Paul Thomas Richards US Sen. Tester Slips Bill Calling for Mandatory Taxpayer-Subsidized Logging of Public Lands into Omnibus Spending Bill
Sets dangerous precedents for forest management, endangers wildlife, and amounts to a $140 million gift to the timber industry courtesy of taxpayers.
If you liked what President Barack Obama and his Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar did in the Gulf of Mexico: Leasing 53 million acres in the Gulf during Obama’s first year in office (more than any of his predecessors) and approving 5,106 oil drilling wells there, including 591 deepwater drilling rigs; all with no prior environmental analyses, no public participation, no environmental safeguards, and no restrictions or regulations; thereby creating the worst environmental disaster in the United States of America’s history — then, you’re going to love what Obama and his Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack have planned for the last surviving ecosystem in the U.S. outside of Alaska.
U.S. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), strongly backed by Obama and Vilscak, has a bill that was written in secrecy by timber industry lawyers and timber industry lobbyists, a bill often referred to as the “Tester Wildlands Logging Bill,” that was unable to withstand scrutiny from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee due to the financial and environmental costs of its Congressionally-mandated logging quotas, but has now somehow magically appeared on pages 893 to 942 of the 1,942-page $1.3 trillion Senate Omnibus Spending Bill.
An analysis of the spending bill headlined “Earmarkers Feast on Pork One Last Time Before Diet,” by The Associated Press, reads:
“The spending barons on Capitol Hill, long used to muscling past opponents of bills larded with pet projects, are seeking one last victory before tea party-backed GOP insurgents storm Congress intent on ending the good old days of pork-barrel politics. You might call it the last running of the old bulls in Congress.
In the waning days of the lame duck congressional session, Democrats controlling the Senate — in collaboration with a handful of old school Republicans — are pushing to wrap $1.27 trillion worth of unfinished budget work into a single “omnibus” appropriations bill.
Their 1,900-plus-page bill comes to the floor this week stuffed with provisions sought by lawmakers. It contains thousands of pet projects, known as earmarks, pushed by Democratic and GOP senators alike — despite a pledge by Republicans to give up such projects next year.”
Matthew Koehler, executive director of the WildWest Institute, called the sudden appearance of Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill in the “must pass” appropriations measure that funds the federal government for 2011 “underhanded.”
“Let’s get this straight,” Matthew Koehler told the Great Falls Tribune on December 14, 2010. “Senator Tester’s bill never made it out of the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, never made it to the floor of the U.S. Senate, and was never introduced in the U.S. House. It’s unfortunate that Senator Tester is pursuing such a questionable, and some might say underhanded, tactic to pass this bill. Clearly, if this bill was as great as Senator Tester says it is, he wouldn’t have to resort to this questionable 11th-hour strategy.”
Over the last two years, Tester has used six different names for his bill. Until Tuesday, it was known as the “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act.” But, it was inserted into the Senate Omnibus Spending Bill entitled the “Montana Forest Jobs and Restoration Initiative.” Whatever it is called, here’s what Tester’s bill does:
1. Designates 660,000 acres, or 6.6 percent to 7.3 percent, of eligible federal (Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management) roadless wildlands in Montana as Wilderness, depending on whose numbers are used.
2. Opens 92.7 percent to 93.4 percent of Wilderness-eligible federal roadless wildlands in Montana to roading, logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other industrial development (again, depending on whose numbers are used). Court action will likely determine if any of these roadless wildlands might remain protected under provisions of the Clinton Roadless Rule, the Obama Roadless Initiative, and the Montana Wilderness Study Act. Attorneys familiar with public lands laws disagree on whether or not Tester’s bill conveys what is termed “hard release” of 92.7 percent to 93.4 percent of Wilderness-eligible roadless wildlands. Hard release would exempt all roading, logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other industrial development upon these National Forest and Bureau of Land Management wildlands from all federal environmental, scientific, and public participation laws and regulations.
