one. Donald Rumsfeld said he was wrong, but I don’t even want to hear from him. [Former Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs Co-Chair, and former Citigroup Chair] Bob Rubin would be interesting, but he’ll never admit he was wrong. Right now what’s coming to mind are people who have never admitted that they’re wrong about anything.
Schulz: Like who?
Ratcliff: Like basically everybody I’ve been associated with for the last 20 years.
Related Reading
Kathryn Schulz. 2010. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
Robert Jervis. 1997. Systems Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life
Albert O. Hirschman. 1991. The Rhetoric of Reaction. Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
Deitrich Dörner. 1989. The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations
Larry Tye. 1988. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of Public Relations
Richard Hofstadter. 1952. The Paranoid Style in American Politics
[Note: Here’s a post I developed on The Logic of Failure]
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently overturned a lower court’s ruling, declaring that the Forest Service’s Adventure Pass violated the Recreation Enhancement Act (pdf). What I wonder is how the Forest Service thought that the Adventure Pass could pass a ‘red face test’ both in public and in the courts? Moreover, how did their USDA Office of General Counsel legal advisers feel that they could pass that red face test?
Is this yet another example of the Forest Service pushing forward with an initiative without much regard for the law, with both ‘professional arrogance’ and ‘budget protection/maximization’ motivations as backdrop? Finally, where does the Forest Service go from here?
In my book, given the austerity that the American people now face, and will face more squarely in the future, I think it time to talk seriously about what ought the Forest Service to manage for and at what cost, both in terms of direct cost to the US taxpayer and in terms of environmental costs. For me there are plenty of programs to prune, both within what the agency calls recreation and elsewhere. I believe it past time to take a careful look at Forest Service cash flows, sources and uses. Let’s then try to figure out what more and what less to do, and what to do differently.
A Flashback
Fee Demo and Adventure pass discussions are not new to the Forest Service. The Forest Service had a chance to respond to critics of both way back in 1999-2000 on Eco-Watch [Note this link provides a flat file readout of a forum that was largely devoted to fee demo discussion/criticism]. The Forest Service chose to be silent, just as they did with the recent forest planning rulemaking process. See, e.g my Earth to Forest Planning: Get a Blog. In 1999 I could understand their silence, their reluctance to engage in social media discussion. Social Media was brand new and the Forest Service was toying with it.I no longer have patience with their reluctance to engage.
Evidently the Congress did listen, passing the Recreation Enhancement Act in 2004,to replace the Recreation Fee Demo Program of 1994. But the Forest Service somehow thought that it could evade the clear language of the latter Act.
My question is broader than to allege that the Forest Service routinely ignores the Congress and the Courts. My question is, When will the Forest Service engage in public discourse, in public deliberation? And I’m not taking about the many, mostly facilitated, highly spun so-called dialogue efforts that the Forest Service too often employs. [Note: I am a champion of dialogue, when used for deep inquiry. But I’m afraid that the Forest Service is now in the process of turning “dialogue” into another “inform and involve” spin mechanism.]
Footnote on Framing, Blaming
I threw this post together in response to Sharon’s earlier post on this subject. Both posts are examples of what I call The Frame Game and The Blame Game. Sharon’s post frames this as “a problem if the FS can’t charge fees and doesn’t get funding from Congress.” The Forest Service is framed as the victim and the Congress or those who block general fees/contributions are framed as villains. This remains true (or not) whether or not the frame was imposed innocently. My post frames the issue as one where the taxpayer and/or the public interest are victims and the Forest Service is villain. Neither frame does justice to the problem at hand. But, hey, this is a blog and things are “thrown together” quickly.
In both cases—in every case—we ought not to forget that these twin forces, framing and blaming, are almost always at work. And we must never forget that there are plenty of victims (real and imagined) and plenty of us who can rightfully be viewed as villains from time to time. What remains a challenge and an opportunity is to be able to work together toward betterment of the public interest as best we can when we mostly see only our own shadows playing in reflection off the walls of caves that keep our thoughts narrowly confined.
[Note: 2/24/8:23 AM — I updated this post slightly, in response to a comment]
All US tax dollars come from the same source, the US taxpayer. In a couple of recent instances, people are sure that putting an area under the Park Service would get them more funds to do a better job of management.
Here are two examples, in Southern California here
“Diverse support shown for National Park Service proposal for San Gabriel Mountains, River” and here for the Valles Caldera.
The economic benefits of consolidated management of both the Valles Caldera National Preserve and Bandelier National Monument is one of several reasons the preserve should be taken over by the National Park Service, according to a recent study.
