Interview: James P. 'Jim' Perry by Melissa Barnett

Cradle Forest Service Retiree Reunion
Jim Perry talks about his long career with the Office of General Counsel, working closely with the Forest Service. He especially focuses on the transition over decades from the Forest Service being able to operate with broad discretion to being, as he sees it, constrained by a plethora of environmental laws.
MB: Alright. My name is Melissa Barnett, and I’m sitting here with Jim Perry, and it is September 27th, and we’re in Asheville, North Carolina for the Forest Service 2018 retiree reunion. So we’re just going to talk today a little bit with Jim just about his career, and so, you can start wherever you want to. We have been starting just asking how people came to came to the Forest Service, but if you’d like to start somewhere else, we can start wherever you want to. JP: Well we’ll start when I came to the Forest Service. MB: Okay that sounds great. JP: Well, I, first of all, I have to say that I’m not a member of the Forest Service. MB: Okay! JP: In fact, I’m a member of the Office of General Counsel for the Department of Agriculture. And, as it turned out, my career involved advising the Forest Service on legal matters almost exclusively I also had as a client the Soil Conservation Service later in our [unclear]. But, as I was saying, most of my time was spent with the Forest Service, and I might say happily so. And I joined OGC in 1967, and with a two-year interruption with the military very early after that, I spent the next thirty-one years advising the Forest Service progressing from being a Staff Attorney to being a Deputy Assistant General Counsel, Assistant General Counsel, finally Associate General Counsel for Natural Resources, which was as far as you could go in OGC without being a political appointee. And I guess my time there spanned the period, the transition from when the Forest Service was able to conduct business within its legal discretion, to the current time, or at least current in 1998, where it was subjected to great many environmental laws which impeded the ability of the agency to function. When I joined the agency in 1967, and I mean OGC, the Forest Service had a tiny booklet of principal laws, and it was about a quarter-inch thick. A little green book. And my boss, Bill Brazee [sp?] had over the years been able to memorize many of the key st