02-04-2012 - ATLANTA — In an age of creative marketing and rapid-fire social media, some government agencies are struggling to promote themselves. Take the United States Forest Service, the bigger but less well-known cousin of the National Park Service.
A couple of years ago, it tried to make Smokey Bear, 68, a hipster with a new tagline: Get your Smokey on. They even gave him a Twitter account.
And now the agency has made a Rolling Stones piano man an honorary forest ranger.
At a ceremony here on Monday, Chuck Leavell, a keyboardist for the Rolling Stones and the Allman Brothers Band and also a Georgia tree farmer, accepted the ranger hat. “This means every bit as much to me as that Grammy did a couple of weeks ago,” he said in an interview before taking the stage with Smokey and Tom Tidwell, chief of the Forest Service.
He is not the first honorary ranger. The idea bubbled up a couple of years ago, when Betty White was asked in an interview what she would have done had she not decided to act. Her answer? Forest ranger. But, she noted, that was not an option for women in her day back then.
Someone in the Forest Service communications office recognized a promotional opportunity. Making Ms. White a ranger, they figured, would be a perfect way to promote Forest Service efforts to diversify its work force.
(For those keeping count, the staff is almost 40 percent female and 82 percent white. About 7.6 percent of rangers are Latino, 4 percent are black, 3.5 percent American Indian and fewer than 2 percent Asian.)
Selecting Mr. Leavell, who was born in an Alabama and co-owns a 2,500-acre pine tree plantation in central Georgia, is not necessarily helping change the demographics. But he does help the service promote people who responsibly manage private timberland, which makes up more than half of the forests in the country.
The Forest Service, which has a $5.85 billion budget, oversees about 9 percent of the land in the United States.
In addition to his work as one of the premier rock pianists in the nation, Mr. Leavell is a dedicated conservationist.
He was a co-founder of the Mother Nature Network, a Web site that gets more traffic than the one maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. When he was on tour with the Stones, his hotel pseudonym was C. Forester. Even his business cards are made from thin sheets of Southern yellow pine.
Mr. Leavell played “Georgia on My Mind” on Monday for the assemblage of forest rangers, who then snacked on chicken satay and lemonade.
In a speech, Mr. Leavell was effusive in his praise of their work, which has become increasingly challenging in the face of record insect infestations, drought, wildfires and the challenges posed by development.
Having a Rolling Stone sideman on your side, Mr. Tidwell said, offers a much-needed infusion of star power.
“It’s kind of hard,” he said, “to make forestry a sexy issue.”