3. Removes more than one million acres of roadless wildlands (1.5 times the land mass of Rhode Island) surrounding Yellowstone National Park in southwest Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest from the protections of the Clinton Roadless Rule, the Obama Roadless Initiative, and the late U.S. Sen. Lee Metcalf’s (D-MT) Montana Wilderness Study Act and opens them for to roading, logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other industrial development. Tester’s bill includes maps that reclassify these currently protected roadless wildlands to a new category, officially designated “Timber Suitable or Open to Harvest.”
4. Withdraws two entire mountain ranges, the Sapphire Mountains and the West Pioneer Mountains, from protection secured from legislation carefully shepherded through Congress in 1977 by the late U.S. Sen. Lee Metcalf (D-MT), a conservation champion.
5. Mandates the roading, logging, and development of more than two-thirds of the Sapphire Mountains and the West Pioneer Mountains. Only high-elevation “rocks and ice” barren tracts would be designated Wilderness. Of the 94,000 acres of public roadless wildlands currently in the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area, designated by Sen. Metcalf, only 53,000 acres would be protected from development. Of the 151,000 acres of public roadless wildlands currently in the West Pioneers Wilderness Study Area, designated by Sen. Metcalf, only 26,000 acres would be protected from development.
6. “Undesignates” the Axolotl Lakes Wilderness Study Area, Bell/Limekiln Canyons Wilderness Study Area, East Fork Blacktail Wilderness Study Area, Henneberry Ridge Wilderness Study Area, and Hidden Pasture Wilderness Study Area. These roadless wildlands would be subjected to “logging without laws,” as Tester’s bill specifically excludes logging them from protective provisions of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
7. Circumvents current National Forest planning laws, procedures, and regulations. Currently, the U.S. Forest Service is required to honestly and scientifically evaluate “site-specific impacts” of proposed logging. Under Tester’s bill, these requirements would be supplanted by a new system of “Landscape Scale Restoration Projects” where Congressionally-mandated logging would take place in the total absence of well-established forest planning procedures that require state-of-the art science, public information, and public involvement.
8. Congressionally mandates timber cutting levels, damn the environmental and financial costs. Instead of decisions being made at local levels by informed forest science professionals, Tester’s bill dictates a one-size-fits-all prescription that places logging above all other uses.
9. Prioritizes roading, logging, and other industrial development over all other uses. Under Tester’s bill, taxpayer-subsidized roading and logging are more important than anything else; be it elk hunting (which would diminish as elk security is logged away by Congressionally-mandated timber cutting), fishing (drastically debilitated by inevitable water degradation caused by unsustainable logging), steady supplies of clean irrigation water for agriculture (logging causes much faster watershed runoffs and dramatically increased sedimentation), pure community water supplies (many Montana cities get their water from nearby public roadless wildlands), diminished wildlife habitats, and the continued existence of numerous rare, threatened, and endangered species.
10. Promotes “logging without laws.” By Congressionally-mandating that timber cuts be placed above all other concerns, Tester’s bill would statutorily exempt roading and timber cutting on National Forest and Bureau of Land Management wildlands from the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act (which Tester’s bill mistakenly calls the “National Environmental Protection Act”), Wilderness Act, National Forest Management Act (that governs National Forests), and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (that governs Bureau of Land Management lands).
Tester claims environmental laws will be adhered to. The uninitiated believe him. However, the initiated know that when Congress mandates timber cutting quotas, federal courts have consistently held that Congressional mandates to cut down the public’s trees always trump federal environmental, public participation, and land use laws and regulations. While Tester’s and the timber industry’s public relations staffs lull the gullible into believing we can “get the cut out and still follow environmental laws,” the courts consistently rule that Congressionally-mandated cutting quotas are paramount to environmental and public participation laws.
This legal track record is available to anyone who can Google. Court precedents are clear: If a conflict in law arises, “the specific overrides the general.” That is, Congressionally-mandated timber cutting quotas preempt such laws as the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Wilderness Act, National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
11. Mandates taxpayer-subsidized timber cutting at least 5,000 acres per year until a total 70,000-acres have been cut on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwest Montana. Forest Service employees and officials readily admit the roadless wildlands of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest are unproductive forestlands containing no commercial timber of any value.
