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Although he worked for the Forest Service for 13 years, Jeff DeBonis will not be remembered
for his career in harvesting national forests. He will be remembered for standing up to a
huge organization and violating it's unspoken rule: don't speak out against the Forest
Service's policies. But that's exactly what he did; in 1989, after attending a seminar in
Eugene, Oregon on ancient forests, DeBonis wrote a two-page memo and distributed it throughout
the Forest Service using their equivalent to email. In the memo, he assaulted the Forest Service's
position as "an advocate of the timber industry's agenda." He called for greater attention to
conservation and stewardship. The memo created a ruckus throughout the Forest Service and Timber
Industry, and although he was the first to speak his mind, he certainly wasn't alone. DeBonis was
contacted by hundreds of Forest Service employees who wanted to speak their minds but were afraid.
Due to his efforts, a group called the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental
Ethics emerged. DeBonis left the Forest Service in 1991 in order to concentrate on environmental
advocacy through nonprofit organizations. Since that time, he founded the Public Employees for
Environmental Ethics (PEER) which has organized hundreds of public employees as environmental
activists and sued and won many court decisions on behalf of those activists. DeBonis has received
many awards for his work in the environmental community.
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