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)

I was very active in Montana wilderness issues up until about ten years ago. At the time I withdrew, I was convinced that there would never be anymore new wilderness in Montana, and that worse than that, in the future we would be fighting to preserve what we had. I had visions of developers banging on the doors of national parks and existing wilderness areas. The motorbacks were just coming into their own, and were making “share the trails” demand much in the same way that smokers might demand to “share the air” in our restaurants. The idea of saving any of our then-roadless lands seemed out of reach.

The players were:

Senator Conrad Burns: He was the focus for conservationists, as he was openly antagonistic towards wilderness, and easily adopted the posture of motorbacks that machines should go everywhere. He was a rallying point, and served the cause of preservation well by bringing various groups together in opposition.

Senator Max Baucus: He was the man who undermined any efforts to preserve additional lands. Industry had long lost interest in high and rocky lands and lightly timbered ones. Baucus gathered up all of these areas in his own Wilderness Bill, the “Rocks and Ice” Bill. Predictably, wherever there was serious movement at preservation, Baucus trotted out rocks and ice, and said “this or nothing”.

Baucus was the real enemy, yet I will never forget John Gatchell’s words to me after the 1996 election, when Max won another term: “At least we still have Max.” Gatchell is the Conservation Director for the Montana Wilderness Association, a group with a proud conservation history and founded in 1957 by Ken and Florence Baldwin, and others.

Power is dangerous, a narcotic. Proximity to power changes a person, clouds the intellect and alters perceptions. (Wasn’t there some kind of trilogy about a ring or some such thing?) Max, nominally a “Democrat”, managed the conservationists as part of a larger strategy of keeping his left flanks in line and ineffective. (I wrote an op-ed published in the Billings Gazette in which I called him a “faux bonhomme,” literally a “pretended good fellow,” or “false friend.” That is the most dangerous kind of friend to have.

When Conrad Burns left office, we lost our rallying point. Jon Tester was an unknown quantity, but did make serious attempts to reach out to conservationists in his campaign. Many progressives adopted him, placing almost blind faith in his good will as a substitute for on-the-ground organizing. That’s a dangerous situation, as there are few answers inside politics. We were effective against Conrad Burns, literally immobilizing the development forces behind him because we were organized groups with common purpose. That organization stopped the political wheels.

Danger has come to fruition. Tester has set out to achieve what Burns never could – to split environmentalist forces, bring the loggers into roadless lands, and undermine the legal concept of “wilderness” that has guided us thus far. His Forest Jobs and Recreation Act is Baucus “Rocks and Ice” redux, with huge tracts of roadless lands given over to mandated logging. What wilderness it preserves is sullied by helicopter and ATV encroachment.

At the center of this controversy are two people from years past who might now be seen as “collaborators.” They are the aforementioned Gatchell of Montana Wilderness Association (not pictured), and Tom France of National Wildlife Federation’s Missoula branch.

There are others, but these two are my focus, as they have seemingly traveled to the other side. (Gatchell’s 1996 statement of fealty to Baucus indicates that for him, at least, it was a short trip.)

George Wuerthner, among many others, is a new prominent voice for conservation in Montana, and has done serious writing on this subject. This piece, from New West, explores the different meanings of “collaboration” and “negotiation.” He gives and example of each:

Quincy Library Group in California Here local environmental activists joined with timber industry to craft a plan that called for logging up to 60,000 acres of the Plumas National Forest annually in exchange for protection of some old growth trees and small roadless areas. Like the Tester legislation, the Quincy proposal was hailed as an example of how collaboration had achieved a resolution to a long-standing stalemate.

However, other environmentalists, including the Wilderness Society, Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, and Sierra Club among others did not support more logging on the Plumas NF and they railed against the Quincy Library Group proposal. Environmental members of the Quincy group soon joined the timber industry in denouncing the anti-corporate giveaway activists.

The collaborationists adopted the goals of their opposition in an attempt to move the process forward. In so doing, they split from their own ranks and joined the developers, and as the Little Lamb followed Mary, were soon attacking conservationists. This is the Tester Process that Gatchell and France have fostered in Montana.

Steens Mountain National Monument in eastern Oregon: First, ONDA remained very up front that their goal was to end grazing–and they were not afraid to tell the ranchers, the Congressman, or anyone else that if they had an opportunity to eliminate grazing, they would go for it. Indeed, one of the things they negotiated successfully in the Steen Mountain legislation was the first legislated cow-free wilderness. Since they were clear in expressing that their chief goal was to protect wilderness and eliminate grazing, no one, including the local ranchers had any misgivings about their motives.

The ranchers went into the negotiations with their eyes wide open. They knew where [Oregon Natural Desert Association] stood on matters. They did not think ONDA lied or deceived them when they continue to lobby to remove cows from public lands, not only on Steens, but also throughout Eastern Oregon.

However, ONDA’s goal of livestock removal didn’t keep them from working with the ranchers either. By negotiation ranchers got some things they wanted too. They were able to consolidate their private lands by land exchanges with the BLM. Some received permit buyouts, and left the business altogether, but with a golden parachute. With these negotiations, the ranchers had some control over where wilderness designations occurred.

That is negotiation, with each side sticking to principles, but understanding that they must find middle ground. In the end, ranchers and ONDA walked away from the process, neither side having lost or gained everything, but having achieved primary goals. More important, their principles were not compromised and dignity was intact.

Sen Jon Tester has done what Conrad Burns could not do – he has divided the Montana environmental community, and has set the stage for to degradation of large tracts of Montana’s roadless lands. This is why I have consistently and stridently maintained over the years that we face far more danger form Democrats in office than Republicans.

I miss you Conrad. Your replacement is far, far more dangerous than you ever dreamed to be. (In wartime, don’t they shoot collaborators?)

Anyway, as old fighters fall by the road, new ones take their place. The battle goes on. At this time the fighters for wilderness are many, and my favorite group is called “Alliance for the Wild Rockies.” To this date, they have fought for their cause, stand ready to negotiate, and have never collaborated.