guest commentary

Contemplating Compromise Among the Forests of Montana

By Kyle Boelte, Guest Writer, 8-12-08

The view from Stark Mountain, above Nine Mile, Montana. Photo by Anna M Weaver.

For anyone who has been hiking in the mountains of Montana or has flown into Missoula on a clear day, the beauty of the area is often tinged with a multitude of dirt-colored bands that wrap around the mountains like topographic lines on a map. The bands are logging roads, dirt tracks that wind up seemingly every slope in some areas. I was near Nine Mile in just such a valley several weeks ago. I could see the Bitterroot Mountains in the distance, still snow-capped in early July. It could have been an image from a glossy magazine ad but for the foreground of large patches of clear-cut forest and roads that spiraled endlessly around every bend.

As I hiked I couldn’t help but feel a loss. The forest was scared deeply by the cuts and roads. But while I might have once seen logging in this area as unpardonable, a sin against the beauty of the place, now my feelings of loss were met equally with a new acceptance of logging. Things have changed. I’ve gotten some perspective. Some of that perspective came about 50 miles north of Nine Mile in Plains, Montana.

Plains is just downstream from where the Flathead and Clark Fork Rivers meet. It’s a mostly agricultural town, where fields of nursery stock and small gardens dot the land. On the river, children swim in eddies during the summer while flies are casts from the banks. On each side of the valley, mountain slopes rise up to frame the town in shades of forested green. And it’s here, on the edge of town, where Plains shows the signs of a change taking place in Montana.

Just outside of town, I drove up a road leading into the forest. A few miles up, I stopped at a sign, an advertisement for a new development. On past the sign a road wound up a steep slope, where the forest had been clear-cut and house sites now sat. The plots were empty for now—save for signs marking 1, 2, 3…—but it’s only a matter of time before this forest is a small settlement, with cars driving down to Plains to fetch groceries. 

Plum Creek Timber Co. owns that parcel of land above Plains, just as it owns 1.2 million acres of forestland all over the Montana. With the domestic timber industry in a downturn, Plum Creek is searching for the best way to capitalize on its property, and that increasingly means building subdivisions instead of harvesting trees.

If the logging roads are scars, surely their impact will fade with time. The same cannot be said of subdivisions—at least not in a meaningful timeframe. A new perspective: saving some forests in the West will mean embracing logging, if in a new, more limited form.

What the environmental movement is beginning to embrace, I think, is a middle ground, one that acknowledges the need for natural resource development, but in a more local, more thoughtful way. Local is more than just tomatoes and kale, after all.  It’s also about sourcing local timber for construction, instead of importing it from the forests of Indonesia or China. 

It’s becoming more common for local economies to be acknowledged in forest management discussions. A good example is the Montana Legacy Project. The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land is buying 320,000 acres of Plum Creek land for conservation purposes, but will be supplying local mills with logs for at least the next ten years at market rates. But just as with food, local is not simply synonymous with “close to home.” A local mega farm, although better than a distant mega farm, I suppose, is not the alternative we’re seeking. The same is true of forest products. It’s the local, small-scale farm, and the local, small-scale logging operation we want, not the mega farm or the clear-cut.

We should encourage the forest products industry in Montana. But future logging in the state be well thought out, environmentally sensible, and small in scale—not clear-cuts.

I was on a job in St. Ignatius last week and stopped by an Amish lumber yard to get a stack of wood to finish the side of a rancher’s hay barn. I was glad to get this product from a local company and from trees harvested nearby.  As I left, I was given a hand-written receipt—they don’t have a computer—but when I looked out into the yard, I saw that the Amish man cutting logs was using a machine to do the job.

It seemed they’d made some compromises. I thought hard on this and came to some understanding of a principled stand in its context—within the ebb and flow of life. Perhaps we shouldn’t want to live in a glossy ad where everything looks ideal. Life tends to have its rough edges.

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