Here’s more on Sally Jewell, plus an interview..below is an excerpt.
Jewell was born in England but moved to the Seattle area before age 4. She has led Kent, Wash.-based REI since 2005. She served as chief operating officer for five years before taking the top job and worked for nearly two decades in commercial banking before that. She also has worked as an engineer for Mobil Oil Corp.
Jewell emerged as a frontrunner for the Interior post in recent days, edging out better-known Democrats such as former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter. The Interior job traditionally has gone to politicians from Western states. Salazar was a Colorado senator before taking over at Interior in 2009.
Jewell donated $5,000 to Obama’s re-election effort and has supported other Democrats, campaign finance records show.
Jewell is the first woman Obama has nominated for his second-term Cabinet and a prominent representative from the business community.
Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune called her a champion in the effort to connect children with nature.
Tim Wigley, president of the Western Energy Alliance, which represents the oil and natural gas industry, said Jewell’s experience as a petroleum engineer and business leader “will bring a unique perspective to an office that is key to our nation’s energy portfolio.”
Sharon’s thoughts: In comparison to Salazar, or even Ritter, Ms. Jewell has never lived the day-to-day public lands conflicts, and seems to have an urban background, seeing the challenge as “connecting urbanites with nature.” However, let’s face it, we are not doing that well ourselves with resolving disputes, and she could possibly help change the “battle for the environment” culture through a fresh way of looking at our world. It’s not “we pure enviros” and “those evil timber/oil and gas/skiing/OHV beasts” as much as how are we going to live together, take care of our moutains, our prairies, our deserts, our water and wildlife, and our people, rural and urban. There is an area of common ground ripe for exploration by new and different people, with new and different ideas. In my opinion.
Jobs Corps working in the Angeles National Forest in the late 1960s. | Photo: Courtesy Angeles National Forest
Here’s a link to another excellent Char Miller post.
Questions:
1) Where does Job Corps fit into the taxonomy of these programs? and
2) Young people need to learn jobs, but old people often need jobs. As in this Department of Labor
SCSEP enhances employment opportunities for unemployed older Americans and promotes them as a solution for businesses seeking trained, qualified, and reliable employees. Older workers are a valuable resource for the 21st century workforce, and SCSEP is committed to providing high-quality job training and employment assistance to participants. We have an extensive network of service providers in every county in the U.S.
Iremember the FS used to hire people through this program, but not so sure it is used anymore.
Is it time to add a Senior Conservation Corps? Or a Mixed-Age Conservation Corps?
Wall Ranger District is located in South Dakota, but is part of the Nebraska National Forest.
Here are the two projects I could find on the SOPA.
Southwest Fence Relocation and Waterline Project (EA)
Install 3.6 miles of water pipeline with 5 stock tanks, move one existing fence from Lower Booth Dam north of FSR 227 and convert an electric fence to barbwire in the Camp Flat Allotment all in the southwest corner of the Fort Pierre National Grassland.
Status: Under Analysis
Management Unit: Wall Ranger District
Purpose: Grazing management
and
East 83 Prescribed Burn (CE)
Description: This project proposes burning approximately 25,000 acres of the Fort Pierre National Grassland over the next 10 years with the goal of improving wildlife habitat.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Wednesday will nominate business executive Sally Jewell to lead the Interior Department, an administration official said.
Jewell is the president and chief executive officer at the outdoors company Recreational Equipment, Inc., known as REI, which sells clothing and gear for outdoor adventures with more than 100 stores across the country. Before joining REI in 2000, Jewell worked in commercial banking and as an engineer for Mobil Oil Corp. She took the top post at REI in 2005.
If confirmed, Jewell would replace current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who held the post throughout Obama’s first term. Salazar announced last month that he would step down in March.
Jewell is the first woman in Obama’s crop of second-term Cabinet nominees. The White House faced criticism that the new Cabinet lacked diversity after Obama tapped a string of white men for top posts, but Obama promised more diverse nominees were in the queue for other jobs.
Jewell’s confirmation would also put a prominent representative from the business community in the president’s Cabinet. REI is a $2 billion-a-year company and has been named by Fortune Magazine as one of the top 100 companies to work for.
Obama was to announce Jewell’s nomination during a ceremony in the White House State Dining Room Wednesday afternoon, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to confirm Jewell’s nomination ahead of the president.
