Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

That grand strategy, previewed by Obama in his Saturday speech to West Point Army cadets, presents the world with a U.S. eager to uphold and sustain the rules of the international order, rejecting the Bush administration’s asserted right to take preventive military action against hostile foreign states. The U.S.’s leadership role within that global system, Obama contended, is to direct “the currents of cooperation… in the direction of liberty and justice,” for positive-sum international action on global concerns like economic security, climate change, nuclear disarmament, pandemic disease and weak or failing states. Those efforts and that approach will be the centerpiece of his forthcoming National Security Strategy, a defining document of U.S. grand strategy that the administration has labored for months to complete.

The National Security Strategy will be formally unveiled on Thursday. And Brennan won’t be the only senior official previewing it and amplifying its themes. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, just back from a wide-ranging trip to China, will present it to the Brookings Institution. Vice President Biden will do the same on Friday, to the graduating class of Navy midshipmen at Annapolis. Jim Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, has said that the “defining feature of our foreign policy” is that the U.S. is “willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” He’s finalizing the details of his own National Security Strategy-related speech.

Brennan tried this once before — at CSIS, in fact, last August. But back then, Brennan was more interested in articulating discontinuities with the Bush administration in how Obama handled terrorism, such as eschewing a war-centric construct for viewing the conflict and taking it away from Islam. One senior administration official, Dan Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, has urged an expansion of that critique, arguing last June that U.S. strategy needs to “shift away from a foreign and security policy that makes counterterrorism the prism through which everything is evaluated and decided.” The National Security Strategy is supposed to be that prism, but it remains to be seen how the administration’s counterterrorism efforts can be viewed through it.

Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University and a non-resident scholar at the Center for a New American Security, grapples with that reconciliation in a forthcoming paper for the influential think tank, and doesn’t come away with particularly easy answers. “The problem they face is they make a series of pragmatic decisions, each on its own terms, and you can see the logic behind any of them,” Lynch said. “But add it all up, and you see the implementation is clearly at odds with the philosophy.”

All of which are unilateral actions that have met with significant opposition overseas. None easily fit within the framework of “a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” A senior Republican congressional aide agreed that that framework was the “essence” of Obama’s foreign policy. “There are norms and there are laws and ways of doing things in the world that we in the U.S. have in large part put into place, and sustain,” summarized the aide, who declined to speak for attribution. “Those laws, norms and ideas are above every nation and every nation has a responsibility to uphold them. So we need to do better at meeting our responsibilities and so too, incidentally, does the Iranian government.”

Obama’s approach to Afghanistan might not be such an anomaly, even if the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize inherited the war he has escalated. That’s because even though Obama has nearly tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan, by July 2011 the so-called “extended surge” will begin to give way to more of a supporting role for U.S. forces. What’s more, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to Washington two weeks ago highlighted, Obama has recast relations with both Afghanistan and Pakistan in terms of long-term diplomatic, economic and security cooperation, beyond just counterterrorism. What’s more, not only is military action in Afghanistan a multinational affair operated by NATO and not the U.S. alone, it is specifically legally authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Lynch, a former Obama campaign adviser and a critic of the Afghanistan war, observed, “Afghanistan is a big hole in the strategy in all kinds of ways of ways that matter, but not in a conceptual way.”

Heather Hurlburt, an administration ally at the progressive National Security Network, said that the problem is indicative of an inherent tension between a rules-based international order and the prerogatives of a superpower. “What any administration says is the strategy and what the national-security apparatus does on a day-to-day basis are not necessarily the same thing, especially early on,” Hurlburt observed. The role of a National Security Strategy isn’t necessarily to eliminate those tensions, but rather to bring the military and the intelligence services into rough alignment with the broader vision. “It’s a very powerful signaling mechanism across the government and outside of it, to say ‘We’re serious about this rules-based multilateralism, this human rights stuff, this non-proliferation stuff, and you can’t outlast it.’”

