MEDIA TRANSPARENCY"It never occurred to you that these trees you wanted so desperately to log were part of a forest picnic site for a family...or a critical piece of wildlife habitat...or that these trees might shade a blue ribbon trout stream."
"I never said anything to you at the time. I felt you might grow out of it. I thought that once you left academia and actually started walking alone in the forest, you would see the majesty of the natural world without human tinkering. I was wrong."[/list]The open letter detailed her work after she became "the forest supervisor for the Bighorn National Forest in 1997." According to Artley, prior to Kimbell's arrival she "knew that in 1994 some Bighorn N.F. employees wrote a letter to their regional forester stating that the Bighorn forest supervisor had created a hostile work environment for his employees and was mismanaging the forest in several ways."
Artley pointed out that "within a year" of her arrival Kimbell "abolish[ed] 14 positions with forest reorganization"; five of the abolished positions had been held by six of the "people who signed the letter of complaint that were still working on the Bighorn National Forest."
While Kimbell claimed that the reductions were because of budgetary constraints, Artley maintained that her act was aimed at punishing the whistle blowers."Over the next two years, you used the WRAPS process (Workforce Reduction and Placement System) to reassign four of the 1994 letter signers to other stations. One of these 4 people was reassigned to a position in Arkansas that he had never performed and had no prior experience in. One letter signer had his job abolished and was able to be re-employed on the Big Horn only after various members of Congress spoke on his behalf.
"By the year 2000, only 2 people remained on the Bighorn who had signed the 1994 letter to the Regional Forester pointing out massive mismanagement of public land."[/list]In an e-mail exchange, Artley told
Media Transparency that "After 30 years with the USFS, I would testify under oath that their commercial timber sale program is intended to accomplish one thing: to please Republican Reps. and Senators from the west." Artley, who has visited 200+ timber sales prepared by the USFS "both during and after logging and associated road construction, [and] of this total, I would estimate that only three or four had either benign or slightly positive effects on natural resources of the forested ecosystem. The rest had either adverse or massively negative effects on the ecosystem that might never heal."
Dan Berman reported that "Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said outside pressure on the agency has increased since the mid-1980s when the Reagan administration attempted to boost logging levels."
Stahl told Berman that "Ever since, there has been a battle between the foresters and the administration of the day, as each successive administration has attempted to solve what they see as political problems, but Forest Service professionals see as technical problems."
"There are so many reorganizations, this [safety initiative] is another one," an employee said. "Each chief has their own -- I suppose safety is Gail's initiative."
