Firings of staff at agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service are rocking conservationists and environmental organizations. Reuters reported that over 3,000 Forest Service employees and a thousand Park Service employees were let go.
On February 27 a federal judge in California ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind a memo and an email instructing federal agencies to fire probationary employees. The order temporarily blocks the Trump administration from continuing to tell other departments and agencies to mass fire certain federal workers. Though the judge said he would hold another court hearing on March 13, his order does not reinstate federal employees who were already fired
Olivia Miller, Program Director at the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, said she’s been consumed by this news over the past few weeks.
“This was just a real blow and a major disappointment,” she said.
The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Miller about what these changes could mean for conservation efforts in West Virginia and across the nation.
LISTEN to the story
Kara Holsopple: The Trump administration has fired thousands of workers in the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service across the country. How does your organization work with these agencies or employees in these agencies?
Olivia Miller: The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy is an environmental advocacy group. We have been around since 1967. Our goal is to protect the Highlands region of West Virginia, which mostly encompasses the Monongahela National Forest. We interface with these agencies in multiple ways through partnerships.
Namely, we have a Dolly Sods Wilderness Stewards program that is a partnership with the Monongahela National Forest that supports stewardship activities in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area with the Forest Service. We also have had a relationship with them for many years through the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative called CASRI, which is a partnership among many different organizations that seeks to restore red spruce.
Many Forest Service employees have served on our board over the years or been members of the organization. Of course, conservation groups and federal agencies are often tied up in litigation, and so that’s another front. We work with them, and we don’t always see eye to eye on every single situation. But our goal is the same: to steward the natural environment and protect people, wildlife, water and air.
Kara Holsopple: As far as you know, what types of jobs have been part of this round of terminations?
Olivia Miller: It has been increasingly difficult to get concrete information from agencies at this time. So we are hearing through the grapevine from people that we know that people are being fired. We know several biologists from the West Virginia field office through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were let go. We’re aware of a younger woman with the Monongahela National Forest who was an outreach education assistant who has been fired, but we are still trying to piece together a lot of the specific details.
Kara Holsopple: How could the loss of the people in these positions and others who may have been fired, impact forest, wildlife, or even recreation?
Olivia Miller: It’s going to have an impact in a lot of different ways. I think long term, we’re going to be looking at understaffed national forests and parks across the U.S. There will be slower responses to issues like invasive species restoration efforts and an overall decline in the quality of visitor experiences.
I think we’re going to be seeing this at our campgrounds with maintenance, bathrooms and outreach to communities. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out and how the agencies will respond to continue being able to steward the forest.
Kara Holsopple: What would you say to people who support President Trump’s personnel cuts at agencies like the Forest Service, who say this is cutting the fat or making the government more efficient?
Olivia Miller: I would tell them that our public lands have an enormous impact on our state, especially economically. In West Virginia, our public lands bring in around $9 billion annually to local communities and support some 91,000 jobs.
These are communities that were once dependent on the abusive cycles of extractive industries and are just beginning to rebuild around outdoor recreation, tourism and conservation efforts. When our public lands agencies lose their staff, it’s not just the environment that suffers. It’s also local economies. These are our friends and our neighbors and in these communities, a lot of the time, these are the only stable jobs.
People want to work for these agencies because they feel the call to be of service to their state, to their neighbors, to their country, and because they are passionate about what they do and want to help the environment and help West Virginia grow. These are skilled civil servants who did not deserve to lose their jobs.
Kara Holsopple: Have you heard from residents or visitors with concerns about the firings in these agencies?
Olivia Miller: Many of our members of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy have reached out to us to express their concerns and their disappointment in these agencies losing so much of their staff. So we are very respondent to our membership and conscious of what they are worried about. These are everyday West Virginians who are definitely concerned.
Kara Holsopple: What are you telling them?
Olivia Miller: That we’re doing everything we can to try to spread awareness so that this information is not suppressed. To keep using your voice to stand up for our public lands. These public lands belong to all of us, and they need a properly staffed workforce. We’re asking people to just keep showing their support for public lands and join advocacy groups, be more involved and show that we care about these places, and make it as hard as possible for our leaders to ignore the issue.
Kara Holsopple: What’s your biggest concern?
Olivia Miller: My first concern is with the morale of the people in our public lands agencies. This was a huge blow to them, and I’m feeling for these families who have lost their jobs totally out of nowhere. That’s where the first heartbreak for me is.
But in West Virginia, what makes our state so special and why people want to come here and why people are proud of being here, is because of places like the new River Gorge and Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley. These opportunities for outdoor recreation like hunting, fishing, hiking, camping – they’re what make West Virginia West Virginia. With limited resources and limited staff and limited attention to endangered species and wildlife conservation, all of these opportunities are just going to be diminished for people in West Virginia, first and foremost, but across the US as well.
Kara Holsopple: Obviously, Pennsylvania has public lands and forests. Lots of other states are feeling these effects too. Do you have any thoughts about what this means on a national level?
Olivia Miller: On a national level I think that this is going to make it easier to continue stripping away protections for our public lands and our environment. We’re going to continue seeing these rollbacks and the people who have been entrusted to steward our lands – there aren’t going to be as many of them left.
Olivia Miller is Program Director at the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy.