But if the administration keeps granting itself exceptions to following the international order for the exigencies of terrorist emergencies, Lynch said, it will be left without the intellectual underpinnings — and, accordingly, the public support — for an appropriate response if a terrorist attack ultimately succeeds. “What i’m afraid of is that as soon as you get turbulence — like an actual terrorist attack — there’s going to be a big backlash and you can’t hold the overall structure in place,” Lynch said. “Right now, Obama’s got the rhetoric, but they’ve done precious little to institutionalize it and put on durable legal foundations.”

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The original petition was first drafted in 2006 and then analyzed in focus groups and meetings with stakeholders around the state for more than two years. Based on that input, a draft of how Colorado wants more than 4 million acres of largely roadless federal lands managed was released in August of last year.

Revisions since August include an “upper tier” of protection for more than 257,000 acres of particularly high-value public lands; a restriction of fuel-reduction projects around communities endangered by the mountain pine bark beetle epidemic to a half mile radius; a prohibition against road building for oil and gas leases; and a requirement that public land managers must consider impacts to native cutthroat trout when reviewing projects on more than 100,000 acres of roadless land.

“Gov. Bill Ritter made several key changes from the initial December 2006 petition and the August 2009 draft that make this proposal a good approach for our forests, and one that Environment Colorado supports,” Matt Garrington, program advocate with Environment Colorado, said in a release.

The Ritter administration opted to continue the petition process launched by Gov. Bill Owens when the Bush administration threw out the 2001 Clinton roadless rule and allowed states to draft their own rules. Idaho was the only other state that submitted a petition, and the “upper tier” concept was borrowed from that plan.

“This is simply a better rule for Colorado,” Ritter said in a release. “Our roadless areas will get stronger protections and we will get the targeted flexibility we need to address Colorado’s unique circumstances, such as the pine beetle epidemic, the ski industry and Western Slope coal mines.”

The Ritter administration also proceeded because of still-pending legal challenges to the original Clinton rule, which could leave Colorado with no protection at all. However, some scientists and conservationists still oppose the level of road-building exceptions that remain in the Colorado rule.

Jane Danowitz, director of the Pew Environment Group’s U.S. public lands program, cited scientific support for the Clinton rule and expressed disappointment in the Obama administration’s support of the Colorado rule, particularly because of road-building exceptions for expansion of coal mines along the North Fork of the Gunnison.

“Governor Ritter’s proposal would allow major new mining and drilling activity in Colorado’s backcountry, threatening water quality, fish and wildlife habitat and sustainable economic growth,” she said in a release. “We hope the administration will reconsider this direction.”

The Pew Environment Group favors an overarching Clinton-style national rule to patchwork state regulation.

Even Garrington admitted the Colorado plan is unclear on the issue of so-called “gap leases” for oil and gas drilling that were approved in the period after the Clinton rule was tossed out by the Bush administration.

“The Colorado roadless rule is silent on the issue of leases issued between 2001 and the adoption of this rule,” Garrington said. “While we believe these leases to be illegal, the ability for the Ritter administration to address the gap leases within the context of a state petition is unclear.”

Environment Colorado wants Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to protect the roadless areas in those “gap leases” from road building activity.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is the process of injecting water and sand, treated with undisclosed chemicals, into natural gas wells under extremely higher pressure. Used in an estimated 90 percent of the wells in Colorado, fracking breaks open tight underground geological formations and frees up more gas.

Critics of the process say it can lead to contamination of groundwater supplies despite extensive drilling safeguards meant to prevent such problems. DeGette’s bill would remove a 2005 exemption for process under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which was granted during the Bush administration and dubbed by the left the “Haliburton Loophole” after the drilling services company that perfected widely used fracking techniques.

In Colorado, governments and state agencies are split on the need for federal legislation, and industry representatives maintain the process is totally safe, easily handled by state regulators and that any evidence of drinking water contamination – including incidents in which streams have actually become flammable – is purely anecdotal.

The EPA reviewed various studies on fracking in 2004, a process discredited in some circles, and concluded it did not present a major public health threat, but recent EPA tests in neighboring Wyoming and other areas have led to increased concern, especially as the process became more and more popular in recent years.

“We commend EPA for investigating this controversial gas drilling technique,” Earthjustice legislative associate Jessica Ennis said in a release. “From Wyoming to Pennsylvania, people are worried about what this untested process is doing to their drinking water.”

