Only you can prevent forests
Trump's nominee to lead the U.S. Forest Service has a fiery past and little experience
By Sam Bellamy
Judging from what his critics say about him, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Forest Service sounds like Smokey the Bear with the lit match and a mischievous grin.
Michael Boren, an Idaho man who co-founded the multibillion-dollar financial tech company Clearwater Analytics, has been nominated to serve as undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment, which would give him oversight of the Forest Service as well as the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Tuesday afternoon, a Senate subcommittee will review Boren’s nomination. They’ll need to ask a lot of questions about three things in particular that were detailed in a story in today’s New York Times by reporter Hiroko Tabuchi.
Here’s the second paragraph of that story:
He was accused of flying a helicopter dangerously close to a crew building a Forest Service trail, prompting officials to seek a restraining order. He got a caution from the Forest Service, and criticism from his neighbors, when he built a private airstrip on his Hell Roaring Ranch in a national recreation area. And in the fall, the Forest Service sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing a company that Mr. Boren controlled of building an unauthorized cabin on National Forest land.
And a fourth line of questioning, given the times, needs to focus on whether Boren intends to manage the Forest Service or lead its dismantling.
The latter is already underway. As Tabuchi reports, “In April, the secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, issued an order removing environmental protections from almost 60 percent of national forests, or more than 112 million acres, mostly in the West. That came after Mr. Trump issued an executive order to increase logging on those lands by 25 percent. The Forest Service has also fired thousands of workers as part of Mr. Trump’s drive to shrink the federal government.”
Trump’s understanding of forest management is, um, limited, as it is with everything he professes to be an expert about.
During a campaign rally in 2020, Trump expressed his exasperation with wildfires in California with the following: “I see again the forest fires are starting. They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them, and it goes up.”
Two years earlier, Trump had posted on social media that he’d learned a lot about forest management from an expert. “I was with the president of Finland and he said: ‘We have, much different, we are a forest nation.’ He called it a forest nation. And they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”
At this, the people of Finland broke into uproarious laughter. They’re probably still telling jokes about rakes.
Boren’s knowledge of the subject is presumably more advanced, but it may not be by much. He has served eight years on the board of the Idaho Parks and Recreation Department, but he has little forest management experience other than, it appears, what he’s gleaned from running a 480-acre cattle ranch within the congressionally mandated Sawtooth National Recreation Area in central Idaho. The Forest Service manages the area.
Boren, a donor to Trump’s presidential campaign, does have a lot of experience fighting with his neighbors and the Forest Service itself.
The accusation of harassment-by-helicopter (video clip here) involved a construction crew working on a trail in the recreation area. Boren’s brother, David, had tried and failed to get a federal injunction to stop the trail from crossing an easement on his ranch.
“We saw this helicopter less than a hundred feet off the ground, and it started coming toward us,” said Dave Coyner, who was leading the construction crew, told The New York Times. “They were definitely trying to intimidate us.”
The cease-and-desist letter from the Forest Service was sent “to a company then registered to Mr. Boren, Galena Mines, after discovering what the agency said was an unauthorized cabin and cleared land within the National Forest System, close to private land held by the company,” The Times reported.
“Mr. Boren was removed from Galena Mines’ registration on Feb. 24. There is no indication of any mining plans. (The company is thought to have bought up old mining claims for access to the land.)”
The tussle over the air strip involved a runway Boren constructed on a pasture at his ranch not long after he bought it in 2015. He describes the work as “pasture improvement to eliminate gopher holes and weeds,” according to The Times, although the runway sports a million-dollar hangar.
When he applied for a conditional use permit for the air strip from the local government in 2021, Boren ran into heated opposition from neighbors. He got the permit and later sued four of his critics for defamation. A district court judge rejected his claim, saying it had “the potential for a great chilling effect on constitutional rights,” but after a successful appeal to the Idaho Supreme Court, it’s back in district court.
Amusingly, a county commissioner who criticized Boren over the air strip was Dick Fosbury, a former track and field star who created the Fosbury Flop, a backward flip over the high-jump bar that’s familiar to millions of Olympics fans. Fosbury died of cancer two years ago.
Senate Republicans are quite accomplished at the flop – as well as the flip – but they really ought to pay close attention today to the man they may be putting in charge of protection of the nation’s forests.
The party of Theodore Roosevelt has an obligation to think of conservation rather than fealty to Trump.