CHRISTOPHER BURCHFIELD writes:

In 1981, the U.S. Forest Service entered into the Bernardi Consent Decree against the advise of its own attorneys within the Department of Justice. In essence, the Washington Office determined that 43% of its employees, within each of its some sixty professions and trades, should be women. Beginning, ironically enough in 1984, through the year 2000, a mass exodus of men with “on the ground knowledge and skills” took place in a purge so extensive that today no institutional knowledge of the 174 individual forests remains.  

The realities of biology eventually forced the agency to reduce its gender goal in many fields. But 43% overall remained the target. As a result, today it is largely an urban/office outfit with very few “boots” on the ground. For example, on the Plumas National Forest of California, on weekends there were two law enforcement officers, and one recreational employee (myself) patrolling a 300,000 acre district.

The fire teams are so depleted that private fire fighting companies are routinely called in to fight forest fires. Not less than 8.4 million acres of wild lands burned up in 2000, over 6.9 million in 2002, 8.6 million in 2005, 9.8 million in 2006, and 9.6 million in 2007. The suppression costs in that year alone reached $1.85 billion. Since 1993 catastrophic fires have burned up 90 million acres of timber, although not all losses were on service land. Nothing like this has occurred since the great fires of the 1870s, which jarred the United States into creating the forest service, which until the early 1980s, was the most admired agency in the country.

My experiences with the service, its inability to learn, its stark fanaticism in the face of incalculable failures, prompted me to write a book (yet to be published) about “what happened.”

From Chapter 17 of Death of the U.S. Forest Service: A Study of Government Decomposition by Christopher Burchfield

        Upon beginning work for the Mendocino National Forest in 1999, within a few weeks I determined that the U.S. Forest Service’s effort to reach gender parity in all professions and grade levels had been an unmitigated disaster. Fifteen years had passed since the agency had launched its grand social contrivance to make 43% of its employees women, an attempt that had left it demoralized, and utterly without a sense of mission.

          Since its founding over a century ago the service, charged with managing 193,000,000 acres of land spread across 44 states in 174 units had established various barriers for employment to ensure that only the most capable applicants were hired and retained. Yet in the early 1980s Region Five (the 18 National Forests of California), directed by the Washington DC Office, began eliminating as many barriers as possible in order to attain gender, and to a lesser degree, racial equity in its workforce.

          As a result over the past quarter century thousands of miles of recreational trails have reverted to brush, and those campgrounds not farmed out to private companies are in wretched shape. The law enforcement division is so badly depleted that enormous stretches of low elevation backcountry forests have been occupied by cannabis growers, many operated by Mexican drug cartels.

          By the end of my first season I was already wondering who precisely were those forest supervisors, who had quite literally set about destroying an agency that as late as 1975 was the only bureau in the entire federal government placing a yearly deposit with the U.S. Treasury.

          What kind of educational background did they possess, and what prompted them to so eagerly embrace Washington’s fantasies? Zane Smith, the regional forester of Region Five, who so long ago had helped launch the Bernardi Decree, received his bachelors degree in forestry at the University of Montana, and served as a fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs at Cornell University. His interests are so wide ranging that twelve years ago he ventured into the wilderness of Northeast Asia in search of the Siberian Tiger. His successor, Paul Barker, former forest supervisor of the Los Padres National Forest, also carried some impressive credentials, and was once regarded by almost everyone as a man of character. His replacement, Ron Stewart, possesses an educational and achievement background that is astonishing.

          Those employees who have encountered all three regional directors describe them as personable. Photos reveal them to have been passable to impressive in appearance, and to some degree in possession of everyone’s notion of what a forest ranger ought to look like. Tracing the myriad of forest supervisors who managed the forests under their direction, is a bit like trying to trace popcorn balls ricocheting around a hopper. Unlike their pre-consent counterparts, their terms were often quite short, the regional offices quickly disposing of those who were uncooperative.

          On the other hand, a goodly number of supervisors truly believed that a more matronly workplace was the answer to superior forest management. Many also knew that the Bernardi Consent Decree, as amended, did not have the district court’s blessing and was therefore extralegal. I sometimes wondered aloud, in the company of several co-workers, what these supervisors actually learned as they passed through grade school, went into high school and onto college, with regard to the physiological and psychological differences between men and women. This question is particularly apt, because it was these very differences that by 1988 had plunged the agency into such chaos.

          From the chief forester in Washington right on down to the lowest consent decree clerk on the Inyo National Forest, these individuals could look at you with a straight face and tell you that except for reproduction there were no physical and psychological differences between men and women–and if there were, they were marginal differences that could be tweaked. Most, if not all could make this point in the face of the agency’s extraordinary effort to track down every last “gender hostile” tool known to mankind.

