The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views

I continue to fine some nuggets of good information in the Missoulian’s big series on the timber industry in Montana, even though none of the Missoulian articles (to date) have bothered to reach out to anyone in the environmental community and get our perspective on the timber industry, public lands management and the reality that we’re pretty much always blamed for all the timber industry’s woes.

The title of this post is a direct quote from Paul McKenzie, the resource manager for the F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Company in Columbia Falls, Montana, and is taken from this article.

Let the substance of that acknowledgement from Stoltze Lumber sink in for a second. Essentially they are admitting that when they mechanized their lumber mills half their employees were let go, but they still produced the same amount of lumber. And yet, despite this fact, the timber industry in Montana still gets away with blaming all the timber industry worker layoffs on environmentalists? How is that even possible?

Previous Missoulian articles documented the Montana timber industry’s “old-growth forest liquidation” strategy, which dominated the scene in Montana from 1970 to 1990. During those two decades corporations like Champion International tripled logging levels on their own lands – most of it via logging of old-growth forests. But other timber mills in Montana also took part in that old-growth logging frenzy of the 70s and 80s.

As the timber industry was pretty much mowing through all their own old-growth, they turned to the U.S. Forest Service and started pressuring the agency (and politicians) to open up vast swaths of public national forest lands – including old-growth forests and roadless areas – to large-scale logging and roadbuilding schemes.

Apparently, if you believe the timber industry lobbyists and mill owners story now, they actually had no idea that what they were during in previous decades was bad for forests, fish, ecosystems or long-term sustainability.  Of course, I don’t buy that argument for a minute. And you shouldn’t either.

What follows is an action alert from Friends of the Wild Swan. Looks like this is just another proposal (in a long line of similar schemes) to have states and counties take over management of federal public lands, which belong equally to all Americans.

The Lake County Conservation District (LCCD) in Montana has been working on a novel approach to take over management of Flathead National Forest land in the Swan Valley. The Swan Resource Management Study vaguely outlines a plan to take control of 60,000 acres in the Swan Valley in Lake County which then would be managed by the Montana Dept. of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) for logging over the next 100 years.

The LCCD seems to believe that these federal lands represent a cash cow for the county to use for various unnamed projects even though most federal timber sales lose money and DNRC doesn’t have an adequate accounting system to track its costs to see whether they make money from timber sales.

There are obviously flaws with the whole premise of controlling just the timber output on federal lands but the LCCD has been moving along with this since 2014 and is soliciting public comments about whether to proceed with asking Congress to authorize the transfer of management. These are federal public lands and they belong to everyone in the U.S. not just Lake County or Montana residents.

The Swan Valley is rich in wildlife and biological diversity. These wild lands are critical habitat for lynx, bull trout, grizzly bears and other fish and wildlife. Allowing the County to have management jurisdiction for purely logging and its associated roads will adversely affect the habitat for many imperiled animals and fish as well as water quality.

According to their website “LCCD residents, especially those with property in the Swan Valley, will be asked their opinion. LCCD wants to know if there is adequate local community support to request Montana’s governor and legislature to begin working on State legislation that would support the establishment of the proposed Conservation Forest. Conversely, LCCD wants to know if the study should be suspended and the idea of a Conservation Forest tabled.”

In an undated letter on the website it says that environmental groups, Lake County residents, legislators and others have been notified of the public meeting on December 7th at the Swan Lake Clubhouse at6:30 pm. However, even though Friends of the Wild Swan attended the previous meeting in 2014 and submitted comments we have not been notified nor have Lake County residents.

Please attend this meeting if you are able or send a letter to the LCCD and Lake CountyCommissioners — tell them:

• This is a bad idea and no more taxpayer funds should be spent on it,

• These wild lands are too valuable for their clean water, fish and wildlife and must be maintained for those values,

• These are federal lands that belong to everyone in the United States, not just Lake County residents. Any activities on Forest Service land must be in compliance with federal laws like the Endangered Species Act, National Forest Management Act, Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act.

