A whole lot of Rocky
Mountain Westerners are concerned about President Bush’s
recent proposal to cut the U.S. Forest Service budget. Out our way,
the land is not an abstraction. The numbers in the Forest Service
budget aren’t abstractions, either. They mean something real
to our land and to our lives, and a cut of up to 2,700 people in an
already beleaguered and understaffed agency is genuine cause for
alarm.
For those of us fortunate enough to live anywhere
within the eight states of the Rocky Mountain West, the valleys,
high plains, deserts and mountains aren’t the stuff of
movies. We work, live and play on these lands; we depend on them.
We each have a stake in the stewardship of these lands,
and in the guardian of the national forests, the Forest Service.
From maintaining trails in the backcountry to fighting ferocious
wildfires, the agency oversees multiple tasks on more than 96
million acres in the eight-state Rocky Mountain region.
Now, the president’s proposed budget for 2009 asks this
overworked agency to do even more with far less. It would allocate
$4.1 billion to the agency — $373 million less than this
year’s budget and an 8 percent cut. This is senseless.
Bush’s notion of slashing 17 percent from trail maintenance
and $13 million from fuels reduction is both foolish and dangerous.
By birthright, each of us has a stake in the Western
lands, whether it’s 87 percent of Nevada or 28 percent of
Montana. All told, an average of more than 50 percent of the land
in these eight Western states is commonly owned, with Forest
Service employees acting as our caretakers. Agency employees are
not Washington, D.C., desk jockeys; they are our neighbors, friends
and relatives. They work on the ground daily to protect this
valuable public estate, and their jobs are not easy. Managing such
a valued and publicly owned resource is controversial and complex.
The public cacophony of both thoughtful suggestions and often rude
demands has encouraged the Forest Service to become the most
ecumenical of all federal agencies.
With the Western
wildlands shrinking, it was inevitable that the chorus of demands
would grow louder. New homes by the hundreds of thousands are being
built right at the edge of the public’s forested land, and
this alone has enormous implications for the Forest Service, most
particularly its firefighting capabilities. Every year, it seems
that more of the West is both fighting and running from raging
brush and forest fires.
Yet it is astounding to note that
the president’s budget proposal requests 22 percent fewer
firefighting dollars than were spent by the Forest Service last
year. The administration is basing that portion of the budget on a
10-year average of costs, seemingly oblivious to the reality that
the costs of fighting wildfire have risen dramatically, thanks to a
warming climate, changes in forest health and rampant development
across the West.
Though the president calls for spending
$982 million on firefighting, the agency spent $1.4 billion
fighting fires last year. Ironically, shortfalls in firefighting
budgets force the agency to shift money away from preventing fires,
so that now, firefighting consumes nearly half the agency’s
budget, leaving everything else starved of support.
Both
Democrats and Republicans in Congress have publicly criticized the
Bush proposal. “This budget is very frustrating to me,”
Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., told reporters. “If I budgeted on
my farm the way this is budgeted, I’d never get crops in the
ground.”
“It’s critically important
that the Forest Service has the resources to prevent wildfires
before they happen,” said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.
“It’s too bad we have to spend more money fighting
fires than investing in ecological restoration.”
Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., succinctly calls the Forest Service
budget “an unmitigated disaster.”
These and
other critics have no trouble seeing the forest for the trees. The
Forest Service needs more support from Congress, not less, and more
personnel to do the crucial work of tree thinning and restoration.
The combination of increasing demands, budget shortfalls,
manipulation by elected officials, and accusations by the radically
tinged anti-government elements have resulted in a dizzying jangle
of mismatched demands on the agency.
America’s
green and vital public estate is our living legacy. Westerners must
insist that it not be sacrificed on the altar of the federal
budget.
Pat Williams is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). A former
Montana congressman, he is the Missoula-based regional director of
Western Progress, a nonprofit policy
institute.
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