The Final Forest by William Dietrich

Author:William Dietrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295802251
Publisher: University of Washington Press

10

NOBODY TO BLAME

Considering that it is a meeting to foment a polite revolution, the gathering in the basement of the Chimacum Community Center on the eastern end of the Olympic Peninsula is disappointingly small. Only eight Forest Service employees have shown up this October evening of 1990 to discuss reform of their agency with Jeff DeBonis, a former agency employee who describes himself as a “timber beast” turned tree hugger. Only two of the Olympic National Forest employees are year-round, full-time. Even the setting seems a bit prosaic for the formation of a cabal. The room is lit a bright, sterile white by fluorescent fixtures, and a couple of freezers hum in the background. Still, it is a start.

DeBonis sent a shock wave through the Forest Service two years before, first by publicly condemning his agency's rapid harvest of old-growth trees and then by forming an in-house organization called the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE). DeBonis did what was long considered taboo by bringing employee discontent out into the open.

He is a symbol of the dissension about ancient forests that, as the decade turned, was tearing asunder the unity of one of the proudest agencies of the federal government. DeBonis subsequently quit the Forest Service to run his rebel group full-time. While he has had some initial successes, he is finding it difficult to convince public employees to move beyond the complaint stage and agitate regularly from within for a more environmental approach to forest management. Some think the rebel has gone from initial thoughtful criticism of forest policy to automatically opposing anything the Forest Service does.

The employee who invited DeBonis to come up from his base in Portland, Oregon, is Stan Betts, a recreation specialist on the north eastern Olympic forest. Betts is distressed by the annihilation of old growth and the emphasis on timber receipts. “Some of us are members of the Lake Wobegon National Forest,” he told DeBonis.

Another of those present, Kurt Ralston, has come from the Forest Service office in Forks. Agency insiders call employees such as the bearded, ponytailed Ralston, “combat biologists,” or wildlife managers who frequently lock horns with the timber sale supervisors they sit next to in the office. Ralston transferred to the Forks Ranger District office from Oregon in order to get a permanent job as a fish biologist, but some of his friends were surprised by his move. “You're going to Forks?” they asked. “You're going back to the 1950s.” The same day he got the job an Oregon newspaper painted an unflattering picture of the town. Several colleagues sent him copies of the feature story in the mail. “I looked on it as a challenge,” he explained. “I was really committed to change.”

DeBonis smiles in understanding as the people in the group are introduced. “I believed a lot of people felt like I did—they were frustrated and wanted to make changes,” he begins. DeBonis has the restless zeal of the reformer. At age thirty-nine he is slightly built with short hair, animated eyes and hands, and quickness in both words and thought.

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