Transitioning to...

Today, President-elect Barack Obama announced the final two appointments for his environmental team (last week he announced the Head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Chair of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, and the creation of a so-called Energy Czar, previously he announced the appointment of the Secretary of Commerce who oversees National Marine Fisheries Service).   Of course, I would think  Transportation and Labor are also environmental appointments, but we'll get into that issue below! You can read an article about the two most recent nominees here. 

Aside from the flaw in all of our thinking that somehow environmental appointments are separate from the economy or national security, as with all of his appointments so far, Obama has nominated good people.  Many in the environmental community will criticize Senator Salazar for the Department of Interior, but I think his background as both an attorney general (for Colorado) and head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources will serve us well.  The Department of Interior is a complicated agency, filled with competing and cross purposes, and it has become mired down in bureaucratic infighting as well as glad-handing any Tom, Dick, and Harry who has been lobbying the powers-that-be for turning away from wildlife conservation, prying water way from agriculture interests to the ever thirsty urbanites, increasing private National Park concessions, the corruption in awarding status to Native Peoples (think casinos), and of course the press darling, oil and gas leases.  Salazar will have his hands full just trying to get agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and the National Parks reading the same book, much less the same pages.  And each agency within the Department of Interior has powerful and entrenched lobbying interests, from World Wildlife Fund to the makers of snowmobiles.  

Then there is former Iowa Governor Tom Vislack for Department of Agriculture.  There was a "darling" movement afoot to get Michael Pollan nominated.  If you haven't read him, his book on finding wilderness in your own backyard was his best work (Second Nature: A Gardener's Education), but recently he has been ensconced in Berkeley along with Alice Waters, writing about local local local food.  Mid-west farmers are cheering for Vislack because of the ethanol issues, but again, Agriculture is an agency with complex mandates that often conflict with each other.  Briefly, before I get to the forestry matters, there is an issue that I want to beef (pun intended) about.   Why is it we segregate the environment from national security and the economy?  The Department of Agriculture deals with food safety.  Yes, the USDA are the folks who make sure there is no e.coli in your beef, your spinach, and that food which is labeled organic is organic.  

As we can guess, the standards have eroded, not just over the past eight years, but over many years of deregulation and anemic funding.  To me, food security is as vital a national security issue as homeland security (and can we please get rid of that WW II Germanic term?).  In a simple civics sort of way, the role of government is to protect people, and protecting us from, well, to be blunt, the greed that makes slaughterhouses, feedlot owners, yes, even organic producers take short cuts that lead to outbreaks of mad cow, e.coli or whatever else, is just as important as protecting us from international terrorists.  

Vislack also has his hands full but aside from the ethanol issue, I think he will be a measured, disciplined, and enthusiastic head of Agriculture.

Now, the Department of Agriculture is also the agency that runs our national forests.  I was always amazed at how many of my forest policy students thought the US Forest Service was under the Department of Interior.  Nope.  We will not know who the Undersecretary for the US Forest Service much less the Supervisor of the Forest Service will be for a little while.  But I think these will be significant appointments not only for how the federal forest are managed, but for leadership on rural economic issues.

And here is my tie-in with the economy, which I will write about again in the near future.  Our management of natural resources during the past twenty years has been frightening.  We have exported our need for timber to Canada, New Zealand, Chile, Russia...importing not raw logs, but finished product.  Logging, milling, delivery jobs were all once middle class jobs, providing generations of families a quality of life they can only vaguely remember, now.  I am not advocating that we return to the bad old days of acres and acres of clear-cuts, but I am beginning to believe that we need to regenerate our timber industry in this country.  We need to encourage sustainable logging, milling a quality product, and delivering those goods to markets that are relatively close.  Years ago I did a significant amount of research on locating residential development around working forests, where essentially the community becomes part of the decision making process in the management of the forest.  From those ideas sprung what is now called Community Forestry, which is an rather amorphous idea but worth percolating up into the national dialogue and away from the special interests that seem to want to de-rail it.  Interestingly, in my recreational reading of John Wesley Powell he advocated similar ideas.  

Returning to some sort of timber industry in this country would do the following: conserve rural communities, preserve privately held forests, increase well paying jobs, allow this country to actually manufacture products, and in our national forests help restore forest ecologies that have been abused by an unhealthy fire suppression policy.  While I strongly advocate what is called a "restoration economy" (paying people to restore our forests) there simply is not enough jobs or money in that work.  The same is true for non-timber forest products (think mushrooms and greens) even though for a short period of time wild mushrooms were enjoying amazing prices.  But to amp up mills will also create manufacturing jobs (to re-tool the mills), white collar supervisory positions, and of course all the supporting economies in the towns.  We actually have the technologies to make the mills "green," and the forestry science to protect ecosystems.

As I said I will write a lot more about this in future days and weeks.

In the meantime, I wish our President-elect would view his appointments more holistically.  It's all about the environment, national security, and the economy.  I think he does understand that, but his role as our leader is to help all of us grasp this idea, that it is all linked.  To pull us out of this recession is going to take all of us giving up particular fights that we are seeking to have, whether it is to prevent any logging on national forests or keeping food costs down or bail outs to Detroit car manufacturers.  We are in a time of transition...