Jewell has earned national recognition for her management skills and support for outdoor recreation and habitat conservation
In 2011 she introduced Obama at a White House conference on the “America’s Great Outdoors” initiative, noting that the $289 billion outdoor-recreation industry supports 6.5 million jobs.
Under Salazar, the Interior Department pushed renewable power such as solar and wind and oversaw a moratorium on offshore drilling after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The moratorium was lifted in October 2010, although offshore drilling operations did not begin for several more months.
The Interior Department manages millions of acres in national parks and forests, overseeing energy and mining operations on some of the government-owned land.
Jewell’s nomination was hailed by conservation and business groups alike.
Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune called Jewell a champion in the effort to connect children with nature and said she has “a demonstrated commitment to preserving the higher purposes public lands hold for all Americans — recreation, adventure, and enjoyment.
The Western Energy Alliance, which represents the oil and natural gas industry in the West, also welcomed Jewell’s nomination.
“Her experience as a petroleum engineer and business leader will bring a unique perspective to an office that is key to our nation’s energy portfolio,” said Tim Wigley, the group’s president.
My take: this looks like not one of “the usual suspects” and a person who can see both sides. I’m liking this choice, plus I like the fact that if you are going to hold the FS feet to the fire about diversity, it’s time to walk the talk.
I also thought this was interesting…
Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said Tuesday that Obama should adopt a principle in which every acre of public land that is leased to the oil and gas industry is matched by an acre permanently protected for conservation or recreation.
Over the past four years, more than 6 million acres of public lands have been leased for oil and gas, compared with 2.6 million acres permanently protected, according to U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
I have three thoughts. First, if you are going to run the numbers, then shouldn’t you add all federal lands together to get your used/”protected” ratio? BLM plus Parks plus Refuges, plus FS?
Second, it this all about oil and gas? Or is “protected” no grazing, no OHV’s, etc.?
Third, oil and gas structures go away after some years, maybe you should require the O&G folks to put everything back on the surface and then “protect” it.
O Glinda, where are you now that the FS needs you?
Thanks to Matthew for finding this and posting as a comment..
Last September, the United States Forest Service decided not to renew a longstanding contract with Avue Digital Services, a privately held firm in Tacoma that had been hosting the agency’s online jobs database since 2005. The Avue license cost the Forest Service more than $34 million in the past seven years. But the data created from that pricey partnership is now lost to the federal government; under contract, Avue retains proprietary ownership of the position descriptions it generated for the Forest Service. Now the agency faces the incredible task of rewriting potentially 40,000 position descriptions from scratch.
This development recently came to the attention of Andy Stahl, executive director of the Eugene-based nonprofit Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. A friend of Stahl’s from within the Forest Service complained to him of the seeming waste of taxpayer dollars over the years, and of the frustration of having to draft new position descriptions from a blank slate.
“She was upset because she thought that the money spent with Avue had not bought the government anything,” Stahl recalls. “All the work had to be redone.”
Stahl promptly requested copies of the Forest Service’s Avue contract as well as the agency’s payment records to Avue, all of which he later shared with the Independent. The development is particularly galling, he says, because Avue generated much of its data using previously existing Forest Service position descriptions—meaning the agency can’t use those as a template in redrafting either. Stahl wrote a scathing blog post about what he calls the “Avue debacle” in early January.
“The notion that you should…have somebody outside the government writing the document that says what government employees are supposed to do strikes me as bizarre,” Stahl says. “Here at [Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics], I wouldn’t contract with the Sierra Club to write the position descriptions for the people who work here.”
The Creation of Silliness
On the first day, Forest Service employees wrote position descriptions, and they saw that they were good, and that was the evening and the morning of the first day. The second day administrators came and said “you must take your position descriptions and convert them to AVUE. Even though it seems ass-backwards to make people do things to feed a computer program, that is what you must do, or we won’t let you hire anyone.” The third day there was much mourning, weeping and groaning by employees and the plaintive wail of “but is the PD in AVUE?” arose from the valley. On the fourth day employees had accomplished the task.. almost all PDs were in AVUE. There was peace and the buzzing of happy electrons around employees’ computers. On the fifth day, the administrators returned to the valley and said “we’re getting rid of AVUE, and by the way, all the PDs that you labored over, with such great effort so that your head was spinning, even though you know that PDs can’t possibly keep up with the real world of changing responsibilities, retirements and budget cuts, and you know you don’t have the time to keep them up as living documents, you now must not use the ones you developed so painfully, yea, only a short time ago. Because despite the fact that you wrote them, they do not belong to you.”
