An Agency Much Maligned (or another title)

Draft 3.4
November 5, 2025

 

My cabin sits a stone's throw from the seventh largest national forest in the nation. Had I known in the 1970’s what I know now, that nearly half of the ponderosa pines in the Boise National Forest would burn in the span of ten years, I might have chosen a different place to live.

But sometimes the decisions we make in our youth can follow us around like a guilty conscience, and that one decision, where to build my cabin, has pretty much guaranteed unpleasant dreams about hot August winds and fast-moving flames that consume defenseless wooden cabins.

An ancient Greek philosopher might compare the situation to living under the sword of Damocles.

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Outdoor Idaho certainly wrestled with the necessary evil that threatens what we love:  our 1995 “Fire Line,” the 2008 “Wildfire,” and our 2019 “Living with Wildfire.”

But one thing we had never really explored satisfactorily was the inner workings of the federal agency whose job it was to manage nearly 40% of the state’s land mass, a higher percentage than in any other state.

 

In 2022 I saw our chance in a show we were calling “The Next Chapter.” We would gather together some of the people who worked in the vast belly of the Beast and let them discuss how the “family” functions, warts and all.

 

To do it right, we would need the recently retired Chief of the Forest Service, Tom Tidwell. He was an Idaho guy, a former fire fighter who had fought wildfires near my cabin.  Tom had worked his way up the ladder and served as Chief of the sprawling agency for eight years. He had always been a straight shooter in any of our dealings and actually returned phone calls. When he retired, he returned to McCall, Idaho. In my experience, he wasn’t a pencil pusher. He was the real deal.

 

Brian Harris, the public-information spokesman for the Payette National Forest, found other officials who he thought would pull no punches, and even have some suggestions for the future of the behemoth agency.

 

I told them they needed to discuss their dirty laundry, and if they didn’t, we could always find critics who would. There were plenty of loggers and enviros to choose from!

 

For me personally, no agency has produced more cognitive dissonance in my brain than the U.S. Forest Service. If the discussion turned into warmed-over pablum, we had time to make the necessary adjustments.

 

Our Outdoor Idaho crew met the six Forest Service leaders one chilly January morning in McCall’s old log Forest Service building. We were in the basement, and I was pretty sure the temperature would keep everyone wide awake.

Once the mics were on the lapels and the lights were lit, we let the cameras roll. They rolled for more than two hours. This was one talkative group.

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“I’ve always thought the agency was a little slow to really recognize what the public wanted from their land,” said Tom Tidwell, “and it is their land.”

 

The former Supervisor of the Clearwater and Targhee National Forests agreed. “Going back into the 70’s, that’s when we were arrogant,” replied Jim Caswell. “We knew what we were doing. We kind of had the green light to move ahead.”  

Jim knew his way around federal agencies, having once been the director of the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management and the Idaho coordinator of the Wolf Management Plan and a Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Management Plan.

 

“We were responsible for cutting in places that we should never have cut. It just couldn’t support that kind of forestry. We shouldn’t have done it. We did, and we paid for it in the end.”

 

Tom Tidwell agreed the agency was arrogant. But, said the chief, “there was a lot of political pressure from Washington, D.C., the governor’s office, and especially from counties. Produce the jobs, produce the wealth.  

“I give credit to the environmental groups that really helped us and forced us to use the science and to take a step back. They also provided us some cover to change. We learned a lot. I wish we could have learned faster and sooner.”   

Boise National Forest supervisor Tawnya Brummett remembers firsthand the arrogance that seemed to infiltrate the large agency run only by men.

 “I felt we would ask for public input, and we’d put it away in a tiny little file, and we would go on with what we wanted to do. We tended to think of ourselves as the experts on everything.”

 

Cheryl Probert said it differently, but the supervisor of the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest made the same point.  

“Is it beefed-up public involvement that we really just needed as an opportunity to tell people why they were wrong?” she asked rhetorically.

“Our tagline was ‘Caring for the Land and Serving People.’ We are all trained in caring for the land. But we have very few people who understand the science of serving the people. We need people who understand social systems and don’t merely just do a socio-economic cost benefit analysis and stick it in a report.”

Cheryl understands the attraction of a job that doesn’t require much interaction with people. But that’s becoming a luxury. “I became a range conservationist,” said Cheryl, “and I was like, oh, so 10% of my job is doing the grass and the dirt thing. And 90% is working with people.” She could have added, that’s not what I signed up for!

Cheryl liked the analogy of the Forest Service as “family,” where employees are working for the good of the whole ecosystem, regardless of their particular specialty.

“One of the really cool things about the Forest Service culture is we have this commonality around the values of conservation, of natural resource management, of service. Yet we are wildly diverse. And it does create a lot of that ‘family dynamic’ of having to accept that diversity in each other, in order to get that larger mission done. But you're always rooted in those common values.”

