Annual Report - Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics

From the President
Opportunity for Change
Early in 2010, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture and its Forest Service began
meetings to roll out a new planning rule. Like
earlier rules, we hope that this one is destined
for an early grave. Trying to effect adaptive
management via a planning rule is a special
class of insanity reserved for the Forest Service.
But that is a story better told on the blogs.
(See Forest Policy–Forest Practice at www.
forestpolicy.typepad.com and A New Century of
Forest Planning at ncfp.wordpress.com.)
President Obama might get a chance to
reform the Forest Service in ways that Forest
Service Employees for Environmental Ethics has
been working toward for nearly twenty years. If
the Obama Administration plays its cards right,
we might see it make a move toward a cabinetlevel
Department of Public Lands, complemented
with a sister Department for Environmental
Regulation. A move like that would take
the Forest Service out of the Department of
Agriculture and allow it to start anew—in concert
with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and
the Bureau of Land Management, the National
Park Service and others—as a division of a brand
new public lands department. Or the administrative
could simply move the Forest Service into
the Department of Interior, and follow a similar
plan.
Either way, the public wins with a Department
of Public Lands. First, hide-bound agencies can
be set up with structures and functions that work
2010 Annual Report • 1