Pew Charitable Trusts, Montana Logging Division

The following is a comment that Matt Koehler left on a post down below.

I had to chuckle a little when I read the comments from Mr. Gabriel Furshong, MWA’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act Campaign Director, over at George Wuerthner’s excellent perspective piece on Tester’s bill over at NewWest.net titled “Tester’s Response Poor Strategy“:

Mr. Furshong stated:

“Wilderness philosophers from other states can postulate all they want about Montana politics – such chatter will never result in actual legislation to protect 500,000 acres of ground in the largest National Forest in the lower 48 states and create new jobs at Montana mills that have a record of stewardship best practices.”

You know what? Mr. Furshong’s dismissive comment is striking when compared with the fact that just this week the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved 26 bills establishing new Wilderness areas and dealing with other public lands issues. Those 26 bills were approved by the ENR Committee en bloc, by unanimous consent.

Reader’s will recall that Senator Tester’s FJRA [Forest Jobs and Recreation Act] is currently before this same Senate ENR [Energy and Natural Resources] Committee. Sometime in May, the ENR Committee sent Senator Tester a draft revision of this bill, which his office shared with the collaborators. Once the media questioned Senator Tester about the ENR’s draft he proclaimed it “Dead on arrival.”

So now, on June 20, the Senate ENR Committee approved 26 bills dealing with Wilderness and public lands issues

Something I’d encourage Wilderness supporters to consider is the very likely fact that if Senator Tester and the collaborators (Mr. Furshong and MWA included) would have accepted the ENR Committee’s draft revisions when they were shared about a month ago, it too would have been approved by the Committee this week.

So despite Mr. Furshong’s claim that “such chatter will never result in actual legislation” it sure seems to me that MWA and the other collaborator’s insistence on mandated logging and motors in Wilderness might have cost all of us the opportunity to designate over 660,000 acres as Wilderness and get some good restoration and fuel reduction work accomplished as proposed in the ENR Committee’s draft.

Some details of the ENR Committee’s draft:

* It would protect over 660,000 acres in Montana as Wilderness. However, it doesn’t undermine Wilderness by allowing military helicopters to land in Wilderness or ranchers to ride their ATV’s in Wilderness, as Senator Tester’s draft allows.

* It drops the controversial and unprecedented mandated logging levels on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Kootenai National Forests. It adds language requiring that any project carried out under the bill must fully maintain old growth forests and retain large trees, while focus any hazardous fuel reduction efforts on small diameter trees.

* It would also establish a “National Forest Jobs and Restoration Initiative” that would “preserve and create local jobs in rural communities…to sustain the local logging and restoration infrastructure and community capacity…to promote cooperation and collaboration…to restore or improve the ecological function of priority watersheds…to carry out collaborative projects to restore watersheds and reduce the risk of wildfires to communities.” Much of this work would be carried out through stewardship contracting.

Senatorial candidate Jon Tester promised, before witnesses, that he would …work to protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.” What we got instead is mandated logging, violations of the spirit of the Wilderness Act itself, and Baucus-style ‘rocks and ice’ wilderness designations. This is not a nuanced interpretation of what the candidate said versus what reality dictates to the Senator. It a broken promise.

Period.

Something should be done here about MWA’s name – perhaps a contest and a new name for this once-proud defender of Montana wild lands. Here are some suggest new names:

Pew Charitable Trusts, Montana Logging Division
Montana Facilitators Association
The Baucus (Jr.) Caucus
Collaborators Roundtable

Other names will surely occur to me later today …

Now we all know how long it takes for an honest farmer from Big Sandy, Montana, to transform into a Machiavellian and dishonest Washington DC politician. (Paul Richards a Boulder, Montana, former candidate for U.S. Senate)