Dear HCN,
Is there any hope that
change will come from within either the Bureau of Land Management
or Forest Service? My naive answer as a former federal public-lands
agency employee used to be “yes,” if enough conservationists and a
few good leaders entered the ranks. Now, after 20 years, my answer
is a feeble “maybe,” if many more decades are an acceptable time
scale.
The change in my view occurred after Jim
Baca lasted only a short time as director of BLM before he got the
political ax. He knew that the agency’s entrenched
grazing-logging-mining leadership had to be gutted in order to
implement real change, but he never got the chance to cut out the
cancer.
Past history shows that litigation,
exposure of abuses and passage of laws through outside efforts
appear to be the only way to resolve historic and ingrained
problems associated with profiteering from our public lands.
Nothing of substantive positive change has ever solely come forth
from within the agencies themselves.
To fully
alter agency culture, natural-resource activist organizations must
become organized in every Western state and include systems for
receiving anonymous tips about abuse of the public trust. Then the
decision by federal employees may one day be easy to make: Do I
swear allegiance to the natural resources of our public lands – or
to the supervisors and agencies that have sold out to the commodity
interest for so many
years?
Richard
Kroger
Wood Lake,
Minnesota
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Entrenched agency culture is hard to change.
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