Caldera Action, which advocates for increased public access to the preserve, is touting an analysis from The Harbinger Consulting Group that, according to Caldera Trust Executive Director Tom Ribe, “produced more dramatic findings than we expected in terms of impact to the local economy.”
Harbinger says a Park Service takeover would net the Valles Caldera millions more in revenue.
The preserve was created by Congress in 2000 as a kind of private-public management experiment. It is now run by the Valles Caldera Trust, with a board appointed by the president and which has been charged with making the preserve a financially self-sustaining operation.
That, however, isn’t likely to happen. Other studies have shown the preserve won’t make nearly enough money to meet the federal requirement that it break even by 2015. The preserve’s annual operating budget is about $3.5 million; the trust typically raises, through grazing contracts and recreation fees, about $800,000 per year.
“Through fees and commercial resource management, the Trust has made gains in recovering some of the costs of managing the Preserve, but by all accounts, that experiment has not succeeded and is unlikely to do so,” the Harbinger report says.
U.S. Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall have been making this argument since at least last year, when they introduced legislation to fold the Valles Caldera into the National Park Service.
The report backs them up, saying National Park Service management would provide “more stable long-term benefits, more reliable resource protection, and superior visitor experiences.” Key findings in the study include:
Under NPS management, the preserve would support over $1 million more in sales to local businesses and nearly 50 more local jobs than it would if managed by the Forest Service with a similar operating budget and staff.
NPS management would generate in excess of $110 million in local economic benefits over the first 15 years.
In 2016, NPS operation of the preserve would be expected to support 202 local jobs, nearly $8 million in wages and $11 million in economic activity. And between 2012 and 2016, construction projects on the preserve could support an average of 50 local jobs per year.
Consolidated NPS management of the preserve and neighboring Bandelier National Monument would attract more visitors to the preserve and improve the visitors’ experience at both sites. Consolidation would also boost efficiency and create consistent policies and programs.
The National Park Service is more likely than the U.S. Forest Service to maintain a high and consistent level of funding, staffing, visitor services and resource protection.Part of the reason NPS stands to make more money with the preserve than the Forest Service is that the Park Service would probably invest more money in the preserve upfront. “With a small number of notable exceptions,” the study notes, “the Forest Service does not tend to put in place the same level of infrastructure and visitor services typically associated with NPS units.”
Based on plans already presented by the Valles Caldera Trust, the analysis says a likely scenario for the preserve would include the addition of a main visitors center overlooking the Valle Grande, a loop drive with interpretive signs, a full slate of interpretive and educational programming, more trails and trailhead facilities, and one or two small campgrounds on the preserve.
The Park Service is more likely to raise the funds for these projects because of its budget process, the report says. NPS requests annual appropriations by line item for each of its parks — a certain amount for a particular park’s visitors center, for example. The Forest Service, on the other hand, receives appropriations for broad functional categories like fire-fighting, and has to spread those funds out among its areas.
Plus, the Park Service is a draw in itself, much more so than the Forest Service, according to the analysis. Informal surveys of visitors to attractions managed by the National Park Service have shown that “many travelers (especially international visitors) use the NPS website to help plan their visits,” the report says. “Over time, the Preserve would become widely known as part of the NPS system, and word of mouth from other parks in the region could encourage even more visitors to Bandelier and Valles Caldera.”
The bill to put the Valles Caldera under management of NPS has gotten a hearing in Congress’ Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Bingaman chairs, but has not advanced.
In a statement, Bingaman said, “The National Park Service is best suited for the long-term management of the Valles Caldera as it has a long history of protecting unique cultural and natural resources, while also increasing tourism to our nation’s crown jewels.”
For those curious about the study and the assumptions therein, here is a link to the study.
Maybe it’s time to consider changing the budget structure of the Forest Service to be unit by unit- or somehow otherwise equilibrating the budgets among agencies for equivalent kinds of activities. Perhaps there is something about lobbying for a park or for parks; that lobbying for a “fuels treatment” line item across the country doesn’t have the same resonance.
Perhaps, if a place is special, then it belongs best at the Park Service.. otherwise if it’s forested, the Forest Service and if not, the BLM. Maybe it’s time to put all federal lands together under one budget process and approach (if not department). Otherwise, there is likely to be increasing amounts of transferring as local areas try to increase their funding- with the transfers themselves incurring additional costs.
Some of us are not as aware as we might be of the southern national forests and their history; here’s a story from Jason Bacaj of the Anniston Star.