On the sixth day there was much weeping, groaning, and wailing in the valley again, plus incredulity that their work could belong to someone else. There was some joy that AVUE would be gone; but fear that the replacement would be worse. The optimists argued that it couldn’t be worse; the pessimists were not so sure.
Later that day, Glinda, the Good Administrator, put out an email. “We are searching the network for all documents with “PD” in them. We will date those and provide them to you if they were pre-AVUE; we are also setting up a task team to organize standard PDs, and help people who need it in writing them. Finally, if AVUE actually takes us to court over this issue, we plan to launch a public relations campaign to boycott AVUE products. This is BS and we are not going to take it lying down.” And the people in the valley rested on the seventh day, content that Glinda had their backs.
If I were still an employee, I would like administrative problems that affect multitudes of employees and take lots of taxpayer bucks to have the same scrutiny as forest fires. So for example, this issue would have an outside review, with the idea of not placing blame so much as learning what to do better next time. Perhaps it was something in the procurement regulations, and finding out what happened will save all the Feds beaucoup bucks. This outside review would be posted publicly and perhaps open for comment. To me, if this doesn’t happen, the behavior says “we really don’t care.” Fires are important, but you all, wasting your time on a recurring basis, is not. Even though I am absolutely sure that in their hearts, all the people running the FS do care very much.
We’ve had these sorts of discussions here before in regards to people building homes in fire-prone forests with an expectation that the federal government (and US taxpayers) will provide funding for fuel reduction activities. A new(ish) research paper provides another look at the issue.
Abstract: Wildfire, like many natural hazards, affects large landscapes with many landowners and the risk individual owners face depends on both individual and collective protective actions. In this study, we develop a spatially explicit game theoretic model to examine the strategic interaction between landowners’ hazard mitigation decisions on a landscape with public and private ownership. We find that in areas where ownership is mixed, the private landowner performs too little fuel treatment as they ‘‘free ride’ —capture benefits without incurring the costs—on public protection, while areas with public land only are under-protected. Our central result is that this pattern of fuel treatment comes at a cost to society because public resources focus in areas with mixed ownership, where local residents capture the benefits, and are not available for publicly managed land areas that create benefits for society at large. We also find that policies that encourage public expenditures in areas with mixed ownership, such as the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003 and public liability for private values, subsidize the residents who choose to locate in the high-risk areas at the cost of lost natural resource benefits for others.
Area Description: Roosevelt Lake is a year-round recreation destination location in central Arizona on the Tonto National Forest. A two-hour drive northeast of Phoenix, Roosevelt Lake is the largest of the four Salt River lakes and is nestled in the beautiful Sonoron Desert. The lake’s main attractions are water-based activities such as fishing and boating.Other activities around the lake include wildlife viewing, hiking, and exploring. Roosevelt Lake is situated along Highway 188, which can be reached via Highway 60 from Globe via 87 south of Payson. Highway 60 and 87 can be easily accessed from Phoenix. Cholla Recreation Site is five miles northwest of Roosevelt Dam on Highway 188 and Windy Hill Recreation Site is six miles southeast of Roosevelt Dam on Highway 188
Camping Facilities Provided: Both Windy Hill and Cholla have water-operated restrooms, indoor shower facilities, trash removal, boat ramps, fishing-cleaning station, and handicapped accessible boat landing platforms. Each individual campsite has a ramada, picnic table, and grill. An RV dump station is located across the highway from the Cholla Recreation Site.
Area Features: The Roosevelt Marina, Tonto National Monument, Tonto Basin Ranger District Visitor Center, Apache Trail, and Apache Lake Marina are all popular destinations in the wintertime. Watchable wildlife include geese, ducks, eagles, bighorn sheep, mule, deer, javelina, and quail. Gas, food, propane, phones and post offices are located at Punkin Center and Roosevelt just a few minutes from Windy Hill and Cholla Recreation Sites. A full range of services and amenities can be found in Globe or Payson.
Fee/Permits Required: Permits to camp at Windy Hill or Cholla may be purchased at ant Tonto National Forest office, or at a wide variety of venders in Arizona, including Big 5 Sporting Goods stores, Circle K outlets, and local gas stations. The cost is $6 per vehicle per night plus $4 per watercraft per night. Senior and Access cardholders (for people with disabilities) pay 1/2 price. Senior and Access permits may be purchased at Tonto National Forest offices only.