The Colorado Oil and Gas Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Here’s DeGette’s statement:

“I applaud EPA’s decision to undertake a comprehensive study of the potential environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. Such an effort has never truly been done. In 2004, EPA conducted a review of the issue that stopped short of the full scientific assessment and independent analysis that is required.

“This study may be a challenge, given that companies are not currently required to disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids. But it will be a significant step in ensuring that our nation’s drinking water supply is protected. I look forward to working with EPA to provide the resources it needs to conduct a full evaluation of this important issue.”

Arguing against the Clinton rules is the state of Wyoming and several logging and mining industry representatives. They are defending a case they won in 2008 against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where Judge Clarence Brimmer of the U.S. District Court for Wyoming enjoined the Clinton rules.

“The court showed pretty strong skepticism for Wyoming’s claims, and every member of the court seemed to appreciate that there were significant differences between wilderness area management and management under the roadless rule,” Earthjustice attorney Jim Angell said.

“That undercuts Wyoming’s claim that this was a de facto wilderness designation, and the NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] claims didn’t seem to capture the court’s attention either.”

The NEPA process provides for project-by-project public input during a federal review of logging, mining and other industrial uses on public lands. Wyoming officials claim that process is adequate to protect roadless areas from undue industrialization.

Soon after the Clinton rule went into effect in 2001, the Bush administration set it aside and later allowed for a state-by-state petition process, which only Idaho and Colorado engaged in.

Conservationists claim the Colorado rule, which is still being revised by Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration, allows far too many exceptions for logging, coal mining and ski-area expansion. They want the Obama administration to institute a comprehensive national rule like the Clinton rule that would override the pending Colorado rule.

Colorado officials want more say in how deeply into the national forest roads can be built for fuel-mitigation projects around mountain communities. The Colorado rule would allow such activity up to 1.5 miles into the forest to clear defensible space to fight wildfires in the wake of the ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic.

“One of the judges had questions about the ability to which the Forest Service could fight beetle infestation under the rule, but there is an exception for that [already in the Clinton rule],” Angell said.

“Even to the extent that [the judges] have misgivings about the substance of the [Clinton] rule, it also seemed like they were appreciating that those are really largely the policy prerogatives of the administration and that that’s what we have elections for, and it’s not up to judge’s to throw out rules with which they might disagree.”

Earthjustice is representing the Wyoming Outdoor Council, The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Pacific Rivers Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife.

The judges took all of Wednesday’s testimony under advisement and will issue a final decision sometime in the coming months. Earthjustice has promised to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if Brimmer’s decision is not overturned by the appeals court.

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According to the Associated Press, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union placed ads in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the Pueblo Chieftain, the Alamosa Valley Courier, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle and the Casper Star-Tribune over the weekend.

Salazar earlier this month announced a second round of much smaller research leases being offered on public lands in the Green River Formation of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, also calling for greater accountability on progress in extracting oil trapped in shale formations and an investigation of BLM rule making under the Bush administration.

Industry officials were quick to condemn the Obama administration policies on oil shale at the time, and National Oil Shale Association Executive Director Glenn Vawter told the AP over the weekend that “semi-commercial projects” are needed to fully explore all the questions still surrounding the unproven oil-shale production technology.

The agriculture industry and conservationists point out there simply is not enough water in the arid West to support full-scale, commercial oil shale production in the region.

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Salazar, who outright pulled eight of the leases near critical national parks like Arches and Canyonlands and deferred 52 others for more study, said they were sold at the direction of Bush administration officials trying to push them through on their way out the White House doors.

According to the Salt Lake City Deseret News, the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States (IPAMS) Thursday issued a report accusing Salazar of ignoring Bureau of Land Management planners and scientists who found the parcels suitable for drilling.

“It’s a sad day when politics trumps the expertise of professional land managers and the hard work of citizens to develop economic and resource-development plans that the community has embraced,” said IPAMS spokeswoman Kathleen Sgamma. “If you’re not listening to your land managers and the public, who are you listening to?”

However, officials in the National Park Service also objected to the BLM’s handling of the lease sale.

