Guest Column

Will the Tester Bill End Montana’s Wilderness War?

By Robert Saldin, Guest Writer, 8-16-10

	The intro to Tester's YouTube video explaining the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act

Determining the status of public land has arguably been Montana’s most intractable political problem over the last half century. Most of the turmoil has centered on wilderness designation in National Forests.

Environmentalists have seen wilderness status as the best way to save the Northern Rockies’ natural landscape. Meanwhile, many of those whose livelihoods are tied to that land have fiercely opposed numerous efforts to declare new wilderness areas, fearing that such designations would impact property rights and severely curtail timber and mining extraction. As a result, millions of acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) have for years remained in political limbo. But closure may finally be at hand. Last summer the Treasure State’s junior senator, Jon Tester, introduced the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act (FJRA), a bill seeking to end this protracted dispute and determine, once and for all, the final status of public lands in three key parts of Western Montana.

The Problem

Montana’s wilderness war began shortly after Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964. The wilderness classification is noteworthy because it offers the highest level of federal protection, as well as the strictest limitations on human activity. Roads, resource extraction, motorized vehicles and bicycles are prohibited. The law designated 9.1 million acres--mostly in the West--as official wilderness in the Wilderness Preservation System. Of that, 1.5 million acres were set aside in Montana as the Anaconda-Pintler, Bob Marshall, Cabinet Mountains, Gates of the Mountains and Selway-Bitterroot wilderness areas.

In addition to defining wilderness and establishing numerous wilderness areas, the 1964 law and subsequent legislation also established a process by which federal land agencies were to identify other wilderness-suitable areas for Congress to consider adding to the Wilderness Preservation System. In accordance with this mandate, the USFS selected more than 60 million acres as wilderness-suitable
lands, including 6 million in Montana. After this process was complete, the identified land was placed in a holding pattern until Congress decided which areas to add to the System and which to “release” back to the USFS’s standard “multiple use” status, which allows for motorized recreation and resource extraction.

When these potential wilderness lands were identified in the 1970s, there was every expectation that the process of deciding which areas would become wilderness would play out within several years. And in most western states, that is exactly what happened. Members of Congress introduced comprehensive bills that became law and determined the final status for most of the wilderness-potential areas in their states. But that never occurred in Montana.

Indeed, nearly 50 years after passage of the original Wilderness Act, many of the areas in Montana that were identified by the USFS for congressional consideration remain in abeyance. Battle lines were drawn in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Wilderness advocates’ early successes provoked a backlash, known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, among Westerners who made their living off the land. While this movement was felt throughout the West, it found its strongest support in Montana and Idaho.

Meanwhile, environmentalists dug in their heels, seeking to add as much wilderness as possible. A stalemate resulted. In Montana no new wilderness has been declared since 1983.

This failure to bring closure to Montana’s wilderness wars was not for lack of effort. The 1980s saw many comprehensive bills introduced. The most notable were backed by U.S. Sen. John Melcher and U.S. Rep. Pat Williams. The pair came closest to success in 1988 when their comprehensive Montana bill passed both chambers of Congress only to be vetoed by President Ronald Reagan, largely to boost Republican Conrad Burns’ effort to unseat Melcher, a Democrat.

Reagan’s veto illustrated the political stakes and polarization surrounding wilderness in Montana. Williams survived, but Melcher was defeated by Burns, partly in reaction to Melcher’s wilderness advocacy. Other Western politicians have been burned by the wilderness issue too, including U.S. Senate heavyweight Frank Church of Idaho, who lost his seat in 1980. Not surprisingly, many Western politicians have been reluctant to delve into public land disputes. The Montana delegation has not introduced a bill since Williams stepped down in 1997. The direct link between wilderness advocacy and forced retirement may
also explain the curious omission of the word “wilderness” in Tester’s FJRA bill title.

A New Approach Born of Collaboration

Tester’s bill is not only the first to be introduced in more than a decade (and the first with a legitimate chance of passage in more than twice that time), it also takes a wholly new approach. Gone is the old-style, comprehensive approach of trying to settle the wilderness issue in a single bill that covers all the disputed areas in the entire state. Rather, Tester has cobbled together three locally based proposals
designed by environmental groups, the timber industry and various interested citizens. This means that the FJRA does not seek the end game for the status of Montana public lands in the way the 1980s-style Melcher-Williams bills did. But if Tester is successful, he will have gotten about halfway there and, just as importantly, established a clear roadmap for the rest of the journey.

This critical change in tactics emerged recently when longtime opponents and advocates of new wilderness realized that continued stalemate carried great risks for both sides. Wilderness opponents were unsettled by President Bill Clinton’s use of executive power to achieve conservation aims in the waning days of his administration. More than anything, Clinton’s actions drove home the fact that severe limitations on land use could be imposed even in the absence of formal wilderness.

In Montana, it also became evident that the timber industry was on life support, partly because of the inability to resolve the dispute over public lands. Failure to pass wilderness bills ended up hurting the industry because enacting such legislation would have simultaneously released areas not selected for wilderness protection back to multiple-use status, thus allowing resource extraction. The vetoed 1988 bill, for instance, would have released 4 million acres from the 1970s-initiated holding pattern. Smurfit-Stone’s recent closure in Frenchtown is only the latest reminder of the difficult climate for the timber industry.

