Not two hours from DC, just east of Shenandoah National Park, lies a testament to the power of public lands protection. The Elizabeth Furnace Recreation Area in the George Washington National Forest is a treasure of hiking trails, swimming holes, campgrounds, and picnic areas. These attractions are free or cheap and open to all.
In the springtime, you can take the gently winding Pig Iron and Charcoal Trails through a recovering woodland ablaze with cardinal flowers, dogwoods, and azaleas. You can enjoy the shade and the sound of songbirds as you read interpretive trail signage describing the area’s history. And you can be thankful you didn’t have to experience the brutality of life here 175 years ago.
Elizabeth Furnace was built in 1836 to meet a growing demand for iron. Iron ore, rich in the soils of this area, was fed into the furnace’s white-hot mouth, along with charcoal made from trees repeatedly clear-cut from the surrounding hills. Enslaved or poorly paid laborers worked 12-hour shifts under grueling, dangerous conditions. Their labor turned the natural bounty of the land into wrought iron for industry, and, later, for the Civil War.
The transformation of this industrial wasteland into a forested treasure teeming with native life began in 1913. The U.S. Forest Service acquired the land, restored it, and opened the recreation area in 1960.
The U.S. Forest Service: A Century of Public Lands Protection
Countless similar stories could no doubt be told about sites across the 193 million acres of Forest Service lands. The Forest Service, within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), manages 154 national forests across nine regional offices. The agency has 30,000 staff and until recently operated nearly 80 research labs dedicated to studying local ecological conditions.
To be sure, national forest lands are managed for logging, mineral development, and livestock grazing in addition to conservation and recreation. But the agency’s “sustained yield” mandate has meant at least a degree of protection from the ravages of commercial exploitation.
The system is the product of over 150 years of legislative wrangling, public hearings, citizen advocacy, and scientific input. The consensus of all these efforts has consistently been that national forests should be managed in the public trust by the federal government.
The devastating effects of erosion following deforestation in Colorado in 1915. The Forest Service was formed to protect waterways from these effects. (USDA Forest Service)
The initial impetus for the creation of the Forest Service was the protection of waterways suffering rapid degradation through deforestation. Over the past 150 years, Forest Service lands have proliferated under foresighted presidents like Teddy Roosevelt. The enormous popularity of places like Elizabeth Furnace has only added legitimacy to the institution.
The story of Elizabeth Furnace encapsulates what public lands protection can do for even the most abused lands. Told in reverse, it could be a warning about the Trump Administration’s current plans for the Forest Service.
“Restructuring” as Politicization
On March 31, the Administration announced plans to “begin a sweeping restructuring of the agency.” These plans include moving Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah. They also include closing the nine regional offices that have formed the heart of the agency’s governance since its inception.
At 17 million acres, the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska is the largest U.S. national forest and the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. (Kevin Hood)
Regional offices are structured around watersheds and forests. Kevin Hood is a 30-year veteran of the Forest Service, many of those years spent in the Alaska Regional Office. In an interview with the Herald, Hood described working among 140 fire specialists, ecologists, engineers, and forest managers. These employees spent decades developing intimate knowledge of the forests in which they lived and worked.
Under Trump’s plan, this entire layer of relative independence from political forces will be eliminated from the Forest Service chain of command. Supervisors of individual forests will report more or less directly to Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, a former logging industry executive. Mediating that relationship will now be fifteen State Directors, newly created positions within newly created state offices. These offices will be embedded in state capitals, in close proximity to political officials, and will be staffed by six to eight employees.
Forest Service leadership positions have historically been reserved for career professionals hired competitively on a merit basis. But State Director positions and a number of new Forest Service leadership positions are classified so they may be filled by political appointees.
In fact, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management has directed all federal agencies to reclassify career-reserved leadership positions to allow for political appointments. New performance standards for these positions prioritize “faithful administration of…the President’s policies.”
Hood, who is now Executive Director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, says the restructuring is part of a broader legal effort to assert the “entire executive power” over the federal workforce. “We’re going back to an early 19th century political system of patronage and spoils characterized by incompetence, corruption, and chaos,” he says.
“Restructuring” as Workforce Reduction
With agency leadership set to be populated by ideological allies, a few obstacles remain in the way of the administration’s public lands exploitation agenda. One is the Forest Service employee rank-and-file, many of whom remain dedicated to the agency’s conservation mission.
