U.S. Forest Disservice

I have mixed feelings about whether now is the time to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to return to the moon. Like many (most?) people of my generation, I have that remnant childhood thrill left from the Apollo program. And my dad worked on the space program, to boot. 

But we have more existential problems to solve these days; whether we would spend that kind of money to solve them or not is the question.

That said, it's hard not to feel awe at this new photo sent back by the Artemis crew:



This is the dark side of Earth, lit only by moonlight. Dawn is just peeking over the lower left of the planet. 

We share a beautiful world, despite the work of humans and particularly capitalism to extract everything it can and leave behind negative externalities. 

Some of this week's bad news in the U.S. is from a Trump regime press release, which decreed the dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. Really, it's just from a press release, as if it's not a major catastrophe worthy of front-page news all by itself. Read the whole story here.  

At first it sounds semi-innocuous — they plan to move the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah. 

But it also means closing its 10 regional offices and 50 research facilities across more than 30 states. Those labs do work that can't be restarted once it's stopped:

You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.

As seems to always be the case with the regime, the idea is to replace it all — thousands of people — with political appointees, in this case 15 of them. Located in state capitals where they can be lobbied to log the forests more, more, more.

And the HQ will be in Utah — a state whose government itself wants to gut federally owned forests. What a place to house the Forest Service! 

This is what temporary restraining orders and injunctions are made for. It has to be stopped before it can start. It cannot be allowed to happen. 

Once it is done, it's done.