by Anne Millbrooke, Bozeman
Wanting to do something tangible to express my support for our public lands, I walked into a Forest Service office and asked, may I volunteer?
At the age of 73, I thus became a fire lookout in a tower atop a mountain peak this past summer.
I was soon in awe of the professionalism and efficiency of Forest Service employees, as well as what they could accomplish with little funding.
When I reported smoke rising from behind a ridge six miles away, the dispatcher launched an observation plane and personnel on the ground headed toward the fire. Within two hours firefighters were laying hose lines around the lightning-ignited fire in thick forest. That was on a Saturday evening. Wow.
That early detection and suppression protected people living nearby and visitors in the forest.
There was neither waste, inefficiency, nor fraud. The stated rationales for reductions in force (RIFs) and firing federal employees are wrong.
The simple presence of residents and visitors in a forest impacts the environment, including the obvious trails, roads, and structures that are all barriers and disruptions to wildlife and native plant species.
The protection of people requires fire suppression, and suppressing fire alters the natural environment. Logging, thinning, prescribed burns, and forest treatments remove fuel for fires, for example. But living trees shade the land and hold the soil against erosive forces. Trees also transfer carbon and nitrogen to the soil.
And dead trees, standing or fallen, and duff on the ground are natural nurseries for fungi, insects and other invertebrates, rodents, small mammals, and birds. Yet those nurseries are routinely removed in the name of fire prevention.
Removing fuel causes other changes to the natural environment. Removing duff, for example, exposes the ground to the evaporative forces of sunshine and wind. It causes the soil to dry out in the already arid West. Removing fuel also adds access roads and thereby increases fire danger, introduces alien species, and disturbs wildlife.
Protecting the natural environment and natural processes are goals that are undermined by the need to protect people who are there to enjoy the public resources. It takes professional land stewards to manage public lands in order to work toward the diverse and sometimes conflicting goals.
Given the nation’s growing population and the increasing pressures on our public lands, we need more rather than fewer staff.
Wilderness designation helps by reserving roadless wildlands as places where nature can proceed naturally. It is the gold standard of conservation. A recent study of protected lands, for example, documented fire’s beneficial impact on bird populations in the decades following a wildfire.
Wilderness designation does not keep people off the land, but it does ban mechanized and built disturbances and industrial degradation of our watersheds and wildlife habitat.
We need not destroy our public lands through overuse and misuse. Land stewards facilitate our use and limit damage.
Wilderness areas and other legally protected public lands — national parks, national monuments, national forests, BLM lands, wildlife refuges — require professional land stewards to implement and maintain protections as well as public services.
Removing land stewards weakens the public lands system and endangers our wildlife and native plants as well as our public waters. Too many reductions in force will shatter the system.
Please tell elected officials, political appointees, and career bureaucrats that you support our public lands and the men and women who take care of those lands.