They Took All the Trees, Put 'Em In a Tree Museum
and then closed the tree museum
Late last month, as wildfires consumed significant firefighting resources in California, the regional office of the U.S. Forest Service in California ordered the full closure of every national forest in the state1. The order was stark; it meant no hiking, fishing, camping, or sightseeing in tens of thousands of square miles of public lands, a whole state’s worth of shuttered nature. The forest service closed the forest.
They weren’t kidding: In the Angeles National Forest, near my own elegant suburban estate, the highway into the forest was barricaded and taped off and marked with warning signs, like somebody really wanted to make sure you couldn’t fail to notice. The California regional office wasn’t exactly blazing trail, though, since we’d seen the same thing on a family trip to northern New Mexico and southern Colorado in the summer of 2018. On a camping trip, we’d ended up camping in a Best Western – because there were no trees the government would let us sleep under, lest they burst into flame.
In both cases, they were wrong without being wrong. The recent order in California was based on a series of claims that were entirely true, and a set of assumptions that were perfectly reasonable: big fires plus hot and dry weather plus firefighters already fighting the big fires we already had equaled a condition in which more wildfires could be really bad news.
But being right about the conditions doesn’t invariably mean being right about the response. In Massachusetts in 2013, Deval Patrick was right: there were bombers on the loose. In Los Angeles in 2020, local government officials who closed playgrounds, beaches, and hiking trails were right: people were getting sick. But the choice that resulted, the decision to fully eradicate the population as an assembled public, remains a product of the moment, and a very telling choice.
Alongside the national forest closures, the national parks in the same regions stayed open. In 2018, when we couldn’t find national forest land to camp on because of the extreme fire danger, we visited national parks and national monuments without impediment – and camped in Mesa Verde National Park, where the rangers kept telling us that holy shit is the forest dry, be really careful out there. This summer, when national forests were fully closed in California, the campgrounds at Yosemite National Park weren’t just open – they were full, and I wandered around in Lower Pines while families gathered by their campfires. Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks were safe to visit, while the strip of national forest in between the two national parks was dangerous to visit.
The National Park Service warned people to be careful about their campfires (and, in some areas, allowed camping but forbade campfires entirely); the National Forest Service banned people.
Most remarkably, the recent closure of all the national forest land in California produced no apparent debate; new stories were brief and matter-of-fact, like they were covering the annual maintenance-day closure of the municipal swimming pool. No critics were quoted, should such a creature have existed.
But the loss was real, the choice was debatable, and the question should have been discussed. The eradication of the public place in nature costs something; the families that would have gone camping, the children who would have been outdoors but instead sat at home, had something taken from them. What are public lands without the public?
This is where we are: Increasingly, government is inclined to respond to risk by entirely forbidding a public presence. It’s the emerging Australian Doctrine in practice all over the planet, the belief that the correct response to potential future problems is to lock everybody in their house until nothing can go wrong anymore. We have an enduring societal shelter-in-place order, and it’s as unhealthy as any policy choice we’ve ever made.
Except a tiny piece of the Nevada-centered Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest that juts into the eastern Sierras.