A hunger for wild country
There is a strong and growing hunger in Montana for protecting more of our wild places for future generations. A variety of polls show large majorities of Montanans value our wild public lands and want more of them permanently protected.
This is a remarkable fact, especially now, when this desire is one of the few issues that most all Montanans agree on. This makes it a puzzle to understand why we have such a poor record over several decades, to pass legislation to permanently protect some of our special places.
It seems we have somehow allowed politics to get in the way of accomplishing something that is truly popular and inspiring. For years we have allowed a few elected officials to block a host of popular efforts to protect the wild character of deserving public lands.
The presence of these wild places and the wildlife they support is surely one of the things that make Montana special, and inspire our love and affection for our great state. There is ample evidence of widespread support for maintaining many of these special lands in their wild and natural condition.
The most reliable and effective way to keep wild country wild is to designate it as wilderness, under the revered Wilderness Act of 1964. But in the last 30 years, only a tiny total of about 67,000 acres in Montana has been designated as Wilderness. If you do the math, this represents 0.07% of Montana’s 94 million acres. Is this really the best we can do? Are we doomed to lose much of our remaining wild country to roads, machines, and commercial development?
The Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act is a prime example of our remarkable failure to permanently protect our precious wild country. The BCSA agreement was forged over a decade ago by a diverse group of local stakeholders. It includes a number of elements, like major funding for restoration forestry, stream restoration and expansion of motorized and unmotorized recreation. Respected polls show that some 83% of Montanans support this agreement, including the Wilderness component. This number has gone up steadily over the years, starting at around 70% a decade ago.
Today, most of the elements in the agreement have been completed, but the wilderness recommendation has been stuck in limbo for years, blocked by Sen. Steve Daines. What gives when a U.S. senator from Montana actively opposes a bill supported by 83% of the people he is supposed to represent?
For some reason he has been blocking this initiative, along with a host of similar proposals from around the state. This is in spite of the fact that polls show strong support for the proposals from both east and west, Republicans and Democrats, old and young. So, isn’t it past time that we all make it clear that we will not stand by while the wishes of so many Montanans are thwarted?
Our hunger to protect priority wild country has been ignored for too long. Let’s let Sen. Daines know how we feel about playing games with our precious wild public lands.
Doug Ferrell lives in Trout Creek.