Montana Wilderness News: Editorials

Montana has waited for nearly 30 years for new wilderness with nothing yet to show for it. When the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act passed in March, not a single acre of the 2 million acres newly designated as wilderness was located in Montana.

Meanwhile, Montanans have watched as our timber industry has dwindled to a bare skeleton of what it used to be, and in recent years, the nationwide decline in housing construction that hastened the shuttering of several western Montana mills.

The other day, as I watched the leaves whip through the forest near my home, I thought of an old friend. He and I used to visit the Bob Marshall Wilderness every hunting season. We would leave camp in the morning before first light. Once we got him close to an elk he would place it squarely in the rifle sights four or five times. Then he would lower the gun, clap his hands, and head back to camp happy as could be.

In reference to their guest opinion printed on the editorial page of the Thursday, Oct. 15, Montana Standard, I believe Beaverhead County commissioners Mike McGinley, Tom Rice, and Garth Haugland were right to be concerned how the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act might affect their constituents. The Butte-Silver Bow Council of Commissioners is also mindful of our
constituents and their concerns. While those concerns are not the same, they are similar.

When letters and phone calls started trickling in about Sen. Jon Tester's Saturday forest bill meeting in Dillon, we decided to investigate.

Tester behaved badly, according to his critics. He stayed only long enough to sing the praises of his Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, refused to take comments from the crowd and then hightailed it to Helena for seemingly more important pursuits — the coin toss at the Carroll-Western football game.

President Theodore Roosevelt, perhaps the most influential conservationist in American history, argued equally that "attention must be directed to the preservation of the forests" and that our forests should be "the means of preserving and increasing the prosperity of the nation."

I was blessed to be born in northwestern Montana and to grow up in the middle of the majestic and towering forests surrounding Libby. I loved those trees then and, like so many Americans, I love them even more now. My ancestors were involved with logging for a very long time, starting with my grandfather, a logging camp cook who came to Montana with a timber company from Minnesota early on in the last century before the advent of logging trucks.

The Montana map on Jon Tester's forestry bill Web page ends just east of Bozeman and Great Falls. It shows that this isn't a bill to end all wilderness bills. It wouldn't decide forever the decades-old argument of whether Montana has too much or too little public land protected from roads, motorized use and development.

However, Senate Bill 1470 is the first effort in a generation to set aside Montana wilderness and also the first effort to combine forest conservation and logging. By calling the bill "Forest Jobs and Recreation Act," Tester even avoided that controversial W word.

The Montana map on Jon Tester's forestry bill Web page ends just east of Bozeman and Great Falls. It shows that this isn't a bill to end all wilderness bills. It wouldn't decide forever the decades-old argument of whether Montana has too much or too little public land protected from roads, motorized use and development.

My friends from Norway were astounded a few years ago as we drove through the forests of Western Montana. Their shock was at the waste they saw. In Europe, timberland is intensively managed for the sustained use of forest resources. What is not milled into building material becomes biofuel for heating and electrical generation. There are almost no forest fires in Europe because there is no jungle of combustible material helter-skelter across the landscape, and no massive insect infestations.

It’s a wilderness bill. It’s a logging bill. It’s a jobs bill. It’s enlightened natural resource policy. It’s an environmental train wreck.

That’s a brief summary of the wide reaction to the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act officially unveiled a week or so ago by Montana Sen. Jon Tester.

While trying to accurately label Tester’s bill is probably pointless, it is clear that the proposal is a step in the right direction in terms of managing Montana’s forests and wild lands.