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I had grown up watching the TV show “Lassie.” She and her owner, Ranger Rick, worked as a team, making friends, solving problems, making sure that Americans saw the Forest Service as the ones wearing the white hats. As a ten year old, I was all in.

Then things went south. 

I still remember when it changed for me. As was often the case, I was heading to a lake, solo, hoping to hike, camp, and fish. I came around the bend of the dirt road, and in every direction, as far as I could see, the trees were gone. I stopped the car. Suddenly I had no desire to continue to the lake.

I promised myself that, when and if the time came, I would warn people that the Forest Service was not a friend of the forest, and that the swath of trees along the roadways was there to camouflage clearcuts of massive proportions. How can there be the coveted “multiple use” of a forest if the forest had disappeared?

 

Years later, one of the early shows I produced as executive producer of Outdoor Idaho was a two-parter—something we almost never did—called “Searching for the Soul of the Forest Service."   (watch and see if something should be quoted)

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When I first moved to Idaho City in the early 1970’s, the Forest Service was a major player in the rural town. F.S. pilot Nels Jensen sat on the Idaho City Council, and the federal agency was the best employer in town. 

 

This was back when a F.S. employee could walk into a bar and have an even chance of being bought a beer. And if he was a member of the fire crew, wearing the distinctive dark forest-green pants and bright yellow shirt, he would likely get all his beers for free. People might have problems with Forest Service policy, but everyone loved the fire fighters.

 

But that doesn’t happen much anymore, lamented Jim Caswell. “We’ve moved out of county seats. We just walked away. That’s a loss of community support. We’ve lost the ability to be really connected to the community. You can’t go down to the coffee shop on Wednesday at 6:00 a.m. and sit down with the ranchers any longer because we don’t have anybody there. That really bothers me.”

 

One of the younger members of our discussion was former fire fighter Jared Schuster. He got his start in a small community. “I loved it. It was great. You can make your own niche in the Forest Service. and you can make a difference. I think that's amazing. But look at Warren, Dixie, Oak City, Red River. We pulled out of those old work-stations.”  (check video tape on this quote)

 

Blame consolidation for much of that. As the Forest Service is forced to do more with less, the easy answer is to shrink services and operate decisions in a centralized location, in an urban office.  

 

“I’m not suggesting you go back, because I don’t think you could, even if you wanted to,” said Jim, “but it’s a loss. I think it’s a bad deal, and that’s something you really need to think about as an agency nationwide.”

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I came away from our discussion with the strong feeling that there were two issues everyone could agree upon. One was the inclusion of women in leadership roles.

 

“When I was a young buck, we were talking about diversity and having targets and being evaluated. And I kept thinking, gosh, I don’t know if this is ever gonna work. But you can see the results today, vividly,” Jim noted, looking at the six people in the discussion. Three of them were women and two of the women were in charge of entire national forests.

 

“Just think about who's in leadership in this outfit at every level across multiple forests. Just think about who's there,” he marveled. “If you go back to 1965, almost every one of 'em was a white male, and that is no longer the case.”

 

The need for collaboration is the other major point of agreement. Collaboration had become the new coin of the realm, thanks in large part, I’m thinking, because women were taking leadership roles in the agency. Women are willing to reach out and bring conflicting views into the conversation and they understand that sometimes compromise is necessary to keep things on track. 

For Tom Tidwell, collaboration has meant less time in court. “I have been sued as much as any Forest Service employee,” he said. “To be fair, we won the majority of those lawsuits, but the problem was that we were getting sued. Today there’s very much less litigation than there once was.”

 

Tom remembers when he became a believer in collaboration. It was an Idaho example that did it: what to do with 12 million acres of roadless land. To this day, he’s surprised it worked.

“I still look back on that experience,” said Tom, “it’s still probably one of the more meaningful experiences I've had in the agency, about how you were able to bring people together in a way and allow 'em to really share their thinking.

“You didn't challenge a person's values,” explained the Chief. “You listened to 'em. And what came out of that was an agreement where the administration could buy off on it, the governors bought off on it, the communities bought off on it.

“I look back on that Idaho roadless rule, and I'm still somewhat in amazement that we were able to do that.”

 

To Molly Eimers, collaboration is the only thing she’s known in the federal agency. “I just feel tremendously grateful for the growing pains that I think you have all weathered,” the young Payette Forest archeologist told the group. “I don't really know the Forest Service without collaboration. I feel like that is one of the primary pillars of the Forest Service that I know, that I've been a part of.”

Gender diversity and collaboration. Those are two changes that suggest the behemoth federal agency is capable of significant change going forward.

And as the pendulum swings in American politics, as it always seems to, I sincerely hope that the next President and the next Chief of the Forest Service continue to realize the benefits of collaboration and the advantages of a diverse workforce.             

And there’s one more thing to suggest the Forest Service has changed. To Tom, it’s at least as important as getting the cut out. 

