Forest chief quits in protest over questioning
Saying she's fed up with the "anti-federal fervor" in Northern Nevada, Gloria Flora of the U.S. Forest Service has stepped down as head of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, largest federally-managed tract in the Lower 48.
Why the fuss?
For years, residents of northeastern Nevada had been asking when flood damage to the gravel road which runs up canyon along the Jarbidge River would be repaired, restoring long-standing public access for fishing, hunting, and camping.
The Forest Service stalled. Finally, they announced the road wouldn't be repaired at all. It turned out the federals had just used the time to scramble around and devise the fig leaf of an argument that allowing humans to resume using this century-old road might somehow harm the "endangered" native bull trout.
Local activists responded by announcing plans to repair the road by hand on Oct. 9. The Forest Service won a temporary restraining order from a federal judge, ordering residents not to repair the road. The residents obeyed.
Stymied from any other avenue for redress, Nevada Congressman Jim Gibbons invited fellow member of Congress Helen Chenoweth-Hage, R-Idaho and chair of the House Resources subcommittee on forests, to schedule hearings on the matter for Nov. 13, in Elko.
That seems to have been the last straw for Ms. Flora. Having to testify before such a hearing would constitute a "public inquisition of federal employees" far too demeaning to be tolerated, she said in her letter of resignation.
Ms. Flora's letter protests an atmosphere of "hostility and distrust" toward federal employees. In a companion letter to those employees, she contends the boys and girls in green have been "shunned in your communities, refused service in restaurants, kicked out of motels." Forest service workers in northern Nevada "are compared to collaborators with the Vichy government in Nazi-controlled France," she shrilled, accusing elected officials -- presumably Mr. Gibbons and Ms. Chenoweth-Hage -- of "actively supporting these offenders."
Ah. So that's what we now call someone who peaceably speaks out against high-handed federal policies: an "offender"?
In fact, violence or threats of violence against federal employees cannot be condoned, except in cases where the federals, themselves, escalate things to that level (as in the unanimous jury acquittals, on all major charges, of Randy Weaver and the Branch Davidian survivors, in the deaths of attacking federal agents.)
But Ms. Flora is typical of many federal workers in willfully ignoring the role of an arrogant and expansive federal bureaucracy in generating this bad blood.
The talk is always soothingly of "riparian study areas," "archaeological study areas," and "protecting" the little desert tortoises. (Of course, the desert tortoises can be shown to thrive better in land grazed by cattle -- especially during droughts. But why let facts get in the way? They still had to be "protected" by shutting down Southern Nevada's entire cattle industry.)
Ranchers, miners, loggers, and cattlemen would have to be blind not to conclude these are a mere grab bag of pretexts for the real agenda. It's now obvious to all that federal "land managers" are involved in an organized campaign to systematically sweep the rural West free of humans, as though these lands were the "king's forests" in the times of Robin Hood.
Yet Ms. Flora protests even peaceful public public hearings, and finds it intolerable that she might be called before her employers -- the people and their elected representatives -- to explain herself?
Ms. Flora alleges violence and threats of violence, but the Elko Daily Free Press reports no such recent incidents can be documented.
If the people of Northern Nevada have restricted themselves to telling the greenshirts they're not welcome -- and refusing to invite their wives back to the local quilting bee -- I call that an admirable example of restraint, and a good start.
"She don't own the forests," says ever succinct state Assemblyman John Carpenter, R-Elko.
Perhaps Ms. Flora will use her newfound leisure to re-read the Federalist Papers. She might learn that Americans were promised a republican form of government in each sovereign state, and a tiny federal government of sharply limited powers.
It was never contemplated that distant Washington bureaucrats should manage -- let alone claim outright "ownership" thanks to some ancient Mexican treaty -- of 87 percent of any sovereign state. In fact, the Constitution grants the federals the right to acquire and administer within the several states only such "places purchased by the consent of the (state) Legislature, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings."
Is the Navy now building frigates on little Jarbidge Creek? Can any federal agency show a bill of sale for these lands, OK'd by Nevada's state (not territorial) Legislature?
Of course not.
So good riddance to Ms. Flora -- and here's hoping she has room for a few more in her van.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at 1-800-244-2224.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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