Dana's kernel of an idea

Getting things right sometimes means getting lots of things wrong. It means experimenting; learning from both success and failure. It also means engaging a multitude of voices, perspectives, and experiences in order to create a pool of ideas big enough for the best ones to emerge. The momentum and development of these ideas can grow or be squelched depending on the environment in which they are shared.

This is especially true in the development and implementation of policies that shape our western landscape. Take the US Forest Service: from experience and scholarship, almost all forest planning efforts approached in a clearly top-down manner are subject to intense scrutiny, litigation, and failure. Those which successfully engage and empower the community – both local and national interests and perspectives – bear fruit. These fruits include more creative, relevant, and lasting outcomes than would have emerged otherwise.

Explore your ideas and embrace those of others. We’ll sure as hell get there faster together than any of us would alone.

I would like to develop this into a "Writers on the Range" piece for submission to the High Country News. Writing something like this with my own name and agency affiliation may be a challenge... but I'll cross that bridge later.

Posting an opinion piece to Grist may also be rewarding and relevant. Perhaps I could contribute a bit more anonymously (in either venue) in relation to the current $40 million investment in removal of bark beetle hazard trees. Sometimes even good ideas are not popular because of the way they arise.