Forest Fired: The Defunding of Public Lands Management
A shot in an already weakened heart: Trump’s firings escalate the attack on conservation workers in mountain towns across America
Mar 18, 2025
Across the country, small towns thrive on a resource that can’t be bottled, branded, or slapped with a tariff: the recreational and community value of public land. For decades, small western towns like Leavenworth, Washington—where I live—depended on resource extraction like timber or mining. When those industries dried up, many towns found new lifeblood to stay afloat and even thrive. The beauty of the natural landscapes and the wild spaces surrounding those towns became the new currency for tourism, livelihoods, and trade.
Recreation on public lands is no new concept; it’s been competing with resource extraction since the dawn of the National Forest system in the early 1900s. But over the last half-century, it’s taken a drastic swing. More than ever, our public land is being utilized in ways predicated on respect, awe, and wonder for the natural world. To be sure, the impact is still real, and agencies like the Forest Service have dedicated entire contingents of their staff toward protecting and managing these pristine and high places.
For decades, these forest protectors—recreation staff that maintain trails, trailheads, and more—have felt a trickling loss of support. They’ve been consistently underfunded and understaffed. But the most recent slashing of employees and morale is a new story. The checks on our balance with nature have been all but eliminated, signaling a precipitous decline to come. Here is what this has looked like in my little mountain town.
Leavenworth, Washington—population about 2,400—is a quintessential timber town turned recreation mecca. The town has capitalized on its natural, European alpine-village vibes, creating a scene that draws in as many seekers of beer garden pretzels as it does hikers, climbers, and nature lovers. I moved here in 2019, drawn in part by the surrounding landscapes and in part by the community. I’d spent the previous summer managing crews of youth performing conservation work all over the state and had the chance to work alongside some folks based out of this unique Bavarian-themed tourist town. Along with its gingerbread motif, it’s surrounded by some of the most heavily trafficked alpine terrain in the country: an area known as The Enchantments. This one corner of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness sees more than 100,000 visitors every summer. To keep the land healthy and hospitable, Wilderness rangers employed by the Wenatchee River Ranger District (WRRD) remove thousands of pounds of trash and human waste annually. Despite this anomalously heavy use, the workforce overseeing the area sees little more support in funding and staffing than any other district that receives but a fraction of the traffic.
In the summer of 2019, I was Washington’s field coordinator for the Northwest Youth Corps. When one of my crews encountered a road destroyed by a landslide, my introduction to the WRRD recreation staff began. We worked alongside a contingent of WWRD trail crew to repair the road blockage. I was impressed by the professionalism, ingenuity, and hustle this crew of woods-hardened humans brought to the scene as we formulated a plan to move thousands of pounds of boulders with sweat, grit, and mechanical advantage.
On my way out of this hard day’s work, I ran into Xander Demetrios, foreman of the WRRD trail crew. He’d scouted miles of trail we would work on that summer and formulated a plan to make the most of our youth crews’ limited expertise. Until recently, Xander and his partner Claire Thompson were the acting managers of the trails program. He and his crew were responsible for clearing, improving, and maintaining hundreds of miles of trail across the nearly 700,000-acre district every season. He performed this miracle while employed as a seasonal forestry technician, having to re-apply and get re-hired each year. Finally, after eight years of grinding in this position, he earned “Permanent Seasonal Employee” status in 2024, along with some other crew members. At long last, he thought, he’d have stability. His dream, for which he’d toiled for the better part of a decade, had been achieved.
Then, on President’s Day weekend of 2025, Xander, Claire, and the entirety of his trail crew received an email that went out to more than 3,400 Forest Service workers all over the country. “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” it read. They’d been fired. For Xander, like for thousands of others, the sudden termination—and the reasons behind it—were baffling.
Back in my Northwest Youth Corps days, I also met Wayne Hart, a long-timer in the WRRD. He’d seen the heyday of logging around Leavenworth, along with its precipitous decline. Wayne himself was a logger in his youth, and when that work slowed down, he found his way into the Forest Service as a wildland firefighter. As the years went on, he settled into a position in the WWRD’s recreation department as a hazard-tree feller and general handyman, putting the hard-earned chainsaw skills he’d learned in his firefighting days to use. The backlog of work that needed to be done on public land in the WRRD and across the country was enormous.
