Travel & Outdoors News | New West Network

FORMER COUNCIL MEMBERS OPPOSE BEAVERHEAD-DEERLODGE PLAN

Memo to MWA: Return to our Roots

By Bill Schneider, 3-19-08

Editor's Note: With some trepidation, I have decided to post the following letter. It is, sort of, an "internal document," but it is so revealing to the reasons we have suffered the 25-year Wilderness drought in Montana that I felt it should be in the open. This memo was sent about a year ago to the Montana Wilderness Association (MWA) officers and council by Elaine Synder and Ross Titus, two former council members and long-time supporters, financial and otherwise. It was edited and published here with permission of the authors. It was never published in the MWA newsletter, Wild Montana, as requested by the auhtors. I removed off-subject sections but retained all key points relating to MWA's record of achieving success for its members.--Bill Schneider

	New policy is totally at odds with organization’s wilderness ethic.

March 10, 2007

To: MWA Council

From: Two long-time Flathead-Kootenai Chapter members who have served on the Chapter and MWA Council, as officers and as continuing members of MWA for two or more decades.

We seek your undivided attention. It has taken us several months to personally “vent,” gain some perspective, organize, and draft our concerns. Hear us!

We would like this letter published in Wild Montana, unedited…We need to revisit our mode of developing and advancing wilderness proposals.

As we write this, a new group will be formed in the next few months to continue our efforts in ways that do not degrade the Association’s founding principles. Those principles were democratic to their core but no longer are, as has been demonstrated by staff and Council actions since mid-2006.

Here are the specifics of what we find so deeply disturbing:

1. The new MWA organizational chart does not have its members or the Council on the same page as all the Helena staff. It now seems staff is MWA. No Way! The enormous amount of money spent (we think wasted) on the consulting that went into this reorganization plan robbed MWA of its most authentic resource: the power of its member leaders and activists.

2. The Chapters have always been semi-autonomous parts of MWA since 1980…(The) Chapters will now have their agenda and direction set by Helena staff…This is unacceptable. MWA needs Chapters to survive. It is far better to form a new autonomous group than to submit to all this bureaucracy through Helena.

3. Grassroots members grew MWA into what it is today. They have always hiked, mapped, organized local wild areas into wilderness campaigns. The Council and state organization have helped broaden and strengthen these local efforts and gotten areas into the wilderness system. Over the past few years the Council and staff have given a “cool” reception, at best, to the (Flathead-Kootenai) Chapter’s Winton Weydemeyer Wilderness Proposal. Now, the new group can devote itself to this worthy campaign.

4. The Flathead-Kootenai Chapter…nurtured new members, oversaw local issues, developed and dealt with agencies and other groups along with local activists. (Now), we have lost an enormous amount of credibility and standing that we spent years building here.

5. We strongly urge the Council to reclaim its governing power and to reduce top staff.

6. Finally, withdraw MWA from the ill-conceived “Beaverhead–Deerlodge Strategy.” Return to grassroots originated proposals, approved in accordance with the Strategic Plan and its required 21 Criteria, for presentation to the Montana congressional delegation. Beaverhead–Deerlodge wilderness is important but its submission to D.C. must follow the MWA Council’s rules.

Why was the Strategic Plan not followed? The current quid-pro-quo deal came about after a chance meeting between a sawmill owner and MWA staff at a limited public participation roadless area hearing in Missoula in December 2005 called by former Senator Burns. Clearly missing from the B-D “strategy” is all the long range grassroots ground work so vital to the passage of any Wilderness legislation.

It is evident from recent issues of Wild Montana that the membership is not receiving the full story of the B-D Strategy. The agreement was presented to the Dillon office of the B-D Forest almost a year ago.

Omitted from the newsletter is any detailed information about the 713,000 acres in the MWA-wood products companies joint agreement that the parties would urge the U.S. Forest Service to classify as “suitable for logging” in the eventual new forest plan. Who in MWA is prepared to assure the members that there is no reason to suspect there are good and sufficient reasons to withhold approval to log everywhere in an area that is seven-tenths the size of the entire Bob Marshall Wilderness? This kind of carte blanche should never be granted by any wilderness advocacy group that only under the most extreme pressure has ever appealed an agency management action and is even less experienced in litigating issues of national forest management.

By collaborating with five sawmills and two conservation groups not seriously concerned with wilderness designation, MWA has fallen in with the likes of The Wilderness Society, Idaho Conservation League, and, of course, the thoroughly compromised Campaign for America’s Wilderness, seeking fast and painless wilderness tokens at the cost of the most essential element of the wilderness ethic: working and sweating for wilderness support among the people that live near it and out on the political hustings, and not trading equally precious wildlife and ecological values (especially the integrity of roadless areas) for drabs of rocks-and-ice wilderness.

Does MWA intend to continue the current practice of collaborating with any partner offering to help gain wilderness designation in its area of commercial operations in return for our help in gaining access to saw timber in that area? In other words, quid-pro-quo. If the answer is yes, then the Council must prepare to fully inform the membershiip of this opportunistic turn of policy that is totally at odds with this organization’s founding land and wilderness ethic.

A related ethical question concerns the B-D strategy of using Mark Rey, current Under Secretary of Agriculture in charge of the U.S. Forest Service, as a supporter of the Beaverhead Plan. We urge the Council to look closely at Mr. Rey’s plans for Forest Service lands before making arrangements with industry that compromise roadless area rules.

Also of concern to us is the fact that current leadership and possibly some among the large Helena staff of MWA appear to have a pessimistic attitude about MWA’s history that has driven them to “consult” with the Campaign for America’s Wilderness (formerly the Pew Wilderness Center), and now to rely on money from Pew Charitable Trusts. The latter continues the old Pew drive to confine wilderness legislation to rocks-and-ice regions by co-opting gullible or calculating people in the wilderness movement. The material supporters of Pew include Weyerhaeuser, Burlington Northern, International Paper, ITT Rayonier, Dow Chemicals, Dupont, Phelps-Dodge, General Electric, Raytheon, Caterpillar, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and others.

Organizations that have gained access to Pew money are expected to show short-term gains in wilderness protection regardless of the cost to other public resources and political efforts. MWA received $37,000 from the Campaign for America’s Wilderness. What conditions, “advice” or other strings were attached to this grant? All MWA’s members should have received this information long ago.

The Great Bear Wilderness designated by Congress in October 1978 was the last wilderness legislation won in the Flathead. The Flathead-Kootenai Chapter has spent the years since then building and cultivating our grassroots advocacy. We will not submit to Faustian bargains in an attempt to cut across the switchbacks on our way to new wilderness.

For wilderness' sake, we are wilderness advocates. Thank you for listening and best wishes,

Elaine Snyder and Ross Titus

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.

Like to receive our print magazine, The New West? Click here for free subscription information.