[Image]: Forest Service Shield.
Accessibility: All facilities are handicap accessible.
Here’s a link to a story about a public meeting that the Tonto held.
The meeting in Payson stems from the rising recreation program deficit on the Tonto Forest. That deficit arose mostly from a decline in the amount of money the Forest Service spends on operating campgrounds and other facilities.
For instance, in 2011 the Tonto National Forest invested about $2.8 million in operating its vast network of campgrounds and other facilities and collected about $2.5 million in fees. That produced a roughly $90,000 surplus in the recreation program.
However, in 2013 the budget projects the Forest Service will spend $2.1 million in “allocated” funds and collect another $2.4 million in fees. That will produce a projected $920,000 deficit in the program — a roughly 20 percent shortfall.
The looming financial crisis prompted the Tonto National Forest to launch a series of public meetings to gather suggestions from citizens on what it should do to close the gap.
Participants wandered around a room at Gila Community College examining poster boards with information about the problem and laying out solutions. The alternatives included shutting down campsites and other facilities, raising fees to wipe out the shortfall, turning more facilities over to private contractors and forming more partnerships to help cover the costs of running the array of facilities.
The Tonto National Forest includes a chain of heavily used reservoirs along the Salt River, including Canyon, Apache, Saguaro and Roosevelt lakes. It also includes a dozen campgrounds and day use areas.
The Payson Ranger District actually serves as a test case for the contemplated changes — especially using private contractors to operate campgrounds. A contractor already operates most of the Forest Service campgrounds in Rim Country and charges only slightly higher fees than Forest Service campgrounds elsewhere. Contractors can generally pay lower wages and provide fewer benefits for employees than the Forest Service, resulting in lower operating costs.
The most popular option on the list proved the formation of local partnerships, with higher fees trailing well behind. Almost no one said they wanted to see the Forest Service save money by shutting down developed sites.
About 41 people attended the three-hour open house. Comments posted on the bulletin boards often focused on an alliance between community groups and the Forest Service.
“Use more community volunteer projects to cut costs,” wrote one citizen.
“Tax outdoor gear, ATVs, fishing gear — and use the money to support recreation,” wrote another.
“Make the East Verde a Town of Payson park,” wrote one participant.
“Make Fossil Creek a National Wildlife Refuge and charge for entry,” suggested another.
“Coordinate with non-profit organizations.”
My questions:
If the FS can’t charge for entry, does it make sense to transfer these heavily used areas to another federal, state or local government who can charge? Or would it be simpler to mess with the Forest Service’s policies legislatively?
Is it so wrong for the FS to charge, due to its own regulations, due to law, or for some philosophical reason?
Should the FS be moved to Interior and these areas rezoned to the Park Service so that these kinds of areas be managed separately and fees charged but that the transfers are bureaucratically simpler?
Is outdoor equipment already taxed? By state or feds? What latitude is there to increase/add taxes?
Finally, I am a senior (although perhaps not senior enough for this benefit) but $3.00 per night (1/2 of 6) seems fairly low compared to other similar opportunities. Perhaps FS, BLM, NPS and FWS should harmonize their rates for a given level of service?
As frequent readers know, I am always interested in who is empowered by certain framings and approaches to issues, and who is disempowered. I was wondering one day, whether solving problems through litigation was more attractive to some kinds of people than others. I developed the hypothesis, based on my own observations, that “warfare” analogies might be more attractive to one gender than to the other. While exploring this, I ran across an interesting essay by Deborah Tannen linked here from 1998:
Below are some excerpts:
Balance. Debate. Listening to both sides. Who could question these noble American traditions? Yet today, these principles have been distorted. Without thinking, we have plunged headfirst into what I call the “argument culture.”
The argument culture urges us to approach the world, and the people in it, in an adversarial frame of mind. It rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get anything done: The best way to discuss an idea is to set up a debate; the best way to cover news is to find spokespeople who express the most extreme, polarized views and present them as “both sides”; the best way to settle disputes is litigation that pits one party against the other; the best way to begin an essay is to attack someone; and the best way to show you’re really thinking is to criticize.
Italics above are mine..
THE ARGUMENT CULTURE SHAPES WHO WE ARE
The argument culture has a defining impact on our lives and on our culture.