National Forests provide cool respite even in drought-stricken areas like the Lolo National Forest in Montana. (Kirsten Stade)
Agency leadership touts “restructuring” as a way to move this workforce closer to its lands, most of which are in the Western United States. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins publicly insists that the agency is not conducting radical workforce reduction.
The agency’s reorganization plan, unearthed through a lawsuit filed by groups seeking to stop it, tells a different tale. There, the USDA clearly states its plans for reducing its workforce by 23 percent: “…a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments.”
That is exactly what happened when, in his first term, Trump reorganized the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), moving its headquarters from DC to Colorado. Fewer than thirteen percent of affected employees agreed to the move. Years later, the agency remains crippled by the lost staff, expertise, and institutional knowledge.
More than 25 percent of Forest Service staff have left already. They leave the agency hollowed out of those who are most knowledgeable about their home forests and their natural systems.
“Restructuring” to Purge Science
Forests like the Manti-La Sal in Utah need prescribed burns to stay in optimal ecological condition. Trump’s plan will empty them of the skilled staff required for active management. (Kirsten Stade)
Many of those who leave will be scientists. The administration is in the process of shuttering more than 50 of the Forest Service’s nearly 80 research labs. Since 1908, these stations have composed the largest forestry research organization in the world. Its 500 scientists conduct cutting-edge research on forest ecology, hydrology, wildfire, insects, and disease. In partnership with universities, they have produced nearly 60,000 peer-reviewed publications.
According to Kevin Hood, federal science of this kind is unique in its potential to yield long-term data. Unlike corporate or university research tied to product development or a professor’s short-term grant, many Forest Service studies have run continuously for decades. They include findings on how forest ecosystems respond to changing climate conditions, how best to manage and contain wildfires, and how to recover endangered wildlife. These studies have been critical to the responsible management of public forests and grasslands across the United States.
The Forest Service is shutting down the programs that enable these studies just as record drought turns western states into insect-and disease-prone tinderboxes. And it is doing so just as it compels hundreds of fire ecologists, aviation specialists, and wildland firefighters to leave.
“Restructuring” as Precursor to Federal Divestment
This is all by design. As the administration torpedoes federal capacity to manage national forests, it is in the process of ceding that capacity to the states.
Early this year, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a “shared stewardship agreement” with Forest Service Chief Schultz. The agreement gives Utah shared management of wildlife, grazing, minerals, water, and recreation within its 8 million acres of National Forest lands. Utah is the very same state suing the federal government to seize 18.5 million acres of BLM land. Its Senator Mike Lee has repeatedly sought to force the sale of public lands through legislation.
The starvation of federal agency budgets gives states like Utah the opportunity they have long awaited. Having failed repeatedly to take ownership of federal lands outright, they can instead assert control over an ever-broadening slice of their management.
Looking out over the Colorado River from the Manti-La Sal National Forest, Utah. (Kirsten Stade)
With the agency hollowed out of career staff who might mount a resistance, the stealth transfer of public lands to state or private entities will be possible. “They’re looking to facilitate the liquidation of resources so they can privatize profit and socialize the cost,” says Hood. With the “guardrails” of agency science and professional staff gone, Hood says, “agency officials can wheel and deal more freely, unbound by law or policy.”
From its first days in office, this administration has shown an unmitigated hostility to public lands. It has opened them to fossil fuel development, and staffed their agencies with former employees of the industries they regulate. It has called for vastly increased national forest logging, and intensive mineral development across fragile deserts sacred to Native tribes. It is currently considering rules that would cut the public out of Forest Service management decisions, and end the creation of new wilderness areas.
This conduct makes sense in light of the administration’s commitment to GDP growth above all else. Public lands confer vast benefits on society as a whole, but limited kickbacks to preferred industries. Under a single-minded focus on GDP, what is in the public interest falls by the wayside as economic growth primarily benefits the already wealthy.
In contrast, as Kevin Hood reminds us, “Public lands are a great equalizer. Everyone owns them.”
If there is hope of protecting public lands from becoming GDP fodder, it is in their overwhelming popularity. “The groundswell of support in favor of public lands is unstoppable,” Hood says.
Public comments on the restructuring submitted last summer were overwhelmingly negative, with over 80 percent conveying concerns about the move. Congress must appropriate funds to close Forest Service offices, which would mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying jobs in members’ districts. Now is a good time to let elected officials know what a bad idea that is.
