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I can't say exactly how many of my readers forwarded to me a copy of the wonderful piece written yesterday by Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Timothy Egan — but it was many. And while this excellent and important piece is right on the mark with respect to the sentiment it conveys — a sentiment that explain how under the Bush Administration our public lands are being stolen from us — it contains a large factual error that I'd like to correct.
Egan writes that as he drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington State he observed that many of the roads were closed, trails were washed out, campgrounds were frayed and, in general, the place was in tatters. He compared what he experience to "the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house" — and on all these points Egan was correct.
Egan concludes that the land management agencies are being run by industry lobbyists and that they are "cashing out" our publicly-owned heritage — and on this point he is as right as rain. His piece was wonderful. So where did he go wrong???
Egan erred when he blamed the cashing out of our public lands upon the miserly budgets coming from President Bush. That is only part of the problem and for some agencies, such as the Forest Service, there have been no actual budget cuts.
Yes, the President would like to cut and has even proposed deep cuts in the Forest budget, but those cuts have not happened and, as a result of recent Congressional action, will not happen this year. Funding for outdoor recreation and resource management at the level of individual forests, such as the Gifford Pinchot, has indeed been cut to the bone but for the US Forest Service, declining allocations are not to blame. So what is going on?
An article I shared earlier today spoke of a " 64-percent loss in maintenance
funds and a 20-percent cut in operational funding" for the Rogue River-Siskiyou
National Forest Service. Local forest managers said that this funding cut caused
them "to shutter 24 campgrounds, three picnic sites and related services." Sixty-percent cuts are being reported by several forests around the nation.
These are massive cuts, but they did not come from President Bush, nor did they come from Congress.
Let me repeat. The funding cut DID NOT come from either President Bush or Congress.
The Washington DC office of the US Forest Service is bleeding the recreation budget to death. The Regional Offices are ensuring that money received from above DOES NOT get to the ground and IS NOT available to maintain public recreation facilities.
Yes, it is true that the ideology of the Bush Administration is responsible for the cashing out of our American commons and yes --- there is a massive and destructive privatization agenda in play on our public lands today that is based upon the old Reagan concept of "Starving the Beast".
Yes, local forest managers on the Pinchot and on the Rogue and indeed upon all of America's National Forests are having to make do with less.
YES, the upshot will be the parting-out of our once proud tradition public lands. But the destroyers of the public lands do not all reside within the White House nor do they all serve within the Bush Administration a political appointees.
Where Egan erred is in failing to acknowledge that high-level career bureaucrats within the land management agencies, both in the Washington DC offices and within the Regional Office, are largely responsible for executing an agenda presented to them by the Bush Administration and by certain elements within the recreation industry. I call the agenda "The Corporate Takeover of Nature and the Disneyfication of the Wild" and unless stopped, "This Land is Your Land, This Land is my Land" will only be hollow lyrics from a once-popular, once relevant, song.
Scott
"We're going to have to do more with less until we do everything with nothing."
- Cid Morgan, USFS District Ranger, California, 2005
--- begin quoted ---
June 23, 2007
This Land Was My Land
By TIMOTHY EGAN MOUNT HOOD, Ore.
Most Americans don’t own a summer home on Cape Cod, or a McMansion in
the Rockies, but they have this birthright: an area more than four
times the size of France. If you’re a citizen, you own it — about 565
million acres.
The deed on a big part of this public land inheritance dates to a pair
of Republican class warriors from a hundred years ago: President
Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest
Service.
Both were rich. Both were well-educated. Both were headstrong and
quirky. Pinchot slept on a wooden pillow and had his valet wake him
with ice water to the face. Teddy and G.P., as they were known,
sometimes wrestled with each other, or swam naked in the Potomac.
In establishing the people’s estate, they fought Gilded Age titans —
railroads, timber barons, mine owners — and their enablers in the
Senate. And make no mistake: these acts may have been cast as the
founding deeds of the environmental movement, but they were as much
about class as conservation.
Pinchot had studied forestry in France, where a peasant couldn’t make a
campfire without being subject to penalties. In England, he had seen
how the lords of privilege had their way over the outdoors. In the
United States, he and T.R. envisioned the ultimate expression of
Progressive-era values: a place where a tired factory hand could be
renewed — lord for a day.
“In the national forests, big money was not king,” wrote Pinchot. The
Forest Service was beloved, he said, because “it stood up for the
honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government
bureau had done before.”
A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on
my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are
closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those
that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry
equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.
In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy.
If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line — the place is
yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.
Remember the scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when Jimmy Stewart’s
character sees what would happen to Bedford Falls if the richest man in
town took over? All those honky-tonks, strip joints and tenement
dwellings in Pottersville?
If Roosevelt roamed the West today, he’d find some of the same thing in
the land he entrusted to future presidents. The national wildlife
system, started by T.R., has been emasculated. President Bush has
systematically pared the budget to the point where, this year, more
than 200 refuges could be without any staff at all.
The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees some of the finest open
range, desert canyons and high-alpine valleys in the world, was told
early on in the Bush years to make drilling for oil and gas their top
priority. A demoralized staff has followed through, but many describe
their jobs the way a cowboy talks about having to shoot his horse.
In Colorado, the bureau just gave the green light to industrial
development on the aspen-forested high mountain paradise called the
Roan Plateau. In typical fashion, the administration made a charade of
listening to the public about what to do with the land. More than
75,000 people wrote them — 98 percent opposed to drilling.
For most of the Bush years, the Interior Department was nominally run
by a Stepford secretary, Gale Norton, while industry insiders like J.
Steven Griles — the former coal lobbyist who pled guilty this year to
obstruction of justice — ran the department.
Same in the Forest Service, where an ex-timber industry insider, Mark Rey, guides administration policy.
They don’t take care of these lands because they see them as one thing:
a cash-out. Thus, in Bush’s budget proposal this year, he guts the
Forest Service budget yet again, while floating the idea of selling
thousands of acres to the highest bidder. The administration says it
wants more money for national parks. But the parks are $10 billion
behind on needed repairs; the proposal is a pittance.
Roosevelt had his place on Oyster Bay. Pinchot had a family estate in
Pennsylvania. Bush has the ranch in Crawford. Only one of them has
never been able to see beyond the front porch.
Timothy Egan, a former Seattle correspondent for The Times and the author of “The Worst Hard Time,” is a guest columnist.
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- Privatization 