          It is of course impossible to recount the education these supervisors received in human physiology and psychology, but I can relate my own education on the subject, which roughly parallels the years they also passed through school. Sometime in middle school my biology teacher provided our class with instruction on human procreation. He made no mention of the sex act itself, which of course everyone knew of; but he went over, in some detail, what took place within a woman’s womb, as well as her breast development. Otherwise, he omitted any reference to differences between male and female. Later on he gave a short talk about vocal chords, and how as boys matured their vocalizing underwent a change that resulted in their speaking in deeper voices.

          In college I took general biology, and while somewhat more in depth than primary school, the teacher took very little notice about the dichotomy between men and women. I took no courses in physiology, but did take two in psychology during which I learned that men suffered more from various psychosis than did women, while women suffered more from neurosis/ depression. Otherwise nothing.

          Yet in real life, from the third grade on, through personal observation I learned there were many differences between boys and girls. Boys tended to be much more physical, and much more competitive. When the bell for recess rang there was so much energy coursing through our systems we were invariably the first out the door onto the playground. There, we organized ourselves into teams to play dodge ball, basketball, or some sort of tag game. It was strenuous play, and other than an occasional scrap, good fun. On the other hand, if for one reason or another the morning physical education class, or recess, was cancelled, the afternoon brought on a great deal of pencil rapping, throwing of spit balls, and other acts of rascality. All of this restlessness originated from the part of the room where most of the boys sat….

       ….. By the 1990s I was writing history articles for magazines, and also adventuring in California’s backcountry. Finally I went to work for the U.S. Forest Service, where almost immediately I was confronted with the impasse that is the subject of this book. Though I had witnessed some changes in hiring practices at IBM, I found the gulf between making a living with a computer company and the forest service jarring.

          Not that my supervisors and co-workers were all bad people. It was simply that the directives sent from upper management forced them into on-the-job struggles that had little to do with forestry management, and everything to do with regulations. Further, whether my supervisor’s project was completed next week, or next month never seemed to matter to the administrators. In fact, one second-level manager, tired of my supervisor’s protestations against agency “rules,” intervened to make sure a project he attached great importance to, never bore fruit. Of course, backbiting exists in private industry as well, but it was the service’s ever changing, ever lengthening lists of rules, and the accompanying lack of urgency that was so striking when compared to IBM, where urgency meant everything, even if it meant breaking the rules.

          All of which prompted me, when the season ended, to resume the gender studies I had abandoned years before. As I quickly learned, today researchers are obliged to slide through an enormous quantity of feminist science before arriving at real science. This was because during the 1970s and 80s the vast majority of gender studies were undertaken by women seeking to demonstrate that gender parity existed in all aspects of human endeavor, and that the relationship between the sexes, over the past several thousand years, had been a theological misunderstanding.

          Yet, as the 1980s advanced into the 1990s, many feminist researchers became more and more aware that the differences between men and women were real. That is, biologically wired. Most subsequently dropped their gender studies, and spent the remainder of the decade seeking to obfuscate their own findings, and with some success. Other more resilient women, strong enough to deal with their discoveries, quietly continued work, and moreover were joined by an increasing number of men. Which is a big reason why many libraries, as well as the internet, can still be gleaned by anyone in search of the truth.

        Inside the Chico State Library I found lying in print several revelations. For example, why so few women on the fire crews were, as they say, “living the dream.” For one, it had everything to do with body strength, a fact I had come across years ago, but overtime had forgotten. An article in the Journal of Applied Physiology titled “Skeletal Muscle Mass and Distribution Among 468 Men and Women aged 18 to 88 Years,” revealed that relative to body mass the average amount of muscle in men was 38.4 kilograms, as opposed to 30.4 for women, meaning that a women the same weight as a man would be 79% as strong, placing her at a significant physical disadvantage.

          But of course, we know that the average women does not reach the same weight and height as the average man. In fact, when the size differential is taken into account she possesses just 64% of his body strength, which is why a 130 pound firewoman, much as she might desire, is incapable of carrying away from a blaze an injured 180 pound fireman. According to Steven Rhoades in his, Taking Sex Differences Seriously, just 6% of women are as strong as the average man, meaning that if the strongest 20% of candidates applying at a fire academy are to be accepted, not a single woman will pass muster.

          In another paragraph within the same article I learned that a woman’s hands and wrists are capable of applying 57 increments of pressure for every 100 applied by a man, a major reason so many women in the field, confronted by a flat tire, call the ranger station for assistance. And why Gary McHargue and so many others were forced to leave their projects to go in search of the stranded forester.