The public wildlands that Tester and the timber industry want to log are east of the Continental Divide and therefore receive very little precipitation. Located on very steep, fragile mountainous slopes with little-to-no soil, minimal rain and snowfall, and extremely short growing seasons (30 to 60 days) due to high altitudes; the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s trees are merely “sticks,” a term coined by Forest Service timber cruisers.
Trees 150 years-old might reach a maximum of ten inch diameters at the bottom. Since they taper considerably, if logged, they are incapable of producing anything except firewood and wood chips. Foresters know that high-altitude lodgepole pine-dominant forests are useless when treated as commodities. Logging trucks carrying these “sticks” bear from 110 to 150 trees in one truckload.
Due to these limiting factors, Tester’s bill, if not removed from the Omnibus Spending Bill, will cost the public at least $1,400 per acre to log its mandated 70,000 acres of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and its mandated 30,000 acres in the Kootenai National Forest. “This $140,000,000 gift to the timber industry is nothing more than corporate welfare,” said Michael Garrity, an economist and executive director for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
12. Ignores historical timber cuts from the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. Tester claims that Congressionally-mandated and taxpayer-subsidized timber cutting will come from the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s “suitable timber base” and that inventoried roadless areas are not threatened. But, Tester did not involve the Forest Service in any phase of his top-secret bill writing sessions with the timber industry. If he had, Tester would know that Forest Service foresters have established the Forest’s sustainable yearly harvest at a maximum of 500 acres. The most the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest has ever cut, even during the housing boom, was 2,800 acres a year.
13. Congressionally-mandates a cut of at least 30,000 acres of prime grizzly bear habitat in northwest Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, causing disruptions that bear biologists say will force the rapidly-dwindling and endangered population of grizzly bears into insecure habitats, more conflicts with humans, and, ultimately, extinction. Much of the Kootenai National Forest already looks like moonscape from decades of overcutting.
14. Violates Tester’s 2006 campaign promises to “protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.” “Senator Tester broke two campaign promises,” said Garrity. “When Senator Tester ran against Senator Burns, he promised to protect all roadless areas and not use riders for public lands legislation. Senator Tester’s rider opens up at least one million acres of some of the best elk hunting in the world to clearcutting. Thanks to Senator Tester we can kiss grizzly bears in the Yaak, the smallest grizzly bear population in the world, goodbye.”
15. Alienates Tester’s main supporters. In the November 7, 2006, general election, Tester defeated Burns by less than 1 percent of the vote, a razor-thin 3,562 votes. Conservationists provided the margin of victory that allowed Tester to defeat incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns. In tacking solely towards the timber industry, moneyed corporations that never previously supported him in any fashion, Tester has abandoned his true constituency.
16. Contains no Congressional mandates for any reclamation or restoration of roaded, logged, and developed National Forest lands and watersheds. If restoration is attempted, scientists believe it will likely fail, due to the high altitudes, steep slopes, no soil, minimal precipitation (east of the Continental Divide), extremely short growing seasons, and global climate change, which has already stressed high altitude forests to their breaking points (for example, high altitude species such as white bark pines and pikas are fast approaching extinction). Such extreme conditions create timber “mining,” rather than sustainable forestry.
17. Disenfranchises public lands stakeholders throughout the nation unable to personally attend on-site “resource advisory committees.”
18. Eliminates long-established Forest Service citizen participation procedures, including appeals of illegal and environmentally destructive roading, logging, and development.
19. Promotes the burning of forest biomass in power plants, a practice even more polluting than burning coal. Due to its low energy content, burning wood releases 1.5 times the carbon dioxide than burning coal to produce the same amount of energy. Carbon dioxide is a key component of greenhouse gases causing global climate change.
20. Encourages off-road vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and other motorized access into currently roadless Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management Wilderness-eligible wildlands.
21. “Undesignates” the Axolotl Lakes Wilderness Study Area, Bell/Limekiln Canyons Wilderness Study Area, East Fork Blacktail/Blacktail Mountains Wilderness Study Area, Farlin Creek Wilderness Study Area, Henneberry Ridge Wilderness Study Area, Humbug Spires Wilderness Study Area, Ruby Mountains Wilderness Study Area, and Hidden Pasture Wilderness Study Area. These roadless wildlands would be subjected to “logging without laws,” as Tester’s bill excludes their roading and logging from protective provisions of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
22. Overrides legitimate forest planning processes that involve full public information and participation.
23. Severely impacts at-risk, rare, threatened, and endangered species. Since the Tester bill Congressionally-mandates timber cuts, curtails forest planning and public involvement, and severely restricts the Forest Service from accurately assessing logging’s impacts; environmental protections provided by the Endangered Species Act will be preempted.
