Light Emerging

As the days grow longer and we pass out of the dark half of the year, I feel the return of my own drive and motivation. This year there are even more obvious metaphors of light emerging from darkness. Probably the most obvious is that we have just lived through a natural disaster. An ice storm hit AR and KY on 1/26. For 19 days we had no electricity and no running water.

The Forest Service is abuzz with a return to a lighter mode as well. I've worked for the agency for 8 years. The story of those 8 years has been the story of ever shrinking budgets and ever increasing demands. Our passion and dedication to the land was sometimes the only thing which kept us going as we witnessed first hand the impacts of global climate change under an administration which ignored and even denied the threat (at least for the first 3-4 years). Each year wild fire consumed more land and dollars while we desperately castrated our business operations to pinch every penny.

Now we're slated to receive approximately 1.3 billion dollars to let contracts, creating private sector jobs, with the focus of hazardous fuels reduction and woody biomass utilization as an energy source. Finally we're under an administration which sees the inextricable links between environment, economy, and society.