IPAM’s Sgamma earlier this summer weighed in on Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette’s controversial FRAC Act, which aims to remove a Safe Drinking Water Act exemption for the drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing granted during the Bush years in 2005.

“[Fracking’s] got an exemplary safety record and it’s vital to ensuring an American energy source. Keep in mind that it has been regulated by the states for the last 60 years,” Sgamma told the Colorado Independent in June, adding fracking uses 99.5 percent water and sand, with the remaining percentage comprised of chemicals such as food additives, food-worthy thickeners, chlorine, bacteriasides and emulsions to thicken the mixture.

That state oversight isn’t good enough for Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, according to the Pike County Courier. Sestak signed on a co-sponsor of DeGette’s bill, citing state Department of Environmental Protection findings that drinking water has been contaminated by gas drilling in at least seven counties.

“If Pennsylvanians can’t trust their own drinking water, then they should at least be able to trust their representatives in Congress to hold these companies accountable to fix the problem,” said Sestak, who is vying for Arlen Specter’s seat in the Senate.

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Poudre Canyon (Jim Frazier, cc Flickr)

Ken Neubecker, president of the state counsel of Colorado Trout Unlimited and a member of the Colorado River Basin Roundtable, points out that already 64 percent of the upper Colorado River above Hot Sulfur Springs in Grand County is diverted across the Continental Divide to the Front Range population centers of the state.

With the State Demography Office forecasting Colorado’s population to jump 50 percent over the next 25 years from current levels of around 5 million to more than 7.6 million, Neubecker and others say there needs to be a major shift in land-use planning, water conservation efforts and energy policies to head off looming disaster for the Colorado and other state rivers.

Drought by a thousand cuts

“In the long run, especially if you’re going to take the climate change thing seriously, the fossil fuels have got to just come to an end,” Neubecker said of commercial oil shale production and its potential impacts on the Colorado River basin. “[Former Vice President] Dick Cheney made the comment that the American way of life is not negotiable. Well, in a hundred years it’ll be drastically negotiated if we don’t do something now.”

Residential development alone has dramatically impacted the upper Colorado, Neubecker said, referring to a plan by the Denver Water Board to divert even more of the Fraser River in Grand County through the Moffat Tunnel to the Front Range. A key tributary of the Colorado, the Fraser already sees about 60 percent of its flow diverted east of the Continental Divide.

“They’re sort of making light of the true nature of the cumulative impacts on the whole Colorado basin,” Neubecker said. “Essentially, the whole upper Colorado, from Dotsero up, is suffering a death from a thousand cuts, and everybody who makes a cut says, ‘Oh, mine won’t hurt; mine’s too small to be significant.’”

But all the cuts are condemning the river to a permanent drought-year status that adversely impacts riparian areas, degrades aquatic habitat and results in too much sediment building up in the river’s channel, Neubecker said. Couple those impacts with contamination from natural gas drilling and other industrial and agricultural uses, and the Colorado and other Western Slope rivers are in big trouble, others say.

People get to drink that stuff

“That’s one thing in this whole oil and gas industry that kind of gets short shrift is these drinkable or potable aquifers,” said Bob Elderkin, a biologist and retired oil and gas specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who now lives near Silt.

“When something happens and you have [a chemical spill] — and you’re going to have it because we’ve got people involved with [drilling] and people are fallible — that aquifer is polluted with a bunch of stuff, and unless they’re required to go in and pump that out and mitigate the problem, that stuff stays in that aquifer until it eventually surfaces wherever it’s going to surface.

“Most of that stuff either ends up in the White River or the Colorado River, and either way a lot of people are going to get to drink it.”

Routt County Commissioner Doug Monger, whose northwestern Colorado county sits at the epicenter of any future oil shale boom, applauds Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for recently tightening Bush administration research and development leases and requiring more accountability.

Oil shale and nuclear industry water gulpers

He said residents of impacted communities and Americans in general need to know if oil shale is economically and environmentally realistic. The former president of Colorado Counties Inc. has his doubts.

