Wallace Stegner once wrote
that the worst thing that can happen to a piece of land, short of
coming into the hands of an unscrupulous developer, is to be left
open to the unmanaged public.
His great fear seems to be
coming true. With the downsizing of the federal workforce and the
increasing mountain of unfunded federal regulations, our public
lands are witnessing the kind of neglect that befell the thousands
of victims of hurricane Katrina.
During a recent Senate
hearing, while I was waiting to speak about the declining health of
the West’s public lands, I heard a Western senator berate a
Forest Service staffer for failing to work with ranchers who had
grazing leases on federal land. To the official’s credit, he
reminded the senator that his employees did not choose to spend
their days in government offices grinding out federal documents.
These natural resource managers, the agency official
pointed out, wanted to be out on the land, exercising the
stewardship skills they had learned.
That made me think
about the last time I saw a Forest Service employee on a trail. I
had to go back almost a decade, to the time when my wife and I
chatted with a team of sawyers thinning a forest stand. Sure, I
still see federal vehicles on paved roads, and even occasionally on
gravel roads. But today’s public-land stewards more often
park their trucks at Forest Service offices than at trailheads.
Is this what happens when, in the words of an influential
conservative thinker, “you shrink government down to the size where
you can drown it in the bathtub”?
Today, the ideologues
who have made careers of berating the government are now in charge.
Paradoxically, they find themselves having downsized government so
it barely works, yet denying responsibility when it doesn’t
work. It was not always this way. Once, we had leaders such as
Teddy Roosevelt, who said proudly, “I am the steward of the public
good.”
I was thinking of these quirky twists of national
sentiment recently, as a friend and I sawed through yet another
downed lodgepole pine that blocked our horses on a trail through
public land. Behind us lay the remains of the half-dozen trees we
had already sawed. Scores more loomed ahead. We’d packed into
designated wilderness on the Roosevelt National Forest in northern
Colorado, and by the end of our trip it had become obvious that
this national forest was going feral.
The good news is
that this forest won’t continue to be a victim of neglect.
Thanks to a group calling itself Poudre Wilderness Volunteers, 180
Colorado residents have taken up the cause of their national
forest. By foot, horse, or mountain bike, volunteers patrol 43
trails on the Roosevelt National Forest, with about three-quarters
of the routes through designated wilderness. They carry maps and
answer questions from people they meet on the trail. They do the
dirty work of picking up trash, and they take notes on trail
damage. They’ve also trained a crew to open trails that have
closed because government downsizing left no one to maintain them.
The idea was the brainchild of Chuck Bell, a retired
diplomat, who recently worked as a seasonal ranger for the
Roosevelt National Forest. In his three years with the agency, Bell
says he saw the wilderness and recreation staff drop from three
full-time rangers and 33 seasonals, to one full-time ranger and two
seasonals. He also saw wilderness areas overused and abused, which
led him to join with friends in organizing the Poudre Wilderness
Volunteers.
Wallace Stegner anticipated local action such
as this. He wrote that “The protection by these agencies is of
course imperfect. All Americans, but especially Westerners whose
backyard is at stake, need to ask themselves whose bureaus these
should be. Half of the West is in their hands…”
On
the Roosevelt National Forest, for the time being, we’ve seen
an answer. It is almost a new form of outdoor recreation — people
volunteering to work on the public lands, ensuring that their
forests don’t go feral. We can be grateful that these people
are more worried about the health of our publicly owned lands than
about what’s in it for them.
Richard
Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is a professor
of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University in Fort
Collins, Colorado.
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