The Forest Service is still a fucking joke. Read A Walk in the Woods (generally a hilarious and insightful travel book) by Bill Bryston if you want an honest critique of the US Forest Service.
The [U.S.] Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing the word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no—though that was the original plan.
IIn fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century.
The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. By the late 1980s—this is so extraordinary I can hardly stand it—it was the only significant player in the American timber industry that was cutting down trees faster than it replaced them. Moreover, it was doing this with the most sumptuous inefficiency. Eighty percent of its leasing arrangements lost money, often vast amounts. In one typical deal, the Forest Service sold hundred-year-old lodgepole pines in the Targhee National Forest in Idaho for about $2 each after spending $4 per tree surveying the land, drawing up contracts, and, of course, building roads. Between 1989 and 1997, it lost an average of $242 million a year—almost $2 billion all told, according to the Wilderness Society.
So, basically, the forest service is tasked with monetizing the National Forests of the United States, not "preserve the untamed character of the country's wilderness", as the Forest Service "spokeswoman" claims. And they can't even do that right. I guess maybe they know a picture is worth a thousand trees, and they are worried too many pictures will help prove their incompetency to the US population.
