The Forest Service is about to give designated
wilderness the bureaucratic attention it deserves, according to Jim
Lyons, the nation’s front-line politician overseeing the agency.
The Forest Service is creating a new Washington, D.C.-based job,
national director of wilderness, which “will be on a par with other
program managers, such as timber, range and minerals,” Lyons, the
assistant agriculture secretary for environment and natural
resources, said at a wilderness conference in Seattle in October.
Lyons said the Forest Service will begin to make pay raises
contingent, in part, on regional foresters’ attention to the health
of wilderness. Funding for ecosystem monitoring will be increased,
he said, and all federal wilderness managers will be encouraged to
get involved in the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training
Center, which was established a year ago on Montana’s Lolo National
Forest, and the Aldo Leopold National Wilderness Research
Institute, established a year ago at the University of Montana in
Missoula.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Wilderness becomes a career path.
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