Public Lands in Decay; U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Trains “Diversity Change Agents”

BalletForestiStockGood heavens!! Can this be serious?

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service put out a press release today saying, in part:

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Welcomes Inaugural Class of Diversity Change Agents

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today graduated its first Diversity Change Agent Training Class, approximately 60 committed Service employees at all levels of the agency who will serve as mentors and advocates for workforce diversity. Graduates of the course will be utilized throughout the Service as role models…

Deputy Director for Operations Rowan Gould, along with each Regional Director is hosting a “Championing Diversity” workshop this week to reach a broad audience at all levels that will train and educate Service members on how to be champions of diversity…

“Almost all of us, if we’re fortunate, can point to a person who, through their actions and integrity, had a profound influence on our life and how we view the world. That’s why this program is so powerful. As an agency, we are strongly committed to workplace diversity, but it is the effort and example of committed individuals that will truly enable us to realize this vision,” said Deputy Director Gould.

…As part of its commitment to diversity, the Service has also finalized and begun to implement a five-year diversity and inclusion plan which will allow the agency to progressively realize its vision of inclusiveness at all levels of the agency…

We just celebrated Groundhog Day, not April Fool’s Day. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is training diversity change agents. Diversity police.

No wonder the Public Lands are in such disarray and decay. No wonder native flora and fauna are vanishing and being replaced by non-native alien invasive species. No one is minding the shop. Still more proof of the fact that good stewardship of land, habitat, and wildlife can only come through private ownership and the self-interested concerns of private owners, and seldom, if ever, from 9-5 bureaucrats with every possible conflicting interest and no dedicated long-term concerns.

What, me worry?

MaleDownyWoodpeckerBirdiStockThis is precisely what happened to the nation’s government forests. Over the years the U.S. Forest Service took on every imaginable goal and interest — except healthy forest management. It filled its ranks with what were called the “Ologists” — experts in every sort of study except for forestry. Protecting everything in the woods except the trees themselves. And while perhaps “politically correct” in the eyes of some — it has led inexorably to the sad state of the government woods. Dying and dead from vast overcrowding, accumulation of staggering amounts of forest debris and undergrowth — fuel loads — trees weakened by the stress of overcrowding and a struggle for water and nutrients — and then susceptible to disease, insect infestations, and catastrophic stand replacement fires — destroying forests, wildlife, endangered species, watersheds, and viewsheds for decades, if not centuries.

Will that sad scenario become the fate of the nation’s wildlife now? Will the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service now be sending duck hunters, elk hunters, and even birders, out into field and stream dressed in tutus? The Possum Police will now be engaged in “job shadowing?” Will that help expand waterfowl populations or rare butterflies and Neotropical migrant songbirds? Tell me it isn’t so.

You can’t make this stuff up.



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