“Commodity uses are important for the country. But to most Americans their forests are the place to have fun and create memories,” said Tom. “You can hunt and fish, you can hike and ride your bike and motorcycle. That’s the real benefit. We can create memories.”

 

Frankly, I’d expect to hear those words from the National Park Service when referring to Yellowstone and Yosemite and Glacier National Parks, but not from the U.S. Forest Service whose unofficial mantra once seemed to be about getting the cut out.

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 But it’s wildfires that seem to determine how the public views the Forest Service. It may not be fair, but that’s the way it is, and in the eyes of many, the Forest Service has been failing spectacularly. It’s something people see, and it’s something they breathe every summer.

In 1995 wildfire suppression accounted for 16% of the USFS budget. By 2015 more than half of the total budget went to fighting fires.

“As the cost of fires went up every year, we had to take money out of all the other programs to be able to pay for fires suppression,” explained the chief. “The result of that was 50% less foresters, 50% less engineers, 50% less wildlife and fisheries biologists, 50% to 60% less archeologists. And it affected the summer crews.

“And so it really had an impact on the agency's ability to provide the level of care and service that the public wants, demands, and should expect off their national forest.”

 

Luckily, Chief Tidwell and the Idaho delegation convinced Congress to pass a “fire funding fix,” to end the practice of borrowing money from other programs that the public expected from the Forest Service.

The legislation created a separate disaster fund that the USFS can access for high-cost wildfire seasons, supplementing its regular suppression budget. Meanwhile the cost of fighting wildfires continues to climb.

 

 

“When I first came in as Chief,” explained Tom Tidwell, “we talked about the new normal with the large fires we’re having and the effects of climate change. Our scientists and I would talk about that. We have longer fire seasons. They’re hotter and drier.

“And our scientists would say, ‘Wait a minute, Chief. They are 78 days longer, cuz we have the research. So when you talk about it, say 78 days longer on average across the country.’

 

“I have to admit,” said Tom, “at times it’s really hard not to get defensive. I just want to tell people, well, this is the way it is. Climate change is real, and this is what’s causing it.”

 

Part of the problem, said Boise Forest supervisor Tanya Brummett, “is this thought that the Forest Service will just go out and fix the wildfires. We can’t just put on our capes and go out and try to be heroes. It’s a joint effort among communities and citizens, as well as the agency.”

 

As the guy who built his cabin adjacent to the Boise National, I had to agree. I have never been shy about taking my Stihl chainsaw to a tree. I must have some logger blood in me, because I love the process. Plus, I partially heat with wood.

 

But I got into some trouble when I took out every other ponderosa pine on my property back in the 1970s. The covenants of my subdivision stated plain as day that the only trees to be removed were ones where the house was to be built.

When my entomologist cousin from Oregon told me that the western pine beetle was marching into Idaho, decimating huge swaths of land, and that the way to stop them was to make sure trees had plenty of water to fight off the insect, my brother Steve and I grabbed our saws. For their own good, our beautiful Ponderosa pines needed to be thinned.

 

Most of my fellow subdivision dwellers moved close to the forest because they loved the big trees. They had no intention of cutting them down, on the slight chance that wildfire might consume the subdivision. 

 

But as Tawyna reminded us that day in the F.S. basement, “in the places that value independence and the attitude that says ‘I’m gonna do whatever I wanna do,’ there are some serious consequences to that.”

 

Large wildfires used to be rare in the West. No longer. This has put the Forest Service in the cross hairs. Tom experienced that pressure all through his tenure as chief. He knew it would be part of our discussion that day in McCall, and he came loaded for bear.

 

“There’s still this expectation that the federal agencies, working with our state partners, can suppress every fire. And that’s a myth. It’s not gonna happen. It never has, and it never will. 

 

“When you get these large fires, the science is very clear that no amount of suppression is going to change the overall size of that fire.

 

“When it comes to being able to protect homes, we do a tremendous job,” said Tom. “But the science will show that all the work, all the effort that goes into the size of those large fires is basically the same, whether we are there or not. They don’t stop burning until the weather changes or they burn a different field type.”

 

Tidwell knows he’s defensive on this topic but says he can’t help it. “I have to admit, when I think about how hard everyone is working out there on the lines and I hear the criticism that we are not aggressive and that’s why these large fires occur, I still struggle with trying not to get defensive.  

“Climate change and dealing with wildfire in this country are probably the things that I struggle with the most, even today.”

 

I feel his pain. As I rake up needles from around my cabin and cut the small trees that I’m sure weren’t there three years ago, I’m reminded what an entomologist from the University of Idaho once told me, “God sure knows how to grow trees. There are more of them in the forests today than there were 100 years ago.”

 

As I write this, it is now October, and the fire season is behind me. I can once again breathe a sigh of relief. My cabin survived another year. That’s always cause for celebration.

So, my dear cabin, Happy 55th anniversary, my delight, my albatross. I can now sleep easier, at least for another six months.

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