We need to let them know loud and clear that their proposal is not a viable option for our precious public lands.

For more information go to: www.swanforestinitiative.org

Send comments to the LCCD at [email protected] or by mail to 64352 US Hwy 93, Ronan, MT  59864 and to the Lake County Commissioners at [email protected] or by mail to CountyCourthouse, Room 211, 106 4th Ave E., Polson, MT. 59860

1993 was also the year Champion completed its “accelerated old-growth liquidation” strategy. Over the previous 20 years, Champion had tripled its harvest. Much of that took place in the mountains around Primm Meadow.

“That’s why Champion divested,” explained Peter Kolb, Montana State University extension forester. “They said they’re going to convert value on the land that’s not producing a rate of return that’s fair. Once we’ve liquidated that investment, the remaining land has a rate of return that doesn’t meet our business model. They over-harvested their own lands, or from a business perspective, converted it to money for the company.”

The companies then turned to the Forest Service, seeking access to federal timberlands. University of Montana forest economist Alan McQuillan recalled Corrick announcing that Champion needed to buy 60 percent of the Forest Service’s available Montana timber after 1992 or the company wouldn’t be here to stay.

Congress also began receiving reports of “phantom forests” of greatly exaggerated tree inventories and underestimated costs of timber sale preparation and road construction. A General Accounting Office study in 1994 found the Forest Service failed to consider factors like wildlife habitat, sensitive plant species, or recreation in estimating its available timber production area. In one example, the study reported that between 1991 and 1993, costs of preparing timber sales on the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon climbed 147 percent.

But by then, the agency had plunged into its own rethinking of its mission. After selling around 12 billion board-feet of timber a year in the 1980s nationally, the Forest Service reduced its Allowable Sale Quantity, or ASQ, to about one-third that amount by 1993.

Locally, forest supervisors were also cranking back the spigot of federal timber. Lolo National Forest Supervisor Orville Daniels whacked his ASQ from 120 million board-feet to 50 million.

This essay in High Country News on the 40th anniversaries of NFMA and FLPMA is worth a look. It’s written by Martin Nie, director of the Bolle Center for People and Forests in the College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana.

“The National Forest Management Act emerged as a response to the clear-cutting and timber harvest controversies of the 1960s and ’70s. To this day, people differ as to whether it provided much-needed course correction for the Forest Service or instead was a solution to a “nonexistent” problem. What the law does, essentially, is require the agency to prepare management plans for every forest. It also places significant environmental constraints on the Forest Service and gives it a mandate to manage for wildlife diversity.”

Wildlife diversity, yes, but also other resources and values. It is worth noting that the text of the NFMA cites the Multiple-Use, Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 a dozen times or so.

Comments, anyone?

This article from the Yakima (Wash.) Herald, “Future full of doubt for Central Washington timber industry,” highlights a familiar theme: A “small mill is the only one remaining in the Eastern Cascades from Yakima County to the Canadian border. That means while more than a million acres need thinning, there’s no place else buying the wood.”

And, “Experts say the solution is to rebuild the timber industry, but by focusing on small logs now in abundance and encouraging innovative companies that use waste wood for manufactured products or biomass energy to invest here.”

How to do that? The first step is to provide long-term supply agreements, the articles says. IMHO, not just 10 years, but 20, at least.

This topic has been discussed in numerous posts. This report is worth a look: Forest fires in Sierra Nevada driven by past land use. It will not come as a surprise to people who have traced the Indian use of fire in the Sierras and more recent actions/policies.

“We were expecting to find climatic drivers,” said lead co-author Valerie Trouet, a UA associate professor of dendrochronology. “We didn’t find them.”

Instead, the team found the fire regimes corresponded to different types of human occupation and use of the land: the pre-settlement period to the Spanish colonial period; the colonial period to the California Gold Rush; the Gold Rush to the Smokey Bear/ fire suppression period; and the Smokey Bear/fire suppression era to present.

That said, drought is certainly a factor in the current and expanding die-off of pines in the Sierras, but that may not be a climatic change.