DeBonis, Jeff

Jeff DeBonis planned timber sales at his US Forest Service job in Oregon. He didn’t like much of what he saw going on and wrote a memo about his concerns on his office computer. The Service, DeBonis said, should not be facilitating the harvesting of old-growth trees.

The memo got around—way around. Sierra Clubs published it in their newsletters; senior staffers in the Service got calls from industry officials demanding that DeBonis be silenced. The Forest Service, to its great credit, said DeBonis had a right to speak his mind, although not on government computer systems.

The unsilenced DeBonis then wrote an open letter to F. Dale Robertson, Chief of the Service. DeBonis wrote with an insider’s knowledge and much frustration, criticizing the Service policies and actions that troubled his conscience.

“...On every forest I have worked on I can give you numerous on-the-ground examples of “getting the cut out” at the expense of other resource values. ... [These practices] are the norm and we scarcely think twice about them, until some concerned citizen or one of our own specialists dares to challendge us and we become indignant at their audacity... We have taken the politically mandated forest plan data to support the cut level, rather than letting the harvest level be determined by sound biological and ecological considerations mandated by our resource-protection laws.

“...As an agency, we suppport and at times publicly reiterate the timber industry’s smoke screens of jobs vs. environment, jobs vs. the spotted owl, and help promote the impression that we will all be living in cardboard shacks below some freeway overpass if we don’t cut the last grove of old-growth. ... Are we going to continue to parrot the timber industry’s propaganda that turning our national forests into industrial tree farms is necessary for ‘jobs,’ when this very industry exported over 5 billion board-feet on raw logs last year from Oregon and Washington alone?

“...The fact that we think the environmentalists have ‘equal weight’ with the timber industry as just another ‘special interest group’ is a fallacy. ... The timber industry’s motive is short-term, quick profits. The environmental community has a long-range perspective. They are promoting a vision of a sustainable future, both econmically and ecologically.

He went on the chide Forest Service personnel like himself for passing to Congress responsibility for changing the Service’s practices. He urged all in the Service who were as troubled as he was to speak up.

Copies went to foresters, supervisors and to elected officials. DeBonis was now a bona-fide, self-declared dissident. Fellow foresters began contacting him—some to castigate him for breaking the rules; many to urge him to keep his head down; and many, many to say they shared his distress.

DeBonis’s response was to start AFSEEE, the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. In its first year, over a thousand people in the US Forest Service joined AFSEE. Jeff DeBonis had given them a way to join him in making a stand.