I Accept Your Obeisance
Not only am I to blame, but it follows that I also hold the power.
Simply by mentioning a USFS project/program on this blog, I shut it down. The other day I posted an extract from the Federal Register about the proposed Thom-Sieder project on the Happy Camp/Oak Knoll Ranger District of the Klamath National Forest [here]. Within hours complaints came in from the USFS blaming me for sabotaging the entire project, and now it’s defunct, and it’s all my fault.
A year ago I complained about the Wildland Fire Leadership Council violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The Federal Government’s response was to shut down the WFLC site and engage a raft of Justice Dept. attorneys in a six-month effort to remake the WFLC into something other than an Advisory Council. All meeting notices and minutes have been squelched ever since. The WFLC held another secret meeting yesterday, and my guess is that SOS Forests and Mike Dubrasich were all they talked about. Their whoofoo program is choking and dying, their budget has been slashed, they are contemplating another 2,500 layoffs, they have alienated the entire country, and it’s all my fault.
Get mentioned on this blog and your career as a public employee is over, just like that. I hold the power to crush and destroy.
It seems unlikely, even outlandish and absurd. But in case after case my blog has wreaked havoc in the agency from Arizona to Boise to Washington D.C.
Many insiders have told me to cool it, allegedly because I am disintegrating the US Forest Service. Frankly, I didn’t believe them. I mean, how pathetic is the USFS if one blog can monkey wrench their trip? Me and my homemade, backwoods, rust-caked computer with a dysfunctional Internet connection are apparently the most powerful influences today on the USFS nationally. Hard to believe but the evidence mounts up.
Never having held this much power before, I’m not sure how to handle it. What if it goes to my head and I become corrupted by my own magnificence? I never had to face a problem like that before. I’ve faced plenty of other problems, but not the burden of commanding and controlling an entire Federal bureaucracy with the stroke of my keyboard.
But fate (or folly) forces me to assume the mantle of power. I accept the obeisance of the USFS, with grace and dignity.
Dear USFS,
Please call me to receive your instructions. I’m in the book. If you do not clear it with me (whatever it is) chances are I will crush and destroy it, sometimes without even trying to. Such is the burden of power; I step on bugs wherever I turn, and sometimes with complete unawareness of the squishing going on beneath my heavy boot heel.
It must be true; you blame me.
Therefore, before you do anything else stupid, please contact me ahead of time. Trying to hide from me is no use to you. I will suss you out, and then slap the kibosh on whatever it is you didn’t want me to know about.
It’s my game now, and you can’t win.
Give me a call. Let’s cut to the chase and move ahead. If you don’t call me today, I can’t save you any grief.
Mike the Powerful
by Tim Bailey
Tim,
Yes. And yes. And I hope not.
The Jim’s Creek Savanna Restoration Stewardship project is the BEST USFS project I ever heard of.
I have been dilatory. I was waiting for the right moment, but why not now? You’re up next.
And there you go, buddy. Thank you, Tim. You are a forestry hero.
by Tim Bailey
Thanks, Mike!! If I hear about this though channels I’ll let you know. I appreciate the exposure; a PAO type, when questioned about how we should blow this horn, was obviously skittish, apparently concerned about advertising an activity that would create some stumps. So even though this project is right along with recent recommendations and guidance coming from preeminent FS oak researcher Constance Harrington, there has been no effort to make the general public (aside from those many who were involved in developing the project) aware of this particular cutting edge. Go figure. Geez, I sure hope you weren’t right in your touch-of death-assessment!
That was then, this is now. After 2+ years of this, I have achieved certain influence by telling the truth in public.
Actually, the readers of this site hold the real power, and enough of them agree with me, in general, more or less, although they might phrase things differently.
My support for the Jim’s Creek Project is less important than their support, and they do. Your stock went up today. The Willamette NF’s stock went up, too. You have an influential fan club now.
Mike, might you be taking yourself too seriously?? Not that I get out that much, but I’ve not heard of any project that any of your praise has devastated. So, put your money where your mouth is; I’ve been monitoring your blog looking forward to some favorable comments on the Jim’s Creek Savanna Restoration Stewardship project that I took you to last summer.
As best I remember, you thought it a fairly well thought out project grounded in good forestry, fire ecology, and restoration thinking. So give it the exposure that not even the Forest Service has been comfortable to give it, and let’s see if you really have that touch of doom. I’d be very surprised if you could do anything to harm the project at this point; the 10 million board foot restoration-based timber sale was well accepted by just about everybody, did not get appealed at any level, and besides that it’s already under contract and it would be very expensive fiscally and socially for the Forest Service to back out of this good deal at this point.
Your esteemed fellow dirt forester, Tim Bailey.