Not everyone can be an expert in every field of human endeavor. Forest management is one such. It’s easy to see many of the problems, and we hope there are a few in your organization with the expertise to know the solutions. And yes, citizens also can use logic and what expertise they have to suggest solutions. Here are a few:

Snowmobiles in legal wilderness: Send interns out on snowmobiles (isn’t that a couple of nice sleds parked down the street from here at the Carbondale USFS office?) on any Saturday to any number of sled play areas that border on wilderness. Go to the wilderness boundary. Take names. Send out letters. There has to be enough budget for that. When budget permits, send rangers out on snowmobiles in same situation. Write tickets. Lots of tickets. If the USFS can afford to have wilderness rangers tromping around in the summer, it can certainly afford to have a few of them out there in the winter doing something useful instead of harassing backpackers who are camped too close to a lake.

Roads: District rangers have broad discretion on Forest Service road gating. Open the roads earlier in the spring. If they get a few ruts in the mud that’s just normal and has been happening since the days of covered wagons. Be proud about the network of roads we have that access the backcountry. They are not a necessary evil. They are an excellent, incredible resource for recreation, fire suppression, rescue, more. The vast majority of backcountry recreationists like our roads. Listen to us instead of the “roads are evil” minority of enviro fanatics.

Along with that, stop paying for heavy equipment to grade our rougher highcountry jeep trails here in the White River NF. What a ridiculous waste of money that could be used for other things.

Other ideas, anyone?

According to my paystub, I still pay Social Security taxes, and I was out of work two years ago due to budget cuts. Also, many jobs do offer 4 to six month layoff periods each year. That’s “laid off”, as in no pay, no benefits, for up to half of every year. And sure, not many companies offer defined benefit retirements anymore, not since they dumped all of their previous guarantees on the fed’s PBGC, letting us taxpayers pick up their tabs. Laissez-faire indeed.
Additionally, a great number of FS personel are needed for fire fighting duties. 25 firefighters were killed last season, and how many co-workers have you met who have burn scars on their bodies from a normal part of their job? Moreso, crew bosses and commanders can now be sued and even prosecuted by people with plenty of spare time and comfortable chairs for split second decisions made under duress.
If the USFS offers such cush jobs, why aren’t you clamoring for a position? Also, you still haven’t specified any jobs that you think “could be viewed as completely unnecessary” or are “more important than others.” I wouldn’t look at any of your schematics and say “I don’t see that bolt doing anything right now” or “that support is too costly, just get rid of it” without some justification. As an engineer, you must know that some seemingly simple and obvious things can really be very complex under the surface.
Frankly, I find your account of the events coming to Summit County to be spot on. Summit is covered, nearly end to end, in Lodgepole Pine. Lodgepole forests burn roughly every 200 years in stand regeneration fires. It’s how the species reproduces. That’s why all the trees in Summit are nearly the same height and diameter. They’re all the same age; a generation resulting from the last catastrophic fire or blowdown event. Once the old forest canopy was removed, the saplings were able to get sunlight, and they all grew together.
Summit’s forests also suffered a similar beetle infestation in the 1970s, and likely for centuries before that, so pine beetle populations are nothing new. The current pine beetle infestation in Summit has been exacerbated by the recent drought. Less water for the trees equals less sap in the living tree rings and thus less resistance for the burrowing bugs. Also, greater density of the forests due to decades of total fire suppression and the natural density of Lodgepole stands decreases the distance any one beetle needs to travel to find another home, increasing their rates of survival, reproduction, and spread.
Blaming the Forest Service for natural processes that involve millions of trees, billions of bugs, and years of weather trends is beyond irrational. If you consider the USFS’s primary mission to be that of “Forest Doctor” as you alluded, then by your standards we should judge doctors by how many people they keep alive indefinitely and punish those whose patients eventually get sick and die. Our forests exist in a state of dynamic balance, not the static state that seems apparent from the road. There are continuous changes occuring in the forests, and there are acts of God and short- and long-term forces of nature that mankind is totally powerless to force our will upon. Claiming that the USFS is incompetent or wasteful because it cannot acheive what no one in history has
achieved bankrupts the meaning of the term “unreasonable demands”.
Now, what can we do to be proactive in this situation? Mostly labor intensive fuels reduction — which — is exactly what I was arguing for in my first post regarding the lack of funding for adequate resource protection. The particulars of that sort of work in Summit are also messy, but I won’t get into that here.
Fire suppression is also a messy issue, but I generally agree with you, which is why I took a primary fire job with the FS. In fact, the USFS spent 40%, or $1.5 billion, of its budget in ’06 on fire fighting efforts. We can extrapolate that out to find the total USFS budget of roughly $3.75bn, or 0.14% of the Federal budget for 2006 (14 cents out of $100). We spend more than that in one month in Iraq. Assuming that the feds get 100% of their budget from income taxes (which they don’t) and that we all pay the highest income tax bracket (which we don’t), that works out to just over 4.5 cents per $100 of pre-tax income for all of the work that the FS does. Granted, nickles and dimes add up, but these budget amounts simply do not leave much room for the amount of waste you insinuate the FS is responsible for.
I also want to say that I didn’t wake up one day and decide that I wanted to become a bureaucrat defending the status-quo in search of a fat pension. I also believe that there are more effective and efficient manners in which to manage our resources that reflect a more modern land ethic, but right now, I don’t know what they are. If anyone here can suggest a workable alternative, I’m all ears, but all I’m reading here is a list of complaints without ideas. So I challenge Lou and all the readers here to really make some suggestions. Maybe some good can come of this debate.

JS

It’s true, government employee’s pay is below the private sector in many instances. But, don’t forget about the massive pension plan that no private companies can seem to afford, not paying into Social Security every month, top notch health insurance, huge amounts of time off, and not typically having to worry about losing your job to layoffs, etc. There are plenty of benefits that don’t always show up on the pay stub.

Obviously, the Forest Service does have an important job to do, some jobs more important than others. In my opinion, the USFS’s most important job is to maintain the health of the forest. Driving through Summit County these days, I can’t help notice how much of the forest is dead from beetle kill. Looks like almost all of it? Soon enough, all of Summit County is going to burn, probably in spectacular fashion. We’ll make national news, the governor will declare a state of emergency, and everyone will wonder why this has happened. This problem has been bad for several years now. Is the Forest Service doing anything proactive? Is this effective management of the forest?

I guess there’s the old argument that forest fires are natural, and they should happen. However, I feel that our land has become far too populated to allow this, and I feel the Forest Service is failing in their primary duty. Why should we even bother to manage the forest if we’re willing to allow it to die and burn anyway? Given the choice, I’d rather have ATV’s tear it up over allowing the whole thing to burn down. If the USFS can’t get a handle on the most obvious and important issue, should we throw more money at them and hope they suddenly get their act together?

I may be out of touch with the Forest Service’s mandated responsibilities, but I can see the obvious.

Really interesting read as i follow this. There ar very interesting points made on both “sides” about the USFS and there actions. My stance is the same as many, I feel the government is wastefull and somewhat detached from the community. At least locally here in Crested Butte.

Very good reading though, this kind of dialogue is very hard to find as well as keep going on such a good level.

Just wanted to point out that the Nature Valley skier is actually Max Mancini. Not sure about the filming permits and such, but I can ask next time I see him, because that is very interesting, and may prove helpfull to the ski the14ers movie.

keep up the interesting conversation.