Today, in the wake of the mass firings at the Forest Service, Wayne is one of two remaining members of the field-going staff in the Leavenworth office of the agency. He was saved only by his tenure. Those let go were legally easier to fire given their so-called “probationary status.” Despite the sound of it, these were no first-timers; many, like Xander, had been paying their dues for years as temporary seasonals. I caught up with Wayne in the wake of these firings on my way back up-valley from a President’s Day protest in Wenatchee, where we waved signs and shared stories in a crowd of hundreds of displeased locals. When I spoke with Wayne, he still carried a hopeful gleam in his eye. Despite fresh scars from a spinal implant surgery long overdue to repair an old logging injury and even fresher scars from his decimated friends and colleagues, he said he’d continue to fight this year and next, and even longer. As he sees it, if he doesn’t keep standing up for this land, no one else will.
After falling in love with the Leavenworth area, I became one in the starry-eyed squadron of workers who, like Wayne, would give anything to stand up for these spaces. Listening to Wayne speak of the long and varied list of resources needing repair led me to take a role alongside him in developed recreation (a term that describes frontcountry rangers in charge of toilets, ticketeting, treefelling, road clearing, etc.). The position had us doing everything from maintaining trailheads to falling hazard trees and caring for the district’s team of pack mules. I lived in my Subaru and pinched pennies to make ends meet. I worked that role for two seasons before giving in to the need for more stability, but my passion for these places and these people never left.
To me, there’s not a single government employee out there who does more for their dollar than the wilderness staff of the Forest Service. That math plays out in large part because of the unmatchable passion these individuals bring to their work serving and protecting the places dear to them. The reality of the work is unglamorous: long days hauling heavy saws through dusty, burned-out forests and longer weeks on wilderness patrol, when rangers brave storms to keep eyes on the high country. In exchange, pay is meager at best. My last year with the Forest Service, I earned barely over the state’s minimum wage. I held a Bachelor's degree in biology and performed technical, skilled work, from falling dangerous trees to riding pack mules through the backcountry. I couldn’t afford rent in my town and lived homeless in my car on the very same public land that I served full-time by day. My story is not uncommon. Many wilderness workers across the nation perform their work at great personal sacrifice solely so they can hold a role that feels like their highest purpose.
The changes from the Trump Administration are happening rapidly. There have been firings, rehirings, and more firings, and budget cuts are certainly in the works. As I write this, a court has ordered terminated Forest Service workers to return to their positions for 45 days. While the start of that 45 days has come and gone, most folks I’ve spoken with have yet to hear from admin. And most believe the future after the month-and-a-half window is bleak—the legal order reports that, during this period, the agency may seek to redefine their termination as a “reduction in force” instead of the performance-based firing justification initially used.
So, what does this all mean for now? The terminated workers in my community are starting to fall back on construction and other parts of the local tourism industry. They have no idea what’s next. We’re lucky here in many ways: at least some jobs are available. Indeed, at the moment, Xander is working with our little company of climbers-moonlighting-as carpenters, and we’re happy to have his energy and expertise. In many of these wilderness hubs, however, the local economies don’t have the space to absorb displaced workers, and the firings will force people to relocate. I spoke to one ranger (who, for the sake of their continued employment will remain nameless). They questioned whether they could stand the heartache of staying in a community and landscape they’d so lovingly served for so many years only to watch it fall into disrepair. The bottom line is that these folks don't have the time or resources to wait around and wonder. They’re being chased from their calling and chased out of their communities. This stab at the stability of these workers is a shot in the heart of the most efficient and efficacious protectors of wild spaces our country could hope for.
It’s time, now, to stand up as a recreating public and speak out for public lands and the public servants who have dedicated their lives to protecting them. Speak to your senators and let them know how much we value the service of these impassioned stewards. We can't afford to lose these workers now or in the future. When possible, vote for local recreation funds that fuel programs through grants and donate to those local causes. It’s time to act before these high and holy places fall into states beyond repair and more corridors to wild spaces are lost to the growing pressures of wildfires and extreme weather.
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