[NYTr] Berkowitz: Chaos at the US Forest Service

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Media Transparency - Oct 29, 2007
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=217

Taser Time on America's Public Lands:

Chaos at the US Forest Service

The U.S. Forest Service 'is experiencing confusion and drift in its
central identity and direction, and ambiguity in the way it allocates
power and responsibility,' a recent survey of Forest Service workers
found.

By Bill Berkowitz

At about the same time University of Florida student Andrew Meyer was
getting tasered by overly heated campus security guards during an
appearance by Sen. John Kerry, TASER International Inc. announced that
it had received an order from the United States Forest Service for 700
TASER (r) X26 electronic control devices and related accessories.

"We are excited about this new additional federal agency purchasing
TASER technology to protect life," said Tom Smith, Chairman and Founder
of TASER international (website), a market leader in advanced
electronic control devices. "Traditionally, we have focused law
enforcement sales at the local and state level, but we are now seeing
acceptance of TASER technology at various federal law enforcement
agencies."

"We have seen a continual marked increase in TASER technology purchases
at the federal level following our initial U.S. military approval of a
five-year indefinite delivery indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract. We
are proud that law enforcement within the Departments of Defense,
Justice, Homeland Security, Interior, and Agriculture are now relying
on TASER devices to protect life."

John C. Twiss, director of the service's law-enforcement branch, said
that after years of studying the devices, it would give its 700
officers, who police 153 national forests, "an option other than deadly
force in certain law-enforcement situations."

The order will likely be shipped between the third and fourth quarter
of this year.

Is the Forest Service expecting an influx of anti-war protesters? Will
the tasers be used against environmentalists protesting excessive
logging? Are the animals in the wild in for some stunning surprises?

"The Forest Service will likely justify this order by saying that the
forests are a dangerous place filled with marijuana growers, meth lab
workers and illegal aliens," Scott Silver, the executive director of
Wild Wilderness, an Oregon-based grassroots environmental organization,
said in an e-mail interview.

"I'd say that the Forest Service is simply looking to further build up
its police capabilities and to be better positioned to act violently,
albeit non-lethally, when it feels justified in so doing," Silver
pointed out.

An Agency Losing Its Bearings

Silver sees the TASER purchase as another indication of how the agency
has lost its bearings during the Bush Administration. Over the past few
years, "the Forest Service has become more of a policing agency,"
Silver maintained. "It has all but written off providing the public
with services and has set their recreation program on a glide-path to
near total privatization."

"It has focused so narrowly upon contracting out their fire program,
and their latest effort aimed at selling ecological services such as
carbon credits, that they really don't, as an agency, have much of a
function other than to oversee and police."

As access to America's public lands becomes more expensive for the
average family, the Forest Service has "become more confrontational,
putting itself in a position of excluding the public from enjoying the
forests," Silver noted. "More and more Forest Service resources are
being used to patrol recreation sites and to issue tickets to those who
have failed, or refused, to pay to be in the forest. Perhaps these
Forest Service Law Enforcement Officers will feel better protected
knowing that they can taser a disgruntled member of the public and not
be forced to draw their gun on the person."

Silver is concerned that the tasers could "increase the level of
violent reaction from Forest Service personnel, giving them a tool that
is less than the 'nuclear option'; a tool that can be more easily
pressed into service."

Since the taser can be used "more easily" it is likely to be employed
"in situations where a totally non-violent response would have been
appropriate; precisely the way that the University of Florida police
attacked and tasered student Andrew Meyer."

While the leadership of the Forest Service has willingly submitted to
the Bush Administration's privatization/motorization policies, career
Forest Service employees are deeply concerned about the direction
stewardship of our national parks is going.

"Forest Service employees are confused about the future direction of
the agency, upset with the increased emphasis on firefighting and have
a dim view of the political leadership in Washington, according to an
agency survey," Greenwire's Dan Berman reported in early September.

Dialogos, a Cambridge, Mass.-based consulting firm, interviewed more
than 400 Forest Service employees under condition of anonymity, "and
their responses were brutally blunt," Berman reported. "The agency is
experiencing confusion and drift in its central identity and direction,
and ambiguity in the way it allocates power and responsibility," the
Dialogos report stated. "Together these are leading people to be both
unsure of where they stand, and unsure of where the agency is heading."

Dialogos has a $987,000 contract that runs through September 2008, said
Forest Service spokeswoman Allison Stewart. "Safety is our number one
priority and we've been having issues with that in recent years," she
said. "We thought maybe we need some external help to look at ourselves
differently."

According to Berman, "Fire-related costs now account for nearly half of
the Forest Service's annual budget, and employees said the agency
spends more time and resources related to wildfires than managing
forests. They described firefighting as a burden and said it is unfair
the Forest Service has to fight fires for other federal and state
agencies."