By forcing unsustainable industrial-scale logging upon our fragile public wildlands, Tester’s bill would irrevocably harm essential habitats of rare, threatened, and endangered species that characterize the wild nature of the northern Rockies, such as the gray wolf, bull trout, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, elk, arctic grayling, northern goshawk, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, Montana vole, sage thrasher, wild bison, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, and grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal).
24. Ignores the scientific need to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species. Conservation biologists have long understood the need to protect these different elevation habitats and dependent species with designated core areas, buffer zones, and connecting biological corridors, or linkages.
More recently, scientists have documented that forest habitats are changing radically, due to global climate change. The species depending on our National Forests for survival are increasingly stressed by climate change and are increasingly in need of broader migration opportunities.
25. Eliminates essential core habitats and severs connecting roadless biological and botanical corridors, or linkages, between the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Salmon-Selway Ecosystem, and the Glacier/Bob Marshall Ecosystem.
Collectively, these ecosystems and connecting wildlands comprise the Northern Rockies Ecosystem. By fragmenting all of these public wildlands, Tester’s bill would spell the end of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, the ONLY functioning ecosystem with all its native species remaining in the lower 49 states.
26. Extirpates wildlife species. Because the Tester bill overrides the Endangered Species Act, promotes “logging without laws,” and severely restricts Forest Service scientists from accurately assessing logging’s impacts, the public will never know the full extent to which at-risk secluded, rare, threatened, and endangered species will be adversely impacted. Species such as wolverine, pika, and pure strain cutthroat trout are already teetering on the brink of extinction.
27. Pretends there is a demand for timber. There is no demand for sawmills’ lumber. Tester’s bill is blatantly undisguised in its privatization of public resources and its forcing public assumption of private timber corporations’ extensive debts and liabilities.
A mere four corporations: Pyramid Mountain Lumber (Seeley Lake), Roseburg Lumber (Missoula), RY Timber (Townsend and Livingston), and Sun Mountain Lumber (Deerlodge) will receive the benefits of $140 million, with taxpayers picking up the tab in tax dollars spent, watersheds degraded, habitats lost, endangered species exterminated, and public wildlands destroyed. Tester’s bill is more corporate pork, plain and simple.
Editor’s Notes:
A Montana-based print and broadcast journalist with more than 42 years’ experience, Paul Richards specializes in Western politics and resource issues. CLICK HERE to read many postings from retired Forest Service officials and leading conservationists directly relating to this issue.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards
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Paul Thomas Richards
MULTI-MULTI-MILLIONAIRE LAND DEVELOPER US REP DENNY REHBERG LEADS FANTASY LIFE AS A COWBOY!
ALTERNET EXCLUSIVE!
This week, U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg (Far-Right-R-MT) will hold what are expected to be highly emotional “Wolf Impact Hearings” throughout western Montana. For masochists wanting to attend, Rehberg’s Congressional hearings are slated for October 5 in Dillon and Hamilton and October 6 in Kalispell. For specific site locations and lists of those testifying, click HERE.
Of course, the first person to testify at each and every hearing is Rep. Denny Rehberg himself. That’s OK. It’s his show. But, my beef is that Rehberg has officially listed himself as a genuine “Montana Rancher” from Billings.
Denny Rehberg is so very proud of being a “Montana Rancher!”
Check out the beginning sentence of Rehberg’s official biography from his Congressional Web site: “U.S. Congressman Denny Rehberg, in his fifth term representing the state of Montana, is a fifth generation Montana rancher.”
For two decades now, every Montanan has been exposed to countless photos of “Rancher” Denny Rehberg in his shitty cowboy boots, rolled up shirtsleeves, and absolutely perfect cowboy hats. The shit on the boots is because Montana ranchers are not stupid. They know full well that there is NO rancher, ANYWHERE in Montana that does not have shit on his or her boots.
