OPINION: Managing forests needs to change

Some 50 odd years ago, a small group of young college professors who were disciples of the famous naturalist John Muir and his followers, started a new environmental movement to save the trees.

Facts are, at this point in time the teak forests of Asia were being devastated, the rain forests of South America were being cleared to provide more farmland, the vast forests of northern Canada, the Yukon and parts of Alaska were being harvested to satisfy the world’s appetite for lumber and other wood products and the management of forests in the continental U.S. was still in the formative stages with considerable room for improvement.

These professors instilled in the fertile young minds of their students that trees were a critical item in the functioning of our natural ecosystem (factual) and if we continued to scalp the earth it would eventually become a vast desert (questionable). What these professors didn’t provide was a solution to the problem other than demanding that the harvest of trees from public forests be stopped through the use of physical demonstrations including tree hugging, tree sitting and any other such means deemed necessary. Thus were born the “Tree Huggers,” and the battle was on.

The early years of the Hugger campaign were difficult. Without legal standing they resorted to some dangerous and illegal practices such as spiking trees and damaging timber-harvesting and road-building equipment. Some spent jail time for their acts. Then in 1973 the picture changed drastically when the Endangered Species Act was passed (a good program when properly utilized) and the Huggers gained legal status and a formidable ally.

From this point forward the age old cliche that “power corrupts” is proven, as common sense and sound science were lost in the struggle to win at all costs. With lots of money from suburbia, shrewd lawyers and judges willing to risk their career by searching for minor technicalities in the law and/or case documents and basing their judgments on these and questionable data, the Huggers and Endangered Species combined to shut down our forests.  

The details are too voluminous to spell out here but their actions essentially stopped all meaningful management of our forests, and then they forced us to pay for ripping out roads to prevent future access. It has never been publicly stated, to my knowledge, but their actions would indicate their intent to be to treat all national forest lands as semi wilderness with minimum access and management by nature only.

It has been 40 odd years now, and being an avid outdoorsman and hunter, I have watched in horror and become increasingly embittered as our forests have become overgrown jungles filled with tangled deadfall and blowdown and vast areas of diseased and dying trees all to satisfy the whims of a few who think they know what’s best for the forest and its creatures but seem to be unable to see beyond the border trees into the vast forests.

They can’t see the big picture nor project into the future the immense damage that some of their actions have and will continue to cause, but I hope their eyes are watering, their sinuses are blocked and their lungs are burning as badly as mine as I sit here looking at a wall of gray smoke so thick I can taste it that is coming from the trees they saved but neglected to care for.

Mother Nature is a cruel master. She has no empathy for the weak, the sick, the injured or the old, and she manages with death and fire, so she is now exercising her default management of our forests and her creatures, thanks to the Huggers and their allies. No, they didn’t light the hundreds of fires burning on hundreds of thousands of acres and pumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, but they provided the tinder.

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The above is a very short summary of how we got into such a mess with our national forests and sadly our friends and neighbors who perpetrated this travesty accept no responsibility and still believe they are doing the right thing (sincere but misguided). They are just another example of how small special interest groups have commandeered our legal system and used it to force their will on the majority, who in this instance happen to be the rightful owners, you and me.

This madness should have been stopped long ago before our forests got so sick and before thousands of forest-related jobs were lost and hundreds of businesses were closed, all based on often unsubstantiated assumptions (voodoo science) that forest management practices might have some detrimental effect on the fuzzy butted snail or some other creature.

Therefore, I call upon our elected delegates to take action to introduce and do their best to pass legislation designed to put the U.S. Forest Service back in control of our national forests and once again re-state that our forests are to be managed for multiple use with no one use to take priority to the exclusion of the others.

The multiple uses are recreation (which includes roads and trails accessible to all residents), wildlife, and forest management to provide a healthy forest (this includes management as a sustainable renewal product which entails timber thinning and harvest and when necessary road building). Also needed is legislation to vastly reduce the ability of special interest groups and organizations (spelled obstructionist) to halt legitimate forest management projects without incurring appropriate cost and liability and to greatly reduce the associated paperwork.

Larry Metzger is a resident of Bigfork.