"Individuals that raise difficult issues can be accused of being
negative and subsequently feel their input is not welcome," Dialogos
wrote. "They may even get ejected from the system. Employees do not
feel safe to speak up in such a climate, adding to the perception of
suppression."

Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell -- who, unlike the heads of most
other land-management agencies, did not need Senate confirmation and
serves at the pleasure of the administration -- said the Dialogos
report "is not easy for most of us to hear" but urged senior officials
to distribute and discuss the findings in a June memo.

"Perhaps most painfully, our can-do mindset is diluting our
effectiveness, overtaxing our workforce and resources, and contributing
directly to fatalities and injuries," Kimbell, the first woman to head
the Forest Service, wrote. "Every time we say 'that rule does not apply
to me,' we are exacerbating operational challenges that put our
coworkers and the Forest Service itself at risk. As Einstein once
noted, 'Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different
results.' Our culture creates the results we get; we cannot expect
different results until we do the hard work to change it." -Gail Kimbell

On February 1, a few days before Kimbell officially took over as Chief
of the Forest Service, PEER (Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility) cited documents from PEER and GAP (the Government
Accountability Project) and charged Kimbell with being "responsible for
the largest reprisal action ever undertaken against agency
whistleblowers." According to the PEER press release, Kimbell "purged
44 whistleblowers while she was Supervisor of the Bighorn National
Forest in Wyoming ... eight [of whom] ultimately won a $200,000
settlement with the agency in 2003, while Kimbell was promoted to
Regional Forester."

"The promotion of Abigail Kimbell sends a chilling message to the
scientists, law enforcement officers and other specialists working
within the Forest Service," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch.
"Ms. Kimbell can either allay these fears by taking affirmative steps
to protect honesty or she can reinforce these concerns by inaction."

In an open letter to Kimbell written at the time of her appointment,
Dick Artley, a retired Forest Service employee from the Intermountain
West, pointed out that given President Bush's lack of regard for the
environment, he was "not surprised" by her "selection."

Artley knew Kimbell at Oregon State University from 1979 to 1980 when
they "were pursuing master's degree[s] in logging engineering." Artley
wrote "I could not understand at the time why you were never able to
envision a tree as anything other than several logs."

"It never occurred to you that these trees you wanted so desperately to
log were part of a forest picnic site for a family...or a critical
piece of wildlife habitat...or that these trees might shade a blue
ribbon trout stream."

"I never said anything to you at the time. I felt you might grow out of
it. I thought that once you left academia and actually started walking
alone in the forest, you would see the majesty of the natural world
without human tinkering. I was wrong."

The open letter detailed her work after she became "the forest
supervisor for the Bighorn National Forest in 1997." According to
Artley, prior to Kimbell's arrival she "knew that in 1994 some Bighorn
N.F. employees wrote a letter to their regional forester stating that
the Bighorn forest supervisor had created a hostile work environment
for his employees and was mismanaging the forest in several ways."

Artley pointed out that "within a year" of her arrival Kimbell
"abolish[ed] 14 positions with forest reorganization"; five of the
abolished positions had been held by six of the "people who signed the
letter of complaint that were still working on the Bighorn National
Forest."

While Kimbell claimed that the reductions were because of budgetary
constraints, Artley maintained that her act was aimed at punishing the
whistle blowers.

Over the next two years, you used the WRAPS process (Workforce
Reduction and Placement System) to reassign four of the 1994 letter
signers to other stations. One of these 4 people was reassigned to a
position in Arkansas that he had never performed and had no prior
experience in. One letter signer had his job abolished and was able to
be re-employed on the Big Horn only after various members of Congress
spoke on his behalf.

By the year 2000, only 2 people remained on the Bighorn who had signed
the 1994 letter to the Regional Forester pointing out massive
mismanagement of public land.

In an e-mail exchange, Artley told Media Transparency that "After 30
years with the USFS, I would testify under oath that their commercial
timber sale program is intended to accomplish one thing: to please
Republican Reps. and Senators from the west." Artley, who has visited
200+ timber sales prepared by the USFS "both during and after logging
and associated road construction, [and] of this total, I would estimate
that only three or four had either benign or slightly positive effects
on natural resources of the forested ecosystem. The rest had either
adverse or massively negative effects on the ecosystem that might never
heal."

Dan Berman reported that "Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest
Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said outside pressure on
the agency has increased since the mid-1980s when the Reagan
administration attempted to boost logging levels."

Stahl told Berman that "Ever since, there has been a battle between the
foresters and the administration of the day, as each successive
administration has attempted to solve what they see as political
problems, but Forest Service professionals see as technical problems."

"There are so many reorganizations, this [safety initiative] is another
one," an employee said. "Each chief has their own -- I suppose safety
is Gail's initiative."