Leadership Quote by Cathy McMorris

“Maintaining healthy forests” is the kind of phrase that sounds like a neutral public good while doing very specific political work. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (a Republican lawmaker from heavily forested eastern Washington) is speaking in a register familiar to Western land politics: consensus language that can hold multiple, often conflicting, constituencies in the same sentence. “Those who make a living from the land” nods to loggers, mill towns, ranchers, and contractors; “those of us who use them for recreational purposes” reassures hikers, hunters, anglers, and the tourism economy. The move is a coalition-building trick: frame forests as shared infrastructure, not contested habitat.

The subtext is where the stakes live. “Healthy forests” often functions as a proxy for an active-management agenda: thinning, salvage logging, road access, and faster permits, typically sold as wildfire prevention. It’s also a way to sidestep the messier language of regulation and limits. Notice what’s absent: Indigenous stewardship, biodiversity, endangered species protections, and climate change. The quote presents forest policy as an issue of stewardship and use, not power and extraction.

Contextually, this is the vernacular of the post-fire West, where catastrophic wildfire has become a political accelerant. By emphasizing both work and play, Rodgers positions forest management as kitchen-table economics plus quality-of-life, a framing designed to make federal land agencies look like service providers failing local customers. It’s not radical rhetoric; it’s rhetorical insulation, crafted to make a contested policy direction feel like common sense.