Missoula Notebook

Tester’s Wilderness Bill: Q & A With Trout Unlimited’s Tom Reed

By Sutton Stokes, 9-23-09

	Reed prepares to wet a line in an undisclosed location in the proposed Lima Peaks Wilderness.

Senator Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act would protect 600,000 acres of Montana wilderness, but it would also mandate the logging of 10,000 acres per year in Montana’s national forests. (For more details about the bill’s requirements, start with Bill Schneider’s column, What Tester’s Forest Bill Really Does.) Several mainstream environmental organizations, such as Trout Unlimited, the Montana Wilderness Association, and the National Wildlife Federation, have joined with recreation interests and local logging companies in support of the bill. Meanwhile, other environmental organizations, such as Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Wild West Institute, find themselves agreeing with many motorized access advocates that this bill is a bad idea.

I recently sat down with Tom Reed, the Montana/Wyoming backcountry organizer for Trout Unlimited, to get his response to some of the main objections raised by the bill’s critics.

Q: Tom, do you regret anything about the process that led to the current bill? There’s criticism out there that the process was secretive and excluded some stakeholders. Do you wish there had been anything different about the process that might have precluded those criticisms?

A: Honestly, from the very start—the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge Partnership—people immediately started throwing rocks at it and turning up their nose at the fact that conservationists were actually sitting down with timber companies. We certainly would have welcomed their input if they wanted to come to the table with reasonable solutions, but when they come to the table with solutions that have nothing to do with reality, like NREPA [the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act]—which is not a home-based initiative like this one—it makes it a little difficult. We did invite some people to the table who flat refused to even talk to us, just because we wanted to involve the timber industry.

We held hundreds of meetings on this thing. I could show you clippings on this thing from the Montana papers thicker than the Denver phone book. To me, that shows that we didn’t do this in the dark. We did this in the open, and some of these processes have been going on in some of the affected areas for anywhere from half a decade to a decade. It’s not like people didn’t know it was going on.

But if you go into an argument knowing ahead of time that you’re not willing to give an inch, then, yes, of course you will be excluded. If you absolutely hate wilderness, you’re going to hate this bill. If you absolutely do not want to see one more tree cut in the state of Montana, you’re not going to like this bill. If you can live with a little wilderness, and if you can live with a little logging—that’s why seven out of ten Montanans in this survey that we did liked the bill.

Q: One of the criticisms of Sen. Tester’s bill is that the areas being protected are “just rocks and ice.” In other words, the claim is that the act mainly protects areas that industry wouldn’t be trying to develop anyway, and that don’t have strong wilderness qualities.

A: I disagree with that. Many of the areas that would be protected under the act are areas where I elk hunt and have tremendous security cover. In the Pintler Wilderness, for example, the act protects tons of timber and what I call “black holes” for elk, where they can hide out when they are getting a lot of hunting pressure … The Lima Peaks country [would also] be protected … That’s 35,000 acres. There has been some desire to do some natural gas and oil leasing in there. From a Trout Unlimited perspective, that’s an area that we feel shouldn’t be drilled. We’re not against all oil and gas drilling, but we feel there are some areas that are too special to drill. In this case, where there’s pure Westslope cutthroat trout and brook trout, we feel that’s an inappropriate place to drill, so we’re fully supportive of making that a wilderness area.

Q: Another criticism is that the act—which establishes a process in which multiple sections of timber cutting would be proposed and approved at once—wouldn’t require the same scrutiny under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) as before. [Tester’s bill describes “landscape-scale” planning units of 50,000 acres, for which an overarching plan would be established for both timber cuts (on a tiny fraction of those 50,000 acres) and restoration work.] The concern is that this process will allow some logging projects that might have failed review before.

A: Well, there’s nothing in the bill that allows anyone to avoid following NEPA. And the advantage to doing it this way is that we can look at a large piece of countryside all at one time and come up with a long-range plan that makes sense: remove some trees here, select cut there, we can go over here and rip out some old roads that are degrading wildlife and fisheries resources, and use income from those timber projects to pay for that restoration work. And every component of the proposed plans has to go through NEPA review.

Q: Michael Garrity, of Alliance for the Wild Rockies, is skeptical that those timber projects will produce enough income to pay for the restoration work you’re describing. In fact, he says that the Forest Service typically loses money on timber sales in the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest.

A: I’m not an economist, so I can’t speak to that. I can tell you that the way this is designed is for the money from those timber sales to be put right back into the resource it came out of.

Q: Another criticism I’ve heard is that the act’s mandated amounts of timber harvests—7,000 acres per year in the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest and 3,000 acres per year in the Kootenai National Forest—represents quite a bit more than has traditionally occurred in those areas. If those levels of timber harvesting make sense and are sustainable, why isn’t it happening already? Doesn’t this act potentially force the Forest Service to allow more logging than it might think is a good idea?

