If there has been a change in Sweden, and there has been a parallel change here in the US, too (though, admittedly to a lesser extent), that change has come more from the effective destruction of affordably-extractable forest stands - combined with the Parliamentary success (however moderate) of the Green Party. On top of all this, I think its real important to see the very different roles the Forest Service playes in New Hampshire, Vermont and the Adirondacks than it does in Maine, Idaho, Utah and Colorado. In the former, smaller, tourist states, the Forest Service has long been about preservationism, limiting clear cuts to largely invisible, small tracts. In the west, by contrast, a more multiple-use conservationism (talk about an oxymoron) has operated. The former is indirectly captured by tourist and outdoors industries, the latter by resource extraction industies but, for both - and the green-y or small-holder publics in each region - the bureaucracy works the same.
If I were to try to make what I think Wojtek's argument for him on this front, I would argue that Northern and Western European countries - who, in the main, have rather deep cultural commitments to maintaining a certain kind of national identity rooted in various kinds rurality - have managed their forests, rural development and agriculture differently than in the US and that this is reflected in a different bureaucratic culture than that found in the US. To this, returning to my argument, I'd respond that I was never (and he had never before) been talking about national cultures, here in the form of timber policy: we'd been talking about bureaucratic managerial culture, in this instance scientific management by professionally trained, salaried employees who invariably approach the world as if they know better than the hoi polloi what needs to be done and what needs to be done is to follow the rules, regulations and policies of the bureaucracy.
And, hell, you want to see resistance to a classical faceless bureaucracy, look across Europe for resistance to EU policy and management... its not just nationalism and xenophobia, a lot of it is that the EU is just ANOTHER layer of bureaucracy on top of already labyrinthan social democratic ones.
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 9:42 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 3, 2010, at 9:22 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>>
>> What I've noticed is that you've yet to claim that the Forest Service in
>> the
>> US is qualitatively different - with the emphasis on qualitative - from
>> its
>> parallel institution in Sweden...
>>
>
> But isn't the US Forest Service quite explicitly at the service (witness
> more than a century of bitter conflict with the National Parks Service) of
> the Timber Companies with no concern whatever for the environment or even
> long-term productivity? Do you claim that such has always been the case in
> Sweden?
>
>
>
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319