“I hope America can’t come here and trash out my country here to support the current industry,” Monger said of existing oil shale technology, which requires between three and five barrels of water per barrel of oil. “They talk about 500-megawatt power plants to commercially extract this oil shale with Shell’s technology, and all of the rest of the water out of Yampa and White river systems, as well as some further water out of the Colorado River system, which basically obligates all of the rest of the water in the Colorado Compact that we have.”

The 1920s Compact that Arizona Sen. John McCain last year so famously — and disastrously — suggested should be renegotiated, dictates Colorado must send 3.88 million acre feet downstream a year no matter how the state divvies it up for local use. Oil and gas companies have been snapping up water rights in the Colorado basin since the 1940s, but the big knock on oil shale has been how much power it takes to extract petroleum from shale rock and sand.

Some have suggested nuclear reactors could solve the energy demands of full-scale commercial oil shale production, but Neubecker scoffs at that notion.

“[Nuclear] uses twice the water [of fossil-fueled-based power plants], and I don’t think Sen. [Mark] Udall gets it, because he’s a big proponent for nuclear power,” Neubecker said. “I’m all for nuclear power east of the Mississippi because they have the water, just so long as they have to store the waste in their own backyard, not ship it out here for storage. We’re not the country’s trashcan.”

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Experts estimate up to one trillion barrels of oil could be squeezed from the shale rock and sands, but the process consumes huge amounts of water and carries with it potentially devastating environmental impacts.

On its way out the door last fall, the Bush Interior Department tried to lock in rules that would require oil shale royalty rates for production on public lands starting at about 5 percent – far below traditional oil and gas royalty rates because of the speculative nature of the resource.

In its ongoing investigation of former Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who later signed on as an attorney with Dutch Royal Shell – one of the leading researchers of oil shale production in Colorado – the Times turned up e-mails where Norton tips her hand on the strategy she suggested for locking in royalty rates despite changing administrations.

Norton, who’s being probed by the Obama Justice Department for allegedly using her Interior post to secure a job at Shell, said she thought Obama Interior Secretary Ken Salazar might be more inclined to defend the Bush rates because of legal challenges from environmental groups.

But a Shell official questioned that approach because it could seem as if they were admitting the 11th-hour process was flawed and because the rates were too low.

Oil shale production involves either mining shale and super-heating it to force out the kerogen, or organic matter, in order to refine it into petroleum; or heating the shale underground in what’s known as in-situ production. Both methods require huge amounts of water and electricity, and environmentalists argue research and development funds would be better spent on renewables.

Another speculative source of future energy – shale gas – was debunked by an expert this week at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas conference in Denver. Arthur Berman, a geological consultant from Texas, said shale gas plays may not be nearly as promising as some proponents claim, and that speculation on the resource may be the next energy bubble to burst.

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A favorite desert recreation haven for Coloradans and tourists from around the world, the Moab area immortalized by Edward Abbey in “Desert Solitaire” was in the crosshairs of energy development following a December auction in Salt Lake City marked by protests from conservationists such as movie producer and actor Robert Redford and infiltration by a bogus bidder.

On Thursday, Salazar, a former Colorado senator who previously suspended drilling on the 77 leases on more than 100,000 acres sold in that auction, took the advice of an 11-member team comprised of officials from the National Park Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service.

The team reportedly looked at all the leases and recommended making eight near Canyonlands and Arches off limits due to concerns about sage grouse habitat, 17 available for drilling at future auctions and the other 52 the subject of further study. Oil and gas backers, predictably, were dismayed by what the deemed an ongoing Obama administration assault on domestic energy production.

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The 2002 Hayman fire. (Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service)

Speaking at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science during the announcement of a public-private partnership to restore public lands scorched in the 2002 Hayman fire, Vilsack told The Colorado Independent in an interview that the Centennial State’s efforts to lift federal restrictions on building forest roads in order to better contain fires make sense.

“Our first priority is to protect the roadless areas,” Vilsack said of the ongoing odyssey to maintain the roadless integrity of more than 58 million acres of national forest land nationwide. “But I appreciate that Gov. [Bill] Ritter has started a process to build consensus around the issue.”