As for the absolutely perfect cowboy hats, most ranchers restrict them solely to County Fairs and Rodeos. There is only one other exception: Genuine Montana ranchers MIGHT wear their absolutely perfect cowboy hats to basketball games, but ONLY with the following strict caveats:
1. No normal basketball games;
2. No preliminary rounds of the playoffs; and
3. IF, and only IF, their teams survive the preliminaries and actually make it to the Montana State Class B or Class C State Finals, THEN and only THEN will real Montana ranchers bring out their absolutely perfect cowboy hats.
The rest of the year, Montana ranchers wear their normal working cowboy hats. Around the ranch, into town, to the hardware store, to regular basketball and football games, school board meetings, even to bed, especially during calving season.
Montana ranchers’ normal working cowboy hats are uniformly dusty, dirty, sweaty, and, quite honestly, smelly.
But, not Denny Rehberg’s! His cowboy hats are always absolutely perfect and they never smell. And, because Rehberg wears absolutely perfect cowboy hats all the time in order to convince us that he is a genuine “Montana Rancher,” it is quite easy to discern he is not a genuine Montana rancher.
CLEARLY A “DUDE”
Clearly, Denny Rehberg is just a “dude.” Not California-speak “dude,” mind you. But, “dude,” in the original old-timer cowboy pejorative for a “dandy” or “city dweller.”
In fact, Rehberg is such a “dude,” he even buys and sometimes wears those incredibly expensive and embarrassingly tailored “Western” suits that no self-respecting genuine Montana rancher would be caught dead in. Actually, that is the ONLY time they wear their “silly suits”—in their caskets!
It’s sad when politicians buy into their own hubris. Rehberg actually thinks he is a rancher!!
There is just one small problem. Denny Rehberg is NOT a rancher! Rehberg is merely a pitiful cowboy wannabe.
In the real world, Denny Rehberg is a speculator, land developer, and subdivider. The reason he is one of the richest men in Montana and one of the wealthiest members of the U.S. House of Representatives is sheer, dumb luck and pure opportunism.
Through the years, Rehberg made his millions upon millions by chopping up his family’s once-authentic ranch into very tiny little bits and selling these tiny little bits to out-of-staters for astronomical prices.
Rehberg’s extensive land holdings have seen neither cow, nor bull, nor horse, nor calf since 1988. That is 22 years of all hat and no beef! Now, the actual verifiable electronic records only go back as far as 1993. But, that is still 17 full years of all hat and no beef!
“We were land rich, but cash poor,” Rehberg told a reporter two years ago, somehow maintaining a straight face. Sure, it’s good “pity-poor-me” false humility, but it is pure unmitigated bullshit; perhaps the only authentic bullshit Rehberg has had anything to do with for the last 17 to 22 years.
Time after time, Rehberg pulls his infamous, but ever-so-sincere, “Montana Rancher” con, with reporter after reporter, editor after editor. And somehow, over the last two decades, he hasn’t been caught!
Maybe Montana editors and reporters just aren’t that smart. They’ve unquestioningly bought into and echo-chambered Rehberg’s “pity poor me” “Montana Rancher” cornball spiel throughout the state for a full 20 years now. All the while, this “pity poor me” genuine “Montana Rancher” has been peddling “authentic” new “ranchhouses” at $1.7 million a pop, minimum.
Because Montana’s corporate-controlled (Lee Enterprises and Gannett) media have consistently remained asleep at the switch, most Montanans still actually believe Denny Rehberg is a rancher!
Adolf Hitler’s criminally brilliant propaganda minister, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels is reputed to have said “If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes truth.” And: “The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.”
So far, lying has worked quite well for Denny Rehberg. To date, Montana media fully subscribe to his genuine “Montana Rancher” Big Lie. To the best of my knowledge, Rehberg has never been correctly and accurately identified or described as a land developer and subdivider in ANY major news or wire service story over his last 17 to 22 livestock-free years.