Similarly, many wilderness advocates realized that holding out for total victory carried severe risks. Unpredictability brought about harmful logging practices in the timber industry’s attempt to grab as many logs as
possible in the shortest period of time, lest the government decide to halt all activity. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush began overturning Clinton’s environmental orders. Some environmentalists also came to see that limited logging geared toward preventing massive fires and removing beetle-killed trees plays a role in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

But most importantly, wilderness advocates increasingly realized that the soaring popularity of motorized recreational vehicles was scarring many roadless areas and compromising their suitability for wilderness designation. While those areas set aside in the 1970s for congressional consideration are technically off limits to motorized recreation, the reality is that they do not receive the same level of protection as formally designated wilderness. This growing threat undermined a crucial consideration in conservationists’ strategy. For years, environmentalists thought time was on their side. There was no need to compromise because those areas with wilderness potential were more or less safe until Congress acted. But in recent years, many concluded that this strategy was misguided and costly. Of the 1.4 million
acres in the 1988 bill, for instance, approximately 250,000 of those no longer qualify for wilderness preservation due to motorized recreation’s expanded footprint. In short, many environmentalists realized that holding out for the perfect bill carried severe risks.

All of these factors pushed longtime opponents into a number of independent, locally based collaborative groups around Montana. Key participants and supporters include the Montana Wilderness Association, Trout Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation, Montana’s timber mills and various recreation advocates. Tester’s bill essentially combines the final proposals of three such collaborative groups: the Three Rivers Challenge in the Yaak Valley; the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Project in the Seeley area; and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership. Taken as a whole, the FJRA would establish 670,000 acres of new wilderness as well as 300,000 acres of slightly less-restrictive recreation areas. Just as notable, though, is the bill’s mandate for 10,000 acres of “mechanical treatment” or “harvesting” per year for15 years
out of 900,000 acres deemed “suitable for timber harvest.” Designed to bring the timber mills on board, this provision has proved to be the most controversial and confusing aspect of the legislation.

Environmental opponents worry that this aspect of the bill mandates government-subsidized logging and establishes a dubious precedent for future wilderness bills. FJRA supporters, on the other hand, emphasize that “mechanical treatment” is a far cry from the irresponsible clear cuts some associate with the timber industry. They suggest that under Tester’s legislation loggers would be partners in ensuring healthy forests through forest thinning and removal of beetle-killed trees. 

The Opposition

If Tester’s bill is remarkable for forging an unlikely coalition of supporters, it has also miraculously managed to unify the more strident wing of the environmental movement with those philosophically opposed to wilderness.

Some traditional opponents of wilderness continue to fight new federal restrictions. Motorized recreation advocacy groups, for instance, criticize the bill despite Tester’s attempts to address many of their concerns. Ultimately, some elements of the motorized-use community will never be fully comfortable with new wilderness because it would place limits on snowmobile and ATV use. County commissioners in some winter recreation areas have also voiced concerns over the economic constraints the bill might impose on their communities.

The most prominent opposition has come from elements of the pro-wilderness movement.

Environmental groups operating under the recently established umbrella coalition known as the Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign want the “mechanical treatment” provisions eliminated and are holding out for more wilderness acres. For these green critics of Tester’s proposal, the alternative is the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), a bill that would designate 24 million acres of new wilderness in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.

The proposal is enough to make any wilderness advocate giddy. The only problem is that the utopian NREPA has no chance of becoming law. No senators from the states in question have offered support and most, including liberal Democrats, are openly hostile. Theoretically, of course, that doesn’t matter if the congressional votes could be found elsewhere. But practically, the lack of local support makes the bill dead on arrival because of the long history of deferring to home state delegations on public land issues. This tradition was broken only once, in the case of Alaska. It would be a far steeper challenge--even if there were a groundswell of support for NREPA outside of the region--to take on the diverse and bipartisan delegations from the five relevant states. In short, NREPA is not even close to being a politically feasible alternative.

Other key players have yet to take firm positions.

Gatekeepers including the USFS, the Department of Agriculture and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee have all sent mixed signals. During a December 2009 hearing on the bill, the USFS chief testified that the timber harvesting mandates might be unworkable. But several months later, his boss, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, indicated tentative support for the FJRA. Some members of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee are also uneasy about the unprecedented timber harvests. Revised versions of the bill that strip these controversial provisions have been circulated within the Committee. But
Tester and his allies maintain that any such reversals on these provisions are non-starters. As the process currently stands, it isn’t clear whether the Committee will agree to the timber-harvesting mandates or whether a compromise on these delicate points is attainable.

2010 or Bust?

The best path forward for the FJRA seems to be inclusion in a widely anticipated omnibus bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has signaled his intention to bring forth a wide-reaching bill that would combine multiple bills dealing with public lands. For Tester, the key question is whether the USFS, Vilsack and the Energy and Natural Resources Committee will sign off on the FJRA, including the “mechanical treatment” provisions. If so, Tester’s showcase legislation could be signed into law by President Obama in the near future, creating Montana’s first new wilderness in a generation, providing a reprieve to the floundering timber industry, and going a long way toward solving what has been a persistent and polarizing dispute.

If not, Tester will no doubt try again when a new Congress is sworn in next January. But with what is likely to be a strengthened Republican opposition and the distractions of the 2012 elections (in which Tester will appear on the ballot), now may be the last best chance to save the FJRA and, quite possibly, the Senator’s political career.

This piece originally appeared in the Summer 2010 (Vol. 8, No. 1) edition of Montana’s Agenda.

Robert Saldin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Montana.

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