• It makes us distort facts, as in the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Hard-ing story. After the original attack on Kerrigan’s knee, news stories focused on the rivalry between the two skaters instead of portraying Kerrigan as the victim of an attack. Just last month, Time magazine called the event a “contretemps” between Kerrigan and Harding. And a recent joint TV interview of the two skaters rein¬forced that skewed image by putting the two on equal footing, rather than as victim and accused.
• It makes us waste valuable time, as in the case of scientist Robert Gallo, who co-discovered the AIDS virus. Gallo was the object of a groundless four-year investigation into allegations he had stolen the virus from another scientist. He was ultimately exonerated, but the toll was enormous. Never mind that, in his words, “These were the most painful and horrible years of my life.” Gallo spent four years fighting accusations instead of fight-ing AIDS.
• It limits our thinking. Headlines are intentionally devised to attract attention, but the language of extremes actually shapes, and misshapes, the way we think about things. Military metaphors train us to think about, and see, everything in terms of fighting, conflict and war. Adversarial rhetoric is a kind of verbal inflation—a rhetorical boy-who-cried-wolf.
• It encourages us to lie. If you fight to win, the temptation is great to deny facts that support your opponent’s views and say only what supports your side. It encourages people to misrepresent and, in the extreme, to lie.
END THE ARGUMENT CULTURE BY LOOKING AT ALL SIDES
How can we overcome our classically American habit of seeing issues in absolutes? We must expand our notion of “debate” to include more dialogue. To do this, we can make special efforts not to think in twos. Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist at Virginia’s George Mason University, makes a point of having her class compare three cultures, not two. Then, students are more likely to think about each on its own terms, rather than as opposites.
In the public arena, television and radio producers can try to avoid, whenever possible, structuring public discussions as debates. This means avoiding the format of having two guests discuss an issue. Invite three guests—or one. Perhaps it is time to re-examine the assumption that audiences always prefer a fight.
Instead of asking, “What’s the other side?” we might ask, “What are the other sides?” Instead of insisting on hearing “both sides,” let’s insist on hearing “all sides.”
We need to find metaphors other than sports and war. Smashing heads does not open minds. We need to use our imaginations and ingenuity to find different ways to seek truth and gain knowledge through intellectual interchange, and add them to our arsenal—or, should I say, to the ingredients for our stew. It will take creativity for each of us to find ways to change the argument culture to a dialogue culture. It’s an effort we have to make, because our public and private lives are at stake.
Here’s another piece where Dr. Tannen describes her own experiences:
The roots of our love for ritualized opposition lie in the educational system that we all pass through. Here’s a typical scene: The teacher sits at the head of the classroom, pleased with herself and her class. The students are engaged in a heated debate. The very noise level reassures the teacher that the students are participating. Learning is going on. The class is a success.
But look again, cautions Patricia Rosof, a high school history teacher who admits to having experienced just such a wave of satisfaction. On closer inspection, you notice that only a few students are participating in the debate; the majority of the class is sitting silently. And the students who are arguing are not addressing subtleties, nuances or complexities of the points they are making or disputing. They don’t have that luxury because they want to win the argument — so they must go for the most dramatic statements they can muster. They will not concede an opponent’s point — even if they see its validity — because that would weaken their position.
This aggressive intellectual style is cultivated and rewarded in our colleges and universities. The standard way to write an academic paper is to position your work in opposition to someone else’s. This creates a need to prove others wrong, which is quite different from reading something with an open mind and discovering that you disagree with it. Graduate students learn that they must disprove others’ arguments in order to be original, make a contribution and demonstrate intellectual ability. The temptation is great to oversimplify at best, and at worst to distort or even misrepresent other positions, the better to refute them.
I caught a glimpse of this when I put the question to someone who I felt had misrepresented my own work: “Why do you need to make others wrong for you to be right?” Her response: “It’s an argument!” Aha, I thought, that explains it. If you’re having an argument, you use every tactic you can think of — including distorting what your opponent just said — in order to win.
Staging everything in terms of polarized opposition limits the information we get rather than broadening it. For one thing, when a certain kind of interaction is the norm, those who feel comfortable with that type of interaction are drawn to participate, and those who do not feel comfortable with it recoil and go elsewhere. If public discourse included a broad range of types, we would be making room for individuals with different temperaments. But when opposition and fights overwhelmingly predominate, only those who enjoy verbal sparring are likely to take part. Those who cannot comfortably take part in oppositional discourse — or choose not to — are likely to opt out.
Question: Can you imagine ways to foster a broader approach to resolving natural resource/public lands disputes that are more in line with a dialogue, rather than an argument, culture?
