Some of the Players

Former forest ranger Bud Moore has seen his share of changes in the Forest Service. He was there in the forties and fifties, when rangers wore the white hats. He was there in the sixties and seventies, when timber harvest dominated the agency's agenda. And the eighty five year old Moore has watched as the public's perceptions of the Forest Service has changed.

But today he's optimistic. He sees young forest rangers practicing something he calls "ecosystem management."

"The challenge is to go in there and take what we have to take to take care of ourselves as a society and still keep all the connectivity, all the stuff that's important, to make that thing stay alive and function. This land has some broken pieces. For example, the grizzlies are gone; we lost something great... the sea run fish, that's another weak link. So there are some broken linkages -- big ones -- that go clear to the ocean."

Bud calls ecosystem management "the biggest change in my lifetime"; and yet he realizes that without the public trust, not much will improve. "Just how in the blazes can a ranger run a show with the public fighting each other, the public he's supposed to be working for? You're just stalemated, until we join up a little bit. Working together works, and that's what I'm trying to represent today, in whatever way I can."

"I think nature has, over eons of time, come up with a scheme that we just can't beat. That's the way I look at it. So we work with that. But we're part of this thing, too, and we have to take something out of it, too, to survive. And so right in there is the challenge."

Bud Moore has written a book about land ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains, called The Lochsa Story; it's part history, part philosophy, and part autobiography.