The Forest Service—a Force Across Rural America—“Reorganizes” Under Trump
On a recent morning in central Vermont, where I live, it was raining, and the wood frogs had just begun to chorus. The sap run from the maple trees has started to dwindle as the branches begin to bud out. There is a timeless quality to a New England spring (or as timeless as anything can be in an age of rapid climate change), and part of that timelessness is the United States Forest Service, whose land boundaries I wander across most days on rambles through the woods. For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape. Which is why last week, though in the big cities it was barely noticed amid the noisy horror of the war in the Middle East, there was much talk in rural America about the Trump Administration’s sweeping changes to—really, a gutting of—the Service, which operates under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Service’s regional headquarters will vanish, along with most of its research facilities and experimental forests—and also quite likely the sense of mission that has animated the agency for more than a century.
The Forest Service controls a hundred and fifty-four national forests and twenty national grasslands—at a hundred and ninety-three million acres, that’s the second-largest land base, public or private, in the country, trailing only the Bureau of Land Management, which runs the nation’s federal rangelands. Sometimes the national forests are confused with the (much smaller) national-park system, which is understandable—often those parks butt up against the forests, and the uniforms of the two services look a little alike, and that’s before we’ve even considered the Fish and Wildlife Service. But, if you see people driving a minty-green pickup, they’re from the Forest Service, a job that implies a very particular history.
The agency’s antecedents date to the nineteenth century, but it was at the beginning of the twentieth, under President Theodore Roosevelt, that it came into its own. Its first chief was Gifford Pinchot, a close friend of Roosevelt’s, who believed in protecting the country’s natural resources to help power its growth—he wanted there to be plenty of trees for the industrial needs of the country. “Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day,” he said. In his time, however, Pinchot’s biggest confrontation was with the forces of what might be called “preservation,” saving forests not for their industrial potential but for their intrinsic meaning and beauty. The towering figure here was John Muir, and, while it’s easy to overstate the differences between the two men (they were, at worst, frenemies) and their visions, the differences were nonetheless very real. Muir and Pinchot clashed, for instance, over the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite, with Pinchot’s take—that it was “the best, and, within reasonable limits of cost, the only means of supplying San Francisco with water”—prevailing, in 1913.
But, if providing resources for economic growth was the Forest Service’s founding ethos, over time it has, in patches, reflected a more Muirish view: the national-forest system now includes about half of all the designated “wilderness” in the lower forty-eight states. When you drive into a national forest (and you likely have, since the Service retains the largest road network in the world, eight times the length of the interstate-highway system), you pass a sign that proclaims it a “Land of Many Uses.” In the Green Mountain National Forest, near where I live, there’s not just timber production but, also, the Breadloaf Wilderness, big stretches of the Long Trail (America’s first long-distance hiking trail), snowmobile corridors, ski areas, and a Robert Frost Interpretive Trail with signs every few hundred yards quoting his poems. Although there’s always been pressure on the Service to “increase the cut” and harvest more timber for local mills and builders, and although this has often led to egregious clear-cutting (the Service was once reputed to employ more landscape architects than any other organization in the world, largely to make those clear-cuts less visible from the roads), there’s also been a measurable move toward sounder science.
Aldo Leopold, for instance, essentially invented the field of conservation biology while working on game management in the national forests of the Southwest; the U.S.D.A. website, as of this writing, still pays tribute to his un-Trumpian ideas about “the benefit that comes from slowing down and taking the time to listen to nature. In today’s world, being quiet is a valuable commodity; taking time to stop and listen for those minute details outdoors that weave a tapestry of stories all around us is a rewarding experience if we but stop and pay attention.”
The Service maintains many experimental forests, which have produced new understandings of woodland ecology, making it clear that the trees that cover about a third of the country are far more than machines for producing lumber or fibre. I was once told, over a beer with one of the heads of the Clinton-era Forest Service, that its research showed unequivocally that the greatest value of those millions of acres was not timber or even recreation but the way that intact forests absorb and filter water, which reduces both flooding and the need for expensive artificial filtration.
Sound science, we have learned, is anathema to the Trump Administration, which moved within weeks of taking office this term to demand more timber production from America’s forests. So it was no surprise that part of the “reorganization” announced last week involved the ceasing of most of the experimental-forest research and closure of the research stations in the U.S.F.S. network. These are the sites of experiments that can reach back for decades; since trees, by definition, take a fairly long time to grow, that span allows scientists to understand how forests develop and to look for the changes that a warming climate is producing.
But there’s a deeper message in the reorganization, too, which shuts down the Service’s nine regional offices and relocates its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City. Utah is at the heart of what’s been called the Sagebrush Rebellion, which rose during the Reagan era to challenge the prevailing management of federal lands, and, indeed, the entire idea of federal lands. In recent years, Utah’s senator Mike Lee has led efforts to sell off huge tracts of those lands across the West to developers. The Senate refused to act on those plans last year, one of the few defeats suffered by the MAGA right. That was largely because of a huge swell of protests from hunters, fishermen, hikers, mountain bikers, and other recreational users of these lands—and from the businesses that cater to them. The Forest Service reorganization is a backdoor way to achieve some of the same goals: during Trump’s first term, his Administration moved the B.L.M. headquarters from Washington to Colorado, which led many of its key employees to quit. (The Biden Administration moved it back.) It is likely that the same will happen with Forest Service workers (thousands of them have already been DOGE-d). The Service will now have, instead of a regional headquarters, a “state coördinator” in the capitals of states where it has large holdings, and I think it’s safe to predict that these people will service connections to the interests that value timber more highly than those that value, say, water filtration, much less backpacking.
The U.S.D.A. last month announced big loans and grants to companies revitalizing sawmills and wood-processing infrastructure. The current chief of the Forest Service, Tom Schultz, as the Sierra Club explained, served as the vice-president of resources and government affairs with a company called Idaho Forest Group, one of America’s largest lumber producers, “where he led timber procurement operations and managed relationships with government officials.” As Schultz put it recently, “The value of National Forest Systems lands is demonstrated by providing various forest products, such as timber, lumber, paper, bioenergy, and other wood products.”
It is perhaps beyond obvious that the Trump Administration would look at a forest and see board feet of timber. But the gutting of the Forest Service couldn’t come at a more inopportune moment. This winter was by far the hottest ever recorded across the Western U.S., and that has left the mountains of the West, where Forest Service lands are primarily concentrated, with the smallest snowpacks in recorded history, which, a new study from Western Colorado University found last month, is intimately linked to wildfire danger. The possibility—the probability—of conflagration is on every Western mind. It turns out that conservation really does matter: when you burn too much oil, draw too much water, cut too many trees, you eventually end up in enormous trouble. The Trump Administration seems to have decided that, if we’re in this bad a fix, we might as well make the last few dollars out of it, on every possible front. To borrow, out of context, a Trump quote from last weekend, “All Hell will reign down.” ♦