I think this is an important topic to discuss. I certainly can’t force people to discuss it. BUT I can repeatedly post things and ask people their opinions.
Here are my hypotheses for why no discussion thus far (except Mike and Larry, thank you!)
1) People in the FS are afraid of posting their concerns publicly. Based on my pre-retirement experience, that is a well-founded fear. So..
2) Recent retirees, and observers, need to have the conversation, IMHO.
3) Retirees don’t want to be seen as criticizing the current people; they would not have wanted to have been criticized by their predecessors (well, and sometimes were, but that’s another story). And there’s the whole “we might want to ask a favor sometime, so we don’t want to tick them off.” That cultural paradigm doesn’t go away just because we retired.
4) Lack of “straight talk” was one of Dialogos’s findings as I recall.
I know that I often disagree with Cindy, with other FS people, and with just about anybody on just about anything. Yet I think we are each richer for having shared our opinions. And I don’t think the FS can improve by “not talking about it” or the ever-popular strategy “complaining behind people’s backs.”
5) So I think we might do better, rather than critiquing Cindy’s paper per se, reflect our own perspective of the FS and what it might do better in terms of morale and leadership.
I look at this like the old story of the blind man and the elephant. Perhaps if we describe the toenail, tail hairs or saliva that we have experienced, we will jointly be able to describe this unique creature, the Forest Service.
To that end, this is Sharon’s perspective. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a discussion. I’d like to focus, as Cindy did, on the National Forest System.
I think, like Cindy did, that one’s background is significant. Most recently, I was the Director of Planning for seven years in the Rocky Mountain Region. To that end, I participated in regional personnel reviews of placements of line and staff officers, and because I was in planning, and troubled projects of various kinds made their way to our office, I got to see disagreements between line officers, and problems between forest staff and district staff, in fact all possible permutations of Ways Things Can Go Wrong. My experience was very different from the 80’s when I worked on forests in Regions 5 and 6.
Here are several thoughts:
1) I’m not sure you can say anything about “the Forest Service”. Different regions have different cultures, as do forests.
2) In my region, “compliance” was sometimes perhaps more like “apparent compliance.” Which is not really compliance at all. On one bus ride back from a Regional Leadership Team, I asked a Deputy Forest Supervisor why they didn’t warn us about things until it was too late. He wisely noted that the Districts don’t necessarily tell the Supervisor’s Office either.
3) Some Forest Supervisors didn’t think that the Regional Forester had legitimate authority to override their land management decisions. According to what I call the “Cult of the Line Officer” the local official is always right. So if you defend your Ranger, and you are the Supervisor, that is good. If you are Regional Forester and you defend your Forest Supervisor, you are good. But if you disagree with the next level down and try to change it, you are losing points with them at an extremely rapid rate. Now, my experience may have to do with the personalities involved, but I just think the real world is much more complex and colorful than the organizational theories- and may be a function of… the personalities involved!
4) I think perhaps we could learn about the culture more by telling our stories and discussing what they mean, and whether others’ observations are similar or different.
5) When I read the below paragraph…
This position power model could further illuminate the conflict between staff and decisionmaker goals found in recent NEPA studies (Stern and Predmore 2011) as well as employees’ growing critique of leadership in the Partnership for Public Service and other surveys. It could explain recent burdensome business procedures handed down by managers who treat each new societal mandate (a set of rules to enforce new society priorities such as civil rights or homeland security) as not only a new rule but a new priority. Overemphasis on line officers’ careers, adherence to rules for their own sake, and the resulting impact on staff effectiveness might contribute to other Forest Service–acknowledged problems such as ineffective and process-heavy NEPA analysis (Bosworth 2001).
I have listened to line officers complain about the new Dilbertian requirements of the Department or the whole USG. It really isn’t the FS who makes most of these decisions, in my experience. Just attend a District Rangers’ Meeting to get the FS line officer perspective.
6) Finally, I think if you want to know what causes the morale problem, you would have to ask people directly in interviews. Then you would have to figure out what could be changed, within the decision space of the FS . I am all for doing this as a public discussion.
It doesn’t seem fair to me to blame “FS leadership” for ideas of the Department or higher levels. If we wanted to experiment with FS leadership, we would move them to the Department of the Interior (controlling for the “Department and higher ideas” variable) and then comparing them to the BLM (which has the same multiple use mission). Just sayin’