          All of which leads to some amazing cost truths: that the U.S. Forest Service engaged in a quarter century quest for that extraordinarily rare women–equal in strength to the ordinary, run-of-the-mill man; and that the expense incurred within its personnel departments, in their quests for these human anomalies, was enormous. In the end of  course, to approach a female quota of even 33% for fire, recreation, resource and trail crews, the personnel departments were forced to hire many women who were just 64% as strong as their male counterparts.

          Also contributing to expenses were the elaborate exercise yards the various forests set up in hopes that their under strength hires–if they availed themselves–might one day close the power gap. Many yards  featured high tech nautical machines with five or six different settings, purchased at $5,600 a shot (1990 dollars).

          But as the author of Co-Ed Combat, Kingsley Browne, once put it, “Why go through all the trouble of hiring women to give them extensive workouts when men can be hired off the street to perform immediately?”

          With more pressing projects at hand, including forest service work, I placed the research aside. Five years later, with more time suddenly available, I again commenced gender studies. Among the more startling discoveries was this:

          Relative to height, men have significantly longer legs, allowing them to run faster, farther, and to jump much greater distances. In addition, in proportion to their size, they possess larger hearts, larger lungs, higher systolic blood pressure, and a lower resting heart beat rate. These very significant factors offer additional reasons why the forest service was never able to sustain the proper ratio of women in any field that entailed strenuous work.

          I also found that on average a man’s endocrine system generates twenty one times more testosterone than does a woman’s; seven milligrams per day, as opposed to three tenths of one milligram in women. James Dabbs in Heroes, Rogues and Lovers; Testosterone and Behavior, revealed that testosterone also elevates the  production of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein found inside red blood cells. As a result, each liter of male blood contains 150 to 160 grams of hemoglobin, compared to 130 to 140 grams for the female. This large deviation is one of the factors that explains why forest service engine captains on many forests were ordered to permit their firewomen to carry half-filled portable water pumps to the fire lines.

           In addition, testosterone carries agents that are able to neutralize the chemical byproducts that accrue during strenuous exercise–the byproducts that give rise to the aches, pains and stiffness that follow–an important reason why so many women employed in physically demanding jobs fail to appear after a strenuous day on the job.

          I also discovered that by age seventeen there is no overlap between the sexes when it comes to tossing a baseball, stick, wrench, or backpack. Which is to say that in offloading materials at a fire line, every single male firefighter will toss the necessary items to the right individual at the right moment, at much greater distance, with far greater accuracy and velocity than any female present. The standard deviation for throwing velocity and accuracy between the genders is 3.5–rated enormous. Another reason why women do not compete with men in professional sports, or the Olympics, and why they have never been active members of any armed services.

          There was yet another study I discovered that goes a long way toward explaining why women working in fire and police departments, and any other physically demanding profession, go out on disability at much higher rates than their male counterparts. In an article that appeared on Oct. 1, 2004 on ACC Sports Sciences Main Page, R. Alexander Creighton, M.D, reported that injuries to the anterior cruciate ligaments (ACL) was a common problem among athletes. The cause of injury usually involves twisting the knee during deceleration. landing awkwardly, or suddenly changing directions while running. Data from soccer, basketball, and volleyball revealed the incidence of ACL injuries among women to be three to seven times greater than among men.

          Creighton wrote that women were predisposed toward greater injury by a wider pelvis, and smaller anterior cruciate ligaments, that are much less taut than those of men. The fibers in their elbow and shoulder ligaments suffer from identical deficiencies. Which goes a long way toward explaining why thousands of firewomen fail to meet standard when hauling fire hoses and other pieces of heavy equipment over rocky ground and through thick underbrush to reach the fire lines. And why when performing such elementary tasks as post hole digging, many more are taken out of action for days, and weeks at a time.

          Another consequence of the forest service’s contempt for sinew, ligaments, muscle, testosterone and big hearts was divulged by John Fint, the engineer who worked on the Shasta-Trinity and Six Rivers Forests. During most of his career, he was in charge of cutting roads through the forests in order to reach timber stands marked for falling. Not surprisingly, much of the work involved the use of chain saws.

          For most of those years, by order of forest management, almost half of his seasonal crews were composed of women. Yet, as he recalled, during all that time not a single woman expressed a desire to attend a chainsaw class. “The chainsaw is a hazardous tool,” he said slowly and carefully for emphasis. “We needed to certify those who could and wanted to use them. But they were always men.”

          When I asked if the men were paid an extra two or three dollars an hour for operating that dangerous piece of equipment, he replied, “No, they were not. The service will not pay people for doing extra work. If you could perform six tasks, while another of the same grade could perform one task, it didn’t matter. Everyone got paid the same.” It is Fint’s opinion that the agency’s refusal to increase the pay of employees who showed initiative, badly stifled that initiative, and ultimately led to the decomposition of its work force.

