Sen. Tester’s Wilderness Bill: Our Best Bet for New Wilderness Areas, or Christmas for Timber Companies?
2009 September 22
My latest Missoula Notebook column is about Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act:
If passed, the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act would designate the first new Wilderness Areas in Montana since 1983, and I’m up here, in a plane provided by the non-profit Ecoflight, to get a first-hand look at what the bill would actually mean to miles of backcountry in some of the most cherished wilderness in the state. Down below me is the battle zone: forests and landscapes treasured by hikers, loggers, snowmobilers, mountain bikers, horse packers, anglers, hunters, and oil and gas firms, among others. The Tester bill aims to protect wild land while satisfying as many of these groups as possible. But can it succeed?
Read the rest here.
“NREPA is a solution that comes from a New York congresswoman [Democrat Carolyn Maloney] whose concept of Montana is Jackson Hole, Wyoming,” Reed says.
Well, whoa. Let me exaggerate a bit, in order to better cut to the chase: saying that NREPA “comes from” a New York congresswoman shares a lot with saying that current health care proposals include death panels. It just ain’t so, and there’s quite a tale left untold when Mr. Reed’s comment is allowed to go unexamined.
LIke many others in Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wyoming, I had and have firsthand knowledge of from where NREPA came. I knew and frequently talked with its authors, and am known in at least some circles as one of its earliest supporters. Those of us from whom NREPA thus came lived and worked in these states at the time NREPA was being forged, long before Carolyn Maloney entered the picture.
Now, I well understand that residency requirements vary amongst those who argue the origins of wilderness proposals. And I should disclose up front that I’m a relatively recent arrival, born in Great Falls, Montana in 1943, an with family ties leading only back to my great-grandparents marriage in Great Falls in 1896. But, relative newcomer though I and my (mostly labor and ag) family certainly are, I think most people would agree that I’m a local.
From my arguably local perspective, every one of the few dozen grassroots conservationists and groups who were involved in the thinking from which NREPA sprung were as local as I. And many were not just locally placed, but also in possession of some relevant expertise on matters of wildlife and wilderness. Mike Bader, for example, was a commissioned Ranger in Yellowstone National Park and a student working on a degree in natural resources management at the University of Montana-Missoula when he undertook writing the first drafts of NREPA. Montana-born conservationist Keith Hammer had spent some time in the logging industry, and log truck driver Keith Brandemihl found that he couldn’t get a job in his chosen industry after he came out in public support of the key ideas that led to NREPA.
Blackfeeet and other Indian religious leaders who liked the key ideas leading up to NREPA had their own reasons for signing on in formal support when the final drafts were being written. Prominent wildlife biologists including John Craighead had decades of experience in the Northern Rockies region behind their own decisions to sign up in support of this interesting new idea for legislation. A form Superintendent of a National Park located in Idaho also had experience and expertise that led him to support NREPA.
And so on. And so on. There’s little or no need to recite all the reasons to remember that NREPA came from utterly local energy and interests. Alas, while some will be glad it’s so, the local origins of NREPA seem to have been largely forgotten. That’s a shame, and it’s a little shameful for journalists to let that shame go unexamined.
But there’s another issue here, maybe even more important. Despite the danger to clear thinking posed by the old cliche’ of locals vs outsiders, we locals have never been unanimous about much of anything, and never needed outsiders to stoke our fires of disagreement. But it’s always been a matter of simple convenience to act as if, borrowing a phrase from the psychiatrist Carl Jung, to always blame the red-eyed devil on the other side of the mountain for our troubles.
In the current case, it’s been convenient to treat Maloney as that red-eyed devil. But not every journalist in the West was fooled. For instance, the editorial staff of the Arizona Star saw through that form of blame right after NREPA was introduced. The problem, the Star’s editorial stated after NREPA was introduced, was that NREPA originators in Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming couldn’t find sponsors among their own Congressional Delegations, and had no choice but to search the halls of Congress for others willing to bring NREPA up for consideration. And, the Star’s editorial said, the Northern Rockies’ politicians were beholden to, ahem, mining and logging and other entities — entities often based well beyond the region. So, the Star editorial correctly said, it was possible for Maloney et al to see what the regional Congressional Delegation could not see.
NREPA didn’t come from Maloney. It came from lively local support, and found favor in some sectors of Congress despite lively local opposition. And the same is still true, for example in Tester’s not-so-new approach to wilderness designation in the region.
In Tester’s bill as in NREPA, the local conservation community has been and still is divided. Some see a plan like NREPA as being very hard to pass, and thus back away from any chance of being associated with a proposal that may not succeed. These local conservation groups fear failure, and are beloved by politicians who delight in having others do their compromising for them. Other local conservation groups do not operate out of fear of failing, and work for what is best in biological terms if not in political ones. We’re all local. We all live and work in the communities of the region. And we are all forced to face a nation and a Congress every bit as divided as we.
Lance Olsen
President, Great Bear Foundation 1982-1992