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THE ENCHANTMENTS EMERGENCY: A CASE STUDY IN FOREST SERVICE COLLAPSE
by Suzanne Cable
Above: Goats in the Enchantments, 2022.
The U.S. Forest Service is headed for obsolescence. Due to recent personnel reductions, proposed budget cuts, and reorganization plans, the ability of the Forest Service to meet its legislatively mandated multiple-use mission to the American public is being systematically dismantled.
I, and many Americans, welcome thoughtful strategic reform of federal agencies, but what we have seen occur over the last several months to the Forest Service is nothing like that. We’ve seen an agency systematically and deliberately dismantled by indiscriminate firings, forced retirements, and coerced resignations. And the chaos is not over, with a drastic structural reorganization planned and looming in the future.
The large number of personnel leaving the federal government has been widely reported in the news media. What has not been daylighted, however, and specifically in the case of the Forest Service, is that since firefighter and law enforcement positions were not eligible for the various incentives offered to encourage employees to leave, nearly all the employee reductions have come from the far-less-than fifty percent of the remaining agency workforce. That includes personnel that serve as wilderness managers, recreation specialists, fisheries and wildlife biologists, botanists, archeologists, research scientists, and the many varieties of forestry technicians doing work on the ground.
The short-term impact of personnel reductions is being seen this summer, as all remaining employees and resources are devoted to responding to wildland fire now that we have reached national preparedness Level 3, as directed by a joint memo released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Rollins and U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Burgum1. This is after thousands of qualified callas-needed firefighters and fire operations support personnel have lost their jobs. This will come at the expense of the many other mission-critical responsibilities of those remaining employees.
We’re also seeing the impact now that recreational access, information and education, law enforcement, and infrastructure maintenance is reduced or absent, even as summer public visitation to our National Forests is surging. Not unlike 2020, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, agency personnel are again directed by their leadership to keep open all recreational access and facilities regardless of whether they can safely and responsibly operate those sites and facilities to established standards. Instead, we are seeing unmitigated damage to nature from unchecked visitation to sensitive landscapes due to unmanaged recreation. We’re seeing impacts to water quality, wildlife, and vegetation that in the most fragile and heavily used areas will never recover.
A local and especially acute example in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest is in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. The cherished Enchantments area of the Alpine Lakes is one of the busiest wild land destinations in Washington state for outdoor recreation, with up to 100,000 people hiking there each year in the short summer and fall season. There are usually ten to twelve wilderness rangers on rotational patrols that care for the Enchantments each summer. Due to staffing reductions, the Wenatchee River Ranger District has one wilderness ranger on duty this summer to patrol not only the Enchantments but the other 150,000plus acres of designated Wilderness in the district. Additionally, the district now has one trail crew leader and no trail crew. Usually, the District has two or three full crews not only doing their own work to maintain trails but also working with and supporting volunteers, youth crews, and professional partner crews to accomplish trail maintenance.
This situation has caused irreparable damage to wilderness character and natural resources as well as unsafe and unsanitary conditions for visitors, including unmitigated human waste and trash, parking congestion, and blocked access for emergency vehicles and search and rescue operations. As described in a recent letter to Secretary Rollins and Chief of the Forest Service Tom Schultz by Washington Congressional Representatives Kim Schrier and Adam Smith, the crisis is currently unfolding as the Forest Service does nothing to mitigate the damage2. Unlike the impacts to public lands due to visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, this is an entirely self-inflicted crisis by the current administration due to implementing a poorly planned and executed deliberately destructive takedown of the ability of the Forest Service to deliver services to the American public.
The gutting of the Forest Service is just one example of a national crisis that will take years or decades to recover from once we, as a society, choose to stop the damage to our federal system of governance. We must individually and collectively speak out to all our elected officials and demand a stop to the out-of-control damage being done. We need to begin to rebuild a federal government that we can rely on to deliver critical services to the American public, including re-creating a functional Forest Service, and protecting our wild landscapes from destruction.
Suzanne Cable retired in January 2024 after a 30-year career with the U. S. Forest Service. She finished her career as the forest-wide program manager for Recreation, Trails, and Wilderness on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. Suzanne continues her advocacy for wilderness stewardship in central Washington and nationally.
