Tales from Berger - Part I

I've been receiving gentle hints that I haven't been blogging. I've been ridiculously busy at work, but its nice to know I've got at least a handful of readers!

As part of my job, I have to read and respond to public comments on our projects. It tries my patience. It definitely is an eye-opening experience and proves the saying "think about how dumb the average American is, then remember half the population is dumber." Even when it requires more effort for me, I really respect when a person submits a thoughtful, well-written, grammatically and factually correct comment.

Quite often, no matter what the project, the NPS is referred to as the Gestapo. The NPS is almost always put between a rock and a hard place. When the agency was created, it was given a dual mission: preservation and recreation. Out of all of the public land agencies, NPS is the only agency that has a preservation aspect, and that word alone has basically wrecked havoc on every action the NPS has tried to implement.

Allow more recreation? The environmentalists sue. Ban off-road vehicles? Communities eviscerate the agency as "land stealers". I don't envy the NPS.

But more importantly, reading these public comments has taught me to never accept anyone else's word at face value; they have an agenda. Reading these comments, it is so easy to tell who is ill informed, who is going off of information from an outside source. Environmental agencies (I'm looking at you, Defenders of Wildlife and Audubon Society) present the situation unfairly and make it seem as though off-road vehicles are a kin to ATVs and that the vehicles are used for recreation within the park, tearing up dunes and eroding the shoreline. Locals surrounding the park present the NPS as heartless goons, trying to privatize the beaches and remove the communities contained within the park. Neither is true. But when people hear this information, they take it as fact and go on ranting and raving in barely coherent public comments. It just makes me take pause whenever I am about to repeat anything I've been told secondhand.

Overall, one quote pops into my head whenever I'm reading public comments. It makes me giggle and makes reading them slightly less painful:

"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"

So that is what has consumed the last two weeks of my life.

In more exciting news: Weekend trip to Denver is coming up in under a week and a half!