A Walk In The Woods Analysis

Zachary WilhoitDr. Anna TeekellEnglish 11011 September 2014No one likes the U.S. Forest ServiceBill Bryson’s A Walk In the Woods is a book about Bryson and his partner Katz hiking the Appalachian Trail. In the book, Bryson talks about many controversial issues pertaining to the Appalachian Trail and states his opinion one them. The one that really aggravates him are the jobs that the National Forest Service does, or from Bryson’s point of view don’t do.
Bryson’s view on this is that you would think something with the word “forest” in it would be an organization created to preserve the forest and keep it full of lush green trees, but he states that is not the case (Bryson 46). The government owns almost 240 million acre’s of the forests in the United States (Bryson 46). A big chunk of
Bryson tells us that this “land is designated for multiple use, which is generously interpreted to allow any number of boisterous activities – mining, oil, and gas extraction” (Bryson 46). They would also harvest wood and extract minerals but had to do so in an environmentally friendly way (Bryson 47). Building roads is mostly what the National Forest Service does, and in the national forests of America there are 378,000 miles of roads (Bryson 47). According to Bryson “It is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system” (Bryson 47). Bryson believes by the middle of the next century 580,000 miles of more forest road is to be constructed by the U.S. Forest Service (Bryson 47). The U.S Forest Service constructs so many roads so that private timber companies can get to stands of trees that were previously unreachable (Bryson 47). 49 Million of the Forest Services 150 million acre’s of loggable land is to be clear cut, Bryson adds to this by saying “including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acre’s of thousand-year-old red-woods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest”(Bryson 47). The National Forest Service announced in 1987 that private