A: I think the reason there hasn’t been that much timber harvested on the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge, for example, is because [the Forest Service] has been tied up by frivolous lawsuits for years and it’s basically hamstrung the agency. [In the Beaverhead Deer Lodge], the Forest Service has identified 1.9 million acres as suitable for harvest. This act mandates cutting only a total of 70,000 acres of that suitable area [over ten years]. That’s a very small percentage. And remember, the priorities for harvesting will be beetle-killed trees, urban-wildland interface [for better fire management], and previously logged areas. Our understanding is that the timber base is there, and the reason it hasn’t been cut is because the agency and the timber companies have been sued repeatedly with frivolous lawsuits, and we want to see that come to an end.

Q: Some critics say that logging at the rate that the act requires will hurt elk hunting and fishing in those areas. {add explanation of stewardship funds to the question in some fashion so that when he mentions them we’ll know what he’s talking about}

A: I absolutely disagree with that. The way that this act is designed will very much enhance elk hunting and fishing. I’m an elk hunter. Any elk hunter who gets out and walks the country knows that the more roads you have in a piece of country, the less elk you see. Studies have identified 1.5 miles of road per square mile of land as the limit over which elk just quit the country and leave. So, even though this bill mandates some logging, this bill also prescribes using some of the resulting income as stewardship funds for reducing some of those high road densities.

For example, out on the east side of Deer Lodge, we’re talking about taking road densities from 6 miles per section to one and a half. And the fishing—there’s about 150 culverts on Forest Service land that have been identified as blocking fish migration, so fish can’t swim upstream to spawn or get downstream to the rivers. If you take these culverts out, which would be part of the stewardship restoration under this act, you’re actually going to allow for fish passage. If you allow for fish passage, you allow for juveniles to grow and return to rivers, and you allow adults to go upriver to spawn. So this act would actually increase the number of fish in the system.

Q: Of course, many of the most vocal critics of this act are big supporters of NREPA. In an ideal world, would you like to see a bill like NREPA passed?

A: Well, I’m kind of a romantic person myself. It would be nice to live in 1840, but we don’t. The fact of the matter is, we live in an area where there are more demands on the land, there’s more people recreating on the lands in strange and different ways, and [the Tester act] is a solution that responds to those needs in a way that is built from the ground up…. NREPA’s just never going to fly because it doesn’t get people on the ground involved.

Q: There is a map associated with the Tester act [titled: “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act: Proposed Land Designations,” dated July 16, 2009] that outlines all of the areas that fall under the bill, color-coded into three categories: “proposed wilderness,” “proposed recreation, management, and protection areas,” and “timber suitable or open to harvest.” The thing that bothers some critics about this map is that the largest portion of these areas is color-coded as “timber suitable or open to harvest.” You can’t blame people for looking at this map and worrying that it is only preserving tiny little areas in exchange for allowing massive sections to be clearcut, including some currently roadless areas.

A: I can see why it looks like that way, but I think people’s concerns are misplaced. These areas that the map identifies as “suitable for timber harvest” are carried directly over from the Forest Service’s own forest plans already in place before the bill was written. Now, what the bill does, it says that we agree with the Forest Service that, if harvest is to occur, these are the areas where it should occur. However, the Forest Service is still constrained by things like the Clinton roadless rule, which precludes cutting in any designated roadless areas. That’s an executive order that says they can’t cut in there, and they can’t defy that. So they would have to look outside any roadless areas for timber to cut.

And again, the priorities [for timber sales] are going to be areas with beetle kill, areas where there are cabins or other human infrastructure already in the forest [for wildfire management], and previously logged areas that could be logged again or that might be ripe for a stewardship restoration project. The Forest Service is still in charge of these forests, still required to protect them under existing federal rules. All this bill does is help them get up off the mat from these lawsuits and sell some timber more consistently than they’ve been able to do in the past.

Q: What kind of feedback are you getting from Trout Unlimited members on your organization’s support of this bill?

A: The feedback is very positive. Our members in Montana are just regular folks. They work in the mills, maybe they have a business on Main Street. They’ve seen how people have just gotten nothing done in Montana [in terms of wilderness protection] for decades. They’ve seen the timber on the hills above them dying. They’ve seen these catastrophic fires. They’ve seen their favorite elk hunting areas getting encroached upon by motorized vehicles. And they’re tired of it. They want to see something done. Most people seem to be pretty happy with this bill. We all kind of gave a little and got a little and tried to figure out something that had a chance of actually passing. We’re not 100 percenters. We want to have something that actually works.

Want more Notebook? Read the rest here. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook, and I write a blog.

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