Put Bluntly and Country, Tester’s Logging Bill is a Dog that Won’t Hunt

By Matthew Koehler, Unfiltered 11-09-09

Note: The following guest column appeared today in the Great Falls Tribune.

It's written by Paul Edwards, a former Montana Wilderness Association board member who ended up resigning from MWA's Board shortly after the Beaverhead Partnership was announced in spring of 2006. Amazingly, even though Edwards was the chair of MWA's Wilderness Committee, he and other Board members were kept completely in the dark about MWA's secret, closed-door negotiations with the timber industry, the results of which now makes up the bulk of Tester's Logging Bill.

It's also interesting to note that if Edwards supported the Tester Logging Bill, he would be hailed by the Beaverhead Partnership and supporters of Tester's Logging Bill as a "non-traditional ally" because of his remarkably diverse background.

You see, Edwards worked as a young man as a pea-pitcher, header-puncher, roustabout, wild animal trainer's assistant, high-steel man, able seaman, movie actor, and NGO rep in I Corps, during the Vietnam War. Edwards also put in 25 years as a writer, director and producer in Hollywood film and television (including serving as a writer for the hit TV show Gunsmoke) before fleeing for his life and what remained of his sanity to his ranch on the Rocky Mountain Front at the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

However, since Edwards is willing to stand up for Wilderness, public lands, sane economic policy and open and transparent public processes, he's more likely to be labeled an extremist by supporters of Tester's Logging Bill. Go figure...

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Tester Forest Jobs, Recreation Act is a dog that won't hunt
By PAUL EDWARDS

Well, finally ... Sen. Tester and a few strange bedfellows have floated a logging bill that everyone who works, has worked, or hopes to work, for one of four struggling lumber mills or one bankrupt cardboard box maker can wholeheartedly endorse.

Letters to the papers from such folks, including owners and employees of the mills and their "environmental partners," express boundless joy we've all agreed to this federal welfare proposal to bail them out before they perish by the Invisible Hand of the Market.

You know, The Hand that regulates commerce in our American Free Market system and separates businesses that can compete from those can't and will fail. That's private enterprise: Some got to win, some got to lose. Tough noogies - the Hand has no pity.

But our big-hearted feds do. Because even though the Greenspans, Bernankes and Geithners who manipulate our money are sworn hardcore believers in free market capitalism, they think some outfits - doggone it - are ... well, to big to fail.

Evidently, Tester feels the same about these mills. It's not that they're too big, though; it's that they're too important to Montana, so he has to bail 'em out with our money. Like the feds did AIG and Goldman Sachs, B of A and Chase, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It's the new thing in Free Market Economics: The Invisible Hand's been replaced by The Visible Handout. That's what Tester's Logging Welfare Bill is all about.

What makes these mills so important? Will a bailout create thousands of jobs, pump millions into our economy?

Well, no, its effect would be negligible even in boom times and lumber demand is down 55 percent with prices at modern historic lows. So what, then? Why is Tester pushing this deal?

It's symbolism. There's this weird perception rooted deep in our mythology that because extractive industries like mining and logging were once drivers of our economy that they still are; or ought to be; or will be again. The reality is that they can't hack it in the world market even with the huge subsidies the U. S. industrial welfare program hands them.

But let's say it was worth giving them a fat pork-barrel deal. What will it look like?

At an estimated taxpayer hit of $100 million from Forest Service losses on these below-cost sales, they get a mandated cut of 100,000 acres over 10 years: 30K in the brutally overcut Yaak and a staggering70K in the bone-dry Beaverhead/Deer Lodge where the Forest Service never allowed more than 2,800 acres cut, even in boom lumbering years.

In addition, more than 1 million acres of inventoried roadless wildland, including most of several of Lee Metcalf's Wilderness Study Areas, will lose their protection and be opened to "management."

And what's the payoff for us Americans who own the forests for keeping these icons of yesteryear on life support? 600,000 acres of rocks and ice wilderness in scattered, widely separated patches with no connectivity, including one tiny island in the hammered Yaak.

For outdoor folks, hunters, anglers, horsemen and seekers after peace and solitude, any wilderness is good wilderness, and after decades without any preservation of Montana wildlands - as fine and whole as any left anywhere - the yearning for it that all of us feel who love and use the outdoors without smog-machines is tremendous.

That said, this bill is a visionless, wholly inadequate wildlands proposal - a fact made obvious by the absence of the word wilderness in its title - that simply gives away far too much to protect far too little. It shows very clearly how little regard Tester and Max Come-Lately have for our irreplaceable wilderness, in spite of phony chin music.

This plan - secretly concocted by its "partners" - is not only a terrible wilderness bill (which it unquestionably is) it's also a terrible logging bill for everyone but the little mill owners. Since they don't represent 1 percent of Montana's working people, you have to wonder how such a sorry, deformed, ugly hash could ever have been sold to Tester.

It will be interesting to watch it in Congress. Word is the "partners" think they have the skids greased. Maybe so, but they may find that in the big federal meat grinder this particular batch of raw pork will be judged too gamy to make acceptable sausage.

Over half a century ago the wise and visionary Aldo Leopold, speaking of a public Land Ethic, said, "A thing is right when it preserves the integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise." No one has ever said it better.

There is just no way to craft a national welfare bill for a few small, desperate lumber mills at the price of so much irreplaceable wild country and sell it to Congress as a grand boon to Montana and America. To put it bluntly and country, Tester's dog won't hunt.

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