The first weeks on the job have been felt overwhelming and disorienting at times. The Bureau of Land Management Anchorage Field Office (BLM – AFO) is a huge maze of offices complete with emergency response supplies, a helipad, and a warehouse full of a seemingly endless variety of tools, gear, and other odds and ends. I have been splitting time between the Field Office and a small University of Alaska office called the Alaska Natural Heritage Program (AKNHP).
The two locations couldn’t be more different! It seems like an exaggeration, but the field office has over two-hundred employees and is located in the middle of the seven-hundred acre Campbell Tract (CT). The CT is an urban forest managed by the BLM, that is used mainly for recreation and environmental education. Based on the location, employees at the AFO like to jog and mountain bike on CT trails during their lunch break. On the other hand the AKNHP office calls a small office building in downtown Anchorage home. There are about ten employees, and instead of a huge warehouse there is a small room used for gear storage and to house the growing herbarium collection.
You may have noticed that I’ve thrown quite a few acronyms into this blog entry. I’m taking the opportunity to practice because working in a government office seems to require fluency in acronyms. Here is a list of some of the ones I’ve heard so far: AFO, AKNHP, BLM, CT, CWMA, CNIPM, MOA, DOI and DOT.
Fortunately, I haven’t spent all of my time trying to decipher strange combinations of capitalized letters. During my second week I was able to get out with the first weed pull of the summer with a group from the Forest Service (USFS). We met at Cuddy Park near the Anchorage public library and pulled Canada Thistle, an unpleasant prickly plant that members of the Anchorage CWMA (Cooperative Weed Management Area) want to eradicate.
Getting the chance to pull weeds with some really die-hard invasive plant haters has gotten me excited about the work I am doing to help put together an weed management plan for the CT. Residents of Alaska are proud of the natural resources their state has to offer and they are genuinely worried about the effects invasive plants could have on these resources.
Now that some of the acronyms are starting to come naturally I know that I’m settling into my new role here in what some residents call “the city closest to Alaska” or “a suburb of Seattle”. The long summer days are beautiful, especially when a nasty weed infestation has just been assaulted!
Carl Norlen
Anchorage, Alaska
Bureau of Land Management
Weed pullers diligently controling a Canada Thistle infestation
The hated adversary!