Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution.
  • disorderly@lemmy.world
    21·
    20 hours ago

    More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And “consolidated” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research — the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations — will be snuffed out.

    This is incredibly depressing, and leaves some huge questions I am afraid to even seek answers for. I worked alongside some brilliant, dedicated scientists stationed at Los Alamos-- does this mean that everyone there on behalf of the forest service is being moved to a desk in SLC?

    It’s plainly a mass firing dressed up as a re-org, and it will cripple our understanding of how to proactively address localized climate change for decades. Fuck.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 hours ago

      It really is depressing.

      And expect the grift to be supercharged for the next six months. They know their goose is cooked so we’re going to see headlines like this literally every day until November.

      Problem is Dems will take Congress but do nothing to roll it all back.

    • voxthefox@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      6·
      19 hours ago

      Not to mention, aren’t they vital for wildfire prevention? A lot of the planned burns originated from studies done by the forestry service. This is incredibly short sighted.