RETIRED FS PLANNER WANTS FORMER BOSS FIRED
Mark Rey, Public Lands Enemy No. 1?
By Bill Schneider, 2-27-07
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In October, recently retired Forest Service planner Richard Artley made a few headlines when he blew the whistle on his former employer’s secretive plan to close thousands of recreational facilities. Now, he’s blowing the whistle on the man behind it, his former boss, Mark Rey, who currently holds the position most people don’t know even exists.
Officially, Mark Rey is called the Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources & Environment. Unofficially, he is often called much less complimentary names, but I won’t go into that here. Suffice to say, he is considered the enemy of those trying to protect our public lands from commercialization and privatization.
Rey is President Bush’s handpicked controller of the Forest Service, and he has done and excellent job for his boss. In his position, he sets policy for our national forests, and is the person behind recent controversies such as
- Proposals to sell off large chunks of national forests to fund rural schools,
- Repeal of Clinton Era Roadless Rule and endless litigation to fight court reversals of the Bush administration’s repeal of the rule,
- Tacking the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act or RAT, the Recreation Access Tax, as a rider on a must-pass spending bill and then making sure the FS aggressively increases current fees and initiates new fees to limit access to national forests, especially by those least able to afford it.
- Secretively launching and keeping under wraps for four years the Recreation Site Facility Master Plan process, which will result in the closure and “demonstration” (i.e. become fee based) of thousands of campgrounds, picnic areas and other recreational facilities on national forests.
With those exceptions, plus about twenty more detailed by Artley, Rey has been a good steward for our national forests.
Artley, a retired forest planner from Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest, recently posted a long letter detail many other misdeeds by Rey. In my experience in working with government, you don’t see officials trying to “out” their agency and former bosses. If you do, it has much deeper roots than a disputed performance review. You can read his detailed letter here.
“I watched from the inside as Rey’s tragic policies unfolded on a daily basis,” Artley claims in his “Open Letter to All Americans,” which has been posted on several environmental websites. “Forest Service managers still implement them without question. It will take Congress time to purge the many unacceptable Bush land management agency appointments. However, for each week that Rey controls Forest Service policy, our public land suffers.”
Artley goes on to encourage people to write Congress and ask for Rey’s removal.
“Mark Rey is an intelligent man,” Artley admits. “He has been using his intelligence to deceive America into allowing him to create hundreds of thousands of corporate industrial tree farms on your public land.”
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Comments
Weyerhaeuser just prevailed on an anti-trust lawsuit in the Supreme Court. The Bush Admin. AG filed an amicus brief on behalf of Weyco. The outcome was you only had a trust if you controlled over 55% of the SALES of finished product. You can own 100% of the raw material and NOT be a trust. The Bush Admin won, preserved the alder log monopoly and predatory log buying actions of Weyco., or any others in the Pulp, Paper, lumber and panel business.
Rey's job is to make sure, absolute sure, no timber from public lands competes in the American marketplace with Weyerhaeuser, G-P, Intl Paper, Temple Inland, Pack River, Plum Creek, you name it. Those private and stockholder owned companies using their own regrowth, the market-limited timber from small woodlands owners, and their own vast offshore and Canadian operations, have been hugely profitable in the US market now that USFS and BLM are ineffective or worse at selling one sale, let alone a continuing stream of timber. Wood is a less and less competitive market for small ownership timber growers and small mill owners. The Greenies made the Timber Barons and their stockholders immense fortunes since public timber became a non-player. The Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, et al MegaEnviros have also profited hugely by using their Timber Baron straw dog, in fact small private mills using public timber, as the designated villain. Mark Rey has been part and parcel, a player, in this strategy for years. His actions are about smoke, mirrors, and sleight of legislative hand. He is not a threat to conservation and environment because he knows well that his proposals are there as an easy target for the people who write these articles. And all know none will ever see the legislative light of day. The implicit cooperation of both the Mega Pulps and the MegaConservation industries is becoming more transparent all the time. Both are getting richer daily.
Timber from tree farms owned by insurance companies and MegaPulps can easily obtain "green" status, not unlike an organic registration for food. But the USFS timber can't get a "green" label. Go figure. Farmed salmon is labeled "organic" but wild, free swimming fish caught in the Pacific can't get an "organic" label. It is about money. Rey is the US DeptAg mole for the MegaPulps...and has been effective. If he weren't, this story would not have been written.
The public, and writers, should do what legislators and their aides have done with the pap from a Rey led Administrative effort to seemingly be a villain: recognize it for what it is, an act. If you look deeply enough, you will always find MegaPulp corporate money behind MegaConservation. Big blocks of MegaPulp stock are held by public employee retirement funds. The better those companies do, the bigger the retirement benefit for the regulators, and their union minders.
Now the the USFS has decided to let most of their conserved timber burn for its own good, Weyerhaeuser, et al, can rest knowing competitive supplies of wood will go away for a long, long time. That Mark Rey is getting the job done. After the 2008 election, follow him to see where he ends up.
I have yet to see one person on the green side of things have one thing to say about making Weyerhaeuser, et al, more money than they can spend. In all the posturing about "Timber Barons", it was the timber barons who profited by USFS and BLM restrictions, and all the missing mills, the mom and pop logging outfits, the small town business, was destroyed. I wouldn't want to publicly take credit for that if I were MegaConservation, either. But that is the way it played out. Rey's perposterous proposals getting knocked down by a phalanx of environmental lawyers and lobbyists, and no timber sold. And as long as the diversions like RAT keep the process Congressionally occupied, no timber will ever be sold. All that timber accumulation (the land keeps on growing it every day) is fuel. That is all it is when it becomes an unbearable burden on the land and for the agency. It is going to burn. And by burning, will not be competition in the fiber market for MegaPulps, Mr. Rey's sponsors.
It's the big companies that stand to benefit most from Rey's overreaches--if they go through. There aren't enough mom and pop operations left to process all the wood generated by something like the Biscuit salvage operation. That's a Big Timber project, right there.
The big companies have enough wood to keep the market supplied. MegaPulps in Canada log Crown timber every day, and tens of billions of board feet per year. They are not keeping up with bug kill. The worst thing that could happen to MegaPulps would be a return to USFS logging at a billion board feet or more a year. That much wood would disrupt their cozy measuring out of engineered wood products into the market, and impact their profit margins.
Lastly, USFS timber is allocated by Congressional act to historical big and small business shares of the cut, intended to keep the Weyerhaeusers of the world from predatory bidding and buying all the wood put up for sale. Only after small business does not bid on SBA set aside sales can the wood be re-offered for sale with no business size restrictions. (Over 500 employees is a big business in this SBA set aside program). The predatory nature of the MegaPulps had been addressed long ago, and the SBA set aside program installed. Of course, this fact has not been publicized by MegaConservation as it is sympathetic to small business, and show-cases the economic destruction the present USFS/BLM fuel preservation/no logging management direction has wreaked on so many rural communities. The present forest fuels hoarding program is pyro-insanity, but the MegaConservationists are comfortable with it, and that must be all that counts. And they can still hold hands under the Board tables, and share knowing winks. To be able to sell "green" lumber to environmentally concerned buyers, cut from "sustainable forests", the Timber Barons of MegaPulps depend on help from their Boardroom buddies of the MegaConservation lobby. Mark Rey is just their government contact and water carrier.