Seventy-five years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a swath of government landholdings spread over the Talladega Mountain chain a national forest.
It grew from an act of Congress in 1935 allowing the federal government to approach private landowners within a defined “purchase unit” area to see if they’d be interested in selling land, said Bob Pasquill, historian and archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service.
Living in the Great Depression, many small farmers and property owners were relocating already or able to be persuaded to sell their property to the government, Pasquill said, dismissing the idea that the government took land from people with delinquent taxes.
That’s a common misconception, he said, as is the thought that the land was clear-cut when it was declared a national forest. It was rough land and the more remote areas were nearly inaccessible, let alone suitable for large-scale logging, Pasquill said. There was a small degree of logging, though, and even turpentining, but that meant developing wagon roads to collect the pine pitch and logs — not an easy task, as anyone who has ridden a bicycle along the Skyway Motorway can appreciate.
“(The) big section of mountain called ‘Horseblock,’ one has to wonder how it got that name,” Pasquill said. “There was secondary growth across the area. It wasn’t a total wasted clear-cut.”
From the time the government began purchasing land in 1935 to create the Talladega National Forest, two crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps did the legwork involved in turning it into a national park. The men built the Skyway Motorway along the spine of the mountain chain, built dams, lodges, picnic grounds, bridges and fire towers connected by phone lines, Pasquill said.
The forest came into its own in the 1940s and 1950s, as tourist traffic increased and areas of second growth filled out. Forest Service employees carried out the department’s policy of suppressing fire throughout those years, unknowingly damaging the natural habitat and reducing the range of Alabama’s state tree, the once-ubiquitous mountain longleaf pine, Pasquill said.
In the 1970s and ‘80s the Forest Service began performing prescribed burns on a small scale, said Jonathan Stober, USFS wildlife biologist. It wasn’t until 2001 that the prescribed burn program was developed fully as an initiative to restore the historic range of mountain longleaf pines, which was a global critically imperiled habitat at that point. Covering a mere 3 percent of its historic range, mountain longleaf pine habitats remain a critically imperiled, but the Forest Service is making noticeable improvements to longleaf stands.
“We have a certain set of tools: one being an axe and one being a match. With those two tools we’re trying to restore this landscape,” Stober said. “It’ll take another 75 years to do that.”
Restoring mountain longleaf pines is a difficult task and an impossible one without understanding the role of fire in its development, said Dan Spaulding, chief curator for the Anniston Museum of Natural History. A baby longleaf pine looks like a clump of grass. Then it grows into what looks like a palm tree — no branches, just pine needles atop the stump protecting the bud of the tree which eventually shoots up through the palm, Spaulding said. It grows slowly and needs fire to survive because otherwise, that slow growth allows fast-growing, weedier plant and tree species to overtake it.
A period of about 75 years is needed for a mountain longleaf pine to reach maturity, said Rob Carter, biology professor at Jacksonville State University who did his Ph.D. dissertation on longleaf pines. The trees reach a height between 80 and 100 feet at that point, depending on the soil, he said. They can continue to live for another 125 years or more.
Restoring the mountain longleaf pine’s habitat is essential to the forest’s health, Stober said. The tree provides a livable environment to a number of endangered species, such as the red-cockaded woodpecker, an “umbrella species” for the Talladega National Forest. Umbrella species, such as the woodpeckers and bobwhite quails, require a certain type of habitat that’s also conducive to the survival and viability of many other native species, Stober said. The forest is home to about 25 species that are endangered or candidates for becoming endangered, he said.
The small woodpeckers nest in the heartwood of mature mountain longleaf pines afflicted with redheart disease, a fungus that rots out the center of the tree. Open canopy without much scrub or midlevel brush is needed for the birds to scout around for food, Stober said.
The Shoal Creek Ranger District, based just outside Heflin, has gone from 1998 when there were one or two clusters — a set of four separate woodpecker nests for one pair of breeding birds — to having 16 breeding groups producing 26 fledglings this year.
“That ecosystem … is a rare, endemic community to this part of the world and is also a crossroads between Appalachia and the coastal (area),” Stober said.
Although the founding date for Talladega National Forest is given as July 17, 1936, no celebrations or events are planned today to mark the tract’s diamond anniversary — so anyone who’s ever felt inclined to hug a tree might find this the ideal day to do it.
I am a fan of longleaf pine.. for those of you who have never made the acquaintance of one, here is a photo of the grass stage.
and a link to the Longleaf Alliance website for those who want to know more about this tree and efforts to restore it.