In 2001, the Clinton administration pushed through a roadless rule that was quickly set aside by the Bush administration, which later allowed states to petition for individual roadless rules based on state agendas. Only Idaho and Colorado went down that route, with Idaho successfully passing its own roadless rule last year.

“As you probably know, the Idaho process developed consensus and has been successful,” Vilsack said. “It’s important to recognize the uniqueness of each situation, that each state is unique and to go forward from that stand point.”

That is more of a nod to the Colorado rule than Vilsack has previously given, and to some degree validates the ongoing efforts of the Ritter administration to protect approximately 4.2 million acres of roadless national forest in the state. Environmentalists have charged that the Colorado rule contains far too many exceptions for logging, water and energy infrastructure, ski resort expansion and energy development.

Colorado Department of Natural Resources officials argue that the 2001 Clinton roadless rule, which is reportedly closer in its protective scope to what the Obama administration prefers, was put in place before the ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic, which has killed nearly 2 million acres of lodgepole pines statewide. They say there needs to be much more road-building leeway in order to thin national forests around ski resorts and other mountain communities.

The Obama administration has indicated a preference for the more restrictive Clinton rule by challenging two previous 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rulings against the Clinton rule.

Vilsack made his comments to The Colorado Independent while standing amid posters of blown-up photos of the Hayman fire and its devastation.

The largest blaze in recorded Colorado history at nearly 138,000 acres, Hayman wasset by federal forestry officer Terry Barton, who was convicted and spent six years in prison. The fire denuded the land, sterilized the soil and filled streams with ash and sediment.

Monday night, some of the state’s top political leaders, together with representatives from Vail Resorts, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy, announced the launch of a three-year, $4 million project to restore the South Platte River corridor scorched by the 2002 fire.

Besides Vilsack, other speakers included U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, Ritter and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, all of whom praised the restoration project as an innovative private-public partnership that, in endlessly budget-strapped Colorado and across the recession-wracked country, may signal the future of national forest stewardship.

The event was hosted by Vail Resorts, which committed $750,000 to the project over the next three years. CEO Rob Katz told The Colorado Independent that the company was in the business of bringing people to enjoy the beautiful Colorado landscape and so has “a real stake in the environment.”

“We thought, ‘What is the signature program that we can take up and make a difference?’” Katz said. “The Hayman project is just total habitat. This is about forest health and water quality and it serves the broader Colorado community. We could not find a more impactful project to be a part of anywhere in the state.”

The launch of the Hayman restoration project comes on the heels of news that Vail Resorts is pulling out of its wind credits offset program. The company has been a leader in buying wind-credits for the last three years.

“We’re proud of our commitment to the wind-credits program, but when we took that up it was 2006 and climate change was not on the agenda in the same way it is now,” Katz said. “We’re proud of our leadership on the issue. We were number two in the nation in buying wind credits. I think we’re No. 27 now. Vail Resorts doesn’t like to ever fall in rankings, but in this case we think it’s a good thing.”

Vail ski area recently fell to number three in the annual resort rankings issue of Ski Magazine, behind Deer Valley in Utah, and Whistler in British Columbia. Vail typically occupies the top spot in the annual reader survey.

Katz also said that Vail Resorts draws most of its visitors from the greater Denver area and the Hayman restoration project serves that community in a very immediate way because it will restore the watershed in a drainage that supplies water to much of the Denver metro area.

“The [Hayman restoration] protects the climate but it’s also a local project,” Katz said. He acknowledged the PR benefits among green watchers, but added that the environmentalist community would continue to “hold our feet to the fire. And that’s what they should do. We expect that.”

Environmentalists have also been critical of the state’s efforts to build more roads for fire mitigation despite the very real threat of another Hayman fire. Critics say trees should only be thinned near communities and not any deeper into the national forest.

But Vilsack on Monday was commended for taking an “all lands” approach to his job.

“The Forest Service is usually a step child” when compared to farmland in the eyes of the Department of Agriculture, said Bill Possiel, president of the National Forest Foundation. “Tom Vilsack is different.”

“Usually these private-public partnerships are about bringing recreation to Americans,” Possiel added. “This time it’s about restoration, and that’s just awesome.”

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