          The research continued, and by happenstance directed me to subject matter I never thought existed. One magazine in the Sacramento State Library contained an article about “mental rotation.” According to the author, equal numbers of each gender were subjected to a battery of tests to find out what a three dimensional image might look like if it were flipped over, or rotated in one or more ways. It should be noted that mental rotation is strongly correlated with an assortment of capabilities such as mechanical aptitude, map reading, and finding one’s way out of an unknown locale.

          This study, supported by several others, revealed that the discrepancy between adult men and women in mental rotation was 0.66; meaning the differences in their ability to use tools, read maps, and to extricate themselves from unknown locales was substantial. Which is why so few woman are found around repair shops, and why a disproportionate number of people who become lost, whether in a city or a forest, are women.

          I also came across the subject of visual acuity. Men instinctively track and intercept–that is catch, block or dodge–objects thrown in their direction, with much greater precision, which is why around any work shop men toss tools to one another without a thought, and why in the forests they are capable of evading unforeseen dangers.   In turn, visual acuity is directly tied to what is known as “situational awareness,” the ability to focus the mind on immediate objects of concern only: what might happen to those objects should there be a change in their direction or velocity, and what action should be taken if the object’s direction and velocity does change.

          Situational awareness greatly reduces exposure to irrelevant distractions. Thus, whether dodging the onrush of a 120 foot tall ponderosa pine that has unexpectedly lurched off its stump, or darting through a clump of chaparral that has suddenly burst into flames, men will move off the mark more quickly than women, and much more often in the right direction.

          Yet another reason why long before retirement so many women in timber management, resource management, and firefighting apply for a desk job, depart the agency altogether, or go out on disability while still on active duty.

                                                                          [End of Excerpt]

                                                        — Comments —

David Lee Mundy writes:

Given the facts above, one wonders how female race car drivers, like Danica Patrick can compete. I was trying to explain to a NASCAR fan my disgust with her and women’s sports in general. He replied, well at least she is competing on the same level as the men. Not hitting from the ladies tees as it were.

Ok, assuming arguendo that the races are not fixed, and that is a big if considering the amounts of money involved, the only possibility then is that the mechanics of racing have been altered or have evolved so dramatically that a woman is able to compete with men. But in that case, what’s the point?

Lisa writes:

“Ok, assuming arguendo that the races are not fixed, and that is a big if considering the amounts of money involved. The only possibility, then, is that the mechanics of racing have been altered or have evolved so dramatically that a woman is able to compete with men. But in that case, what’s the point?”

We saw this happening while in the military: where standards could not be easier for only women/minorities, then they were made easier for everyone. (How could this possibly be beneficial to our armed services or national defense?) Utopia preaches (or at least wants us to believe) that there is fairness in mediocrity, but, Surprise! It doesn’t work, and there isn’t “fairness” either.

Laura writes:

Instead of unfair meritocracy, we have unfair mediocrity.

David writes:

An amazing statistic leaped out as I prepared to teach tomorrow’s class. “Forestry and conservation workers” is the second most common job for H-­2B temporary seasonal workers. More than 12,000 certifications were granted by the Department of Labor last year.

Hence, the illustrious Forest Rangers have been replaced by temporary seasonal workers. Anyone care to lay a bet as to how many of those 12,000 were female? Moreover, to qualify for H-2B, an employer has to demonstrate that no U.S. citizens want the job. I suppose if they call it temporary work clearing trails, nobody will apply. But how many red-blooded American males would love to be Rangers? As Boy Scouts we used to volunteer to make and clear trails!

Christopher Burchfield replies:

David’s report is not surprising. Up until the early 1980s seasonal/temporary forest service employees, who showed initiative and ability over a five-year period, were routinely made permanent. On a 200,000 acre district, it takes almost that long to learn it. This remarkably successful practice ended during the 1990s. When, I cannot say, as it varied from region to region and forest to forest.

The reason it was stopped is management’s fear that it would find itself saddled with too many white guys. Two seasons at most and a very high percentage of women and minority temporaries quit. For minority men, it is because of their immense dislike of small town living. For women, the reasons were earlier detailed; 33% seasonal “on the ground,” let alone 43% is no longer considered a realistic target. For white youths, they quickly see the deck is stacked against them, and also fail to return. Thus, year after year the learning must begin all over again. One can only guess at the extraordinary annual costs of what can only be termed as “organized incompetence.”

Which is also why the forest service, in order to keep within proximity of 43% women overall, has became such an urbanized outfit. Women love offices, and other like places, where they don’t encounter risks. It is also why the forests are near empty of employees. The millions and millions of off highway vehicle drivers like it that way. They can steer their dirt bikes and quads into any corner of the forest they please, knowing there is no one out there to stop them.

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