It’s a pleasure to be here today. I appreciate the opportunity to say a few words.

Our job at the Forest Service is to sustain healthy, diverse, and productive forests and grasslands for the benefit of present and future generations. People might think we do that for timber and livestock, but there’s much more to it than that.

Americans get a whole range of goods and services from their forests and grasslands, including clean air and water, carbon sequestration, habitat for wildlife, and opportunities for people to get out and enjoy the Great Outdoors. None of this would be possible without the very basics that people get from forests and grasslands—basics like the conversion of solar energy into life-giving plants—basics like the formation of the very soils that these plants need to grow.

Forests and grasslands provide the most fundamental of ecosystem services, like forming soils … like controlling soil erosion … like storing, filtering, and purifying the water we all need to live. That’s why part of our mission has always been restoring degraded lands to healthy, resilient forests and grasslands. Think of the Dust Bowl lands on the Great Plains, lands that today are flourishing national grasslands from Texas to North Dakota … think of the cutover, burned over lands in the Appalachians, lands that today are flourishing national forests.

That’s also why we launched programs specifically designed to protect forest soils, like the Long-Term Soil Productivity program. Under this program, our managers and our researchers work hand-in-hand to mitigate any impacts on forest soils from our management activities.

In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Aldo Leopold pointed out the connection between wolves, deer, forests, rivers, soils, and the future of us all. He wrote, and I quote, “just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. … Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”

It is up to all of us, working together, to “think like a mountain”—to sustain the healthy forests and grasslands we need to preserve and protect the soils and waters that sustain us all.