My boyfriend and I were in our front yard in South Lake Tahoe the other day, enjoying an unseasonably warm afternoon, when a friend approached on his bike. We had met when we all worked at the same U.S. Forest Service station; we were on a fire crew, and he was on a trail crew. He slowed and waved, and I asked him how things were despite knowing the answer.
“Oh, you know, just got fired,” he confirmed.
Our friend had worked at the station for more than a decade longer than we had, but like the vast majority of federal trail workers, he had been a seasonal employee for most of his career. He had finally scored a coveted permanent position last year — part of a Forest Service effort to stabilize the workforce under the Biden administration — but that was gone now. Along with thousands of other federal employees who keep public lands functional and accessible, he was informed that his employment was deemed no longer in the public interest.
Last month, Brooke Rollins, the newly minted secretary of the Agriculture Department, which includes the U.S. Forest Service, released a statement thanking the agency’s firefighters for their service. “I am committed,” she said, “to ensuring that you have the tools and resources you need to safely and effectively carry out your mission.” The same day, the Forest Service fired around 10% of its highly versatile workforce, many of whom were qualified to respond to fires and integral to their prevention.
The dismissals were paused last Wednesday while a personnel board investigates whether the department acted legally. If the firings proceed, they will affect not just fires but every aspect of recreation on public lands, including maintenance of roads, trails, restrooms and campsites; the availability of guidance from rangers; and search and rescue capacity. And those who live near public lands will be affected even if they don’t use them. Rural areas are particularly vulnerable both to fire and to the economic fallout of lost jobs.
What happens to our public lands will be felt in cities and suburbs too. The most destructive wildfires, including those that just laid waste to parts of Southern California, are fought mainly in the interface between urban areas and public lands — with the help of employees like those who were just dismissed.
Wildfire smoke, moreover, causes health problems in metropolises such as L.A., the Bay Area, Chicago and New York City. The health of the watersheds we all drink from also depends on forest and range management.
The attempted kneecapping of the Forest Service comes at a time when we should be doing everything we can to bolster responsible land management. Climate change, fuel accumulation and an ever-increasing number of homes in vulnerable areas have made fire suppression the primary focus of the agencies that manage public land. But suppression is a large part of how we ended up in this predicament in the first place.
For decades, the Forest Service adhered to a policy of total fire suppression to protect valuable timber harvests. This disrupted a cycle of fire that had been part of the American landscape for millennia, leading to a dangerous buildup of fuel that can feed catastrophic fires. We now understand that prescribed, managed and cultural fire are the best tools we have to weather our Pyrocene era. But because of the threatened layoffs, our capacity to use them is facing drastic reduction.
About an hour after we said goodbye and good luck to our friend, Elon Musk announced that he would be asking federal employees to describe what they had accomplished at work the previous week or be terminated. Many of the people who received the subsequent email to that effect probably spent the week felling trees and clearing brush — a particularly bitter irony given the spectacle of the billionaire’s undoubtedly soft hands fumbling a chrome-plated chainsaw, which he brandished overhead with neophytic enthusiasm at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “This,” he declared, “is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!”
But if the Trump administration is after efficiency, the elimination of thousands of employees who are happy to do multiple essential jobs for a relatively low wage seems like an odd place to start. The federal land management agencies are a puzzling target in general: The combined budgets of the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management accounted for about 0.2% of federal spending last year.
So what are Musk, Trump and the congressional right really after? Anyone who works in land management knows these agencies have long gone underfunded and unsupported by Republicans, rendering them less and less effective as the demands on them grow ever more pressing. Now this bloodletting is accelerating, and soon it will be time to go for the throat.
As these agencies flounder, turning their lands over to private administration — to timber, mineral and oil extraction or to private ownership and development — will begin to seem logical and even appealing. The Trump administration is charging toward this paradigm, having appointed a former timber executive to lead the Forest Service and issued an executive order calling for expanded timber production (even though our lumber production infrastructure can’t keep up with our current supply of raw timber).
While sustainable logging can be a valuable forest management tool, research shows that when lands are managed primarily for resource extraction, they become less resilient to wildfire. This is a shortsighted, profit-driven turn toward a land-use model that is ultimately unsustainable.
What will the public be left with? Will we still have places to hike, fish, hunt, dirt-bike and ski? Will the watersheds that sustain us be clean and healthy? Will ranchers be able to graze livestock for $1.35 per head per month? Or will a new landlord be setting new rates?
Public lands are one of America’s greatest, most defining resources. I hope we don’t let an unelected billionaire and his minions jeopardize them without a fight.
Zora Thomas is a former U.S. Forest Service firefighter who now works as a freelance writer and EMT.