This week, Rehberg will again unabashedly play his certified fifth-generation “Montana Rancher” card for all those unknowing saps attending his anti-wolf Congressional hearings this week in Dillon, Hamilton, and Kalispell. And, deprived of the truth, these unknowing saps will respect Denny Rehberg, because, after all, he is a genuine fifth-generation Montana Rancher. (If distasteful reality is allowed to intrude, the fourth-generation’s Jack Rehberg was actually a professional lobbyist for the oil industry).
It’s fun to play cowboy! This is Montana! Everybody loves ranchers! And, fifth-generation! Wow! To many, that means the Rehbergs were here before the Indians!
With no cows, no bulls, no calves, no horses, no NOTHING, except a whole bunch of two-million-dollar “ranchhouses,” Rehberg steadfastly insists he is a “Montana Rancher.” Election after election, Denny Rehberg has played the cowboy card and won, big-time!
For decades now, Denny Rehberg has successfully flimflammed Montana and national media with his carefully-crafted-burnished-and-targeted public relations scam, ultimately designed to warm the cockles of all hearts of steely Montana ranchers, claiming that he is one of them!
Every election, we Montanans who are grounded in reality ask: Are the corporate media editors and reporters really that stupid? Are they drugged? Sedated? Naïve? Numbed by alcohol or cynicism? Insane? Or, just plain sold out?
Where are the young and innocent to point out, as with “The Emperor’s New Clothes:” “Who is this clown parading around with no clothes on?” Or, in this situation, “Who is this so-called self-proclaimed ‘Montana Rancher’ that has NO livestock?”
Watch Montana and national media closely for the next month. See if they report the truth.
Or, will they relegate themselves to parroting the Company line: The so-oft-told-lie-that-it-is-now-Truth that a multi-multi-millionaire livestock-free land developer and subdivider can, every election season, somehow transmute into a genuine “Montana Rancher?”
Will reporters EVER ask Denny Rehberg, now that he has subdivided everything, exactly what does he ranch? Will they ask Rehberg to name ANY other genuine “Montana Ranchers” that have had neither cow, nor bull, nor horse, nor calf for 17 to 22 years?
It is clearly time for an intervention. Like most interventions, this hard love, although necessary, will prove difficult.
Montana’s servile corporate media have unwaveringly proven themselves incapable.
But, can’t someone somewhere end this insane collective delusion and directly ask Denny Rehberg the actual year that he STOPPED being a rancher? And, in the absence of ANY livestock for 17 to 22 years, doesn’t Rehberg feel just a little bit mendacious, hypocritical, or possibly even disingenuous, continually and ceaselessly promoting himself as a genuine “Montana Rancher?”
There has never been a better time for editors and reporters to undergo instantaneous conversions! Their now-vestigial inquiring minds that originally led them into journalism might be curious: In his fantasies, how many acres does Denny Rehberg ranch? How many dollars do Rehberg’s Fantasy Ranch and imaginary livestock gross? With Rehberg ensconced inside the Beltway, who manages his mirage?
Heck, let’s get it all out in the open, once and for all. Is Denny Rehberg’s Fantasy Ranch somewhere in a make-believe county or country that the rest of us don’t know about? What does Denny’s Fantasy Ranch produce? Fictitious cows with no saturated fats or cholesterol? Phantom emus? Ghost llamas? Pretend buffalo? Fabricated goats? Who knows?
If media allow Rehberg to perpetuate this decades’ long all-hat-and-no-beef flimflam, he will likely be reelected come November.
There has got to me ONE courageous editor somewhere who could sponsor a public questionnaire, poll, or contest between now and Election Day: “Where is Denny Rehberg’s Fantasy Ranch and what exactly does Denny actually do there, besides hate wolves?”
Maybe that oh-so-desperately-needed salt-of-the-Earth editor, still young and innocent at heart, will offer a prize (perhaps a REAL COW!!) for the most entertaining and believable response.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards
"Genuine Montana Rancher" U.S. Rep Denny Rehberg
Photo Courtesy of:
“Dump Denny Rehberg” Facebook Community
Paul Thomas Richards Should Congress Abandon 100 Years of Public Lands Protection to Open a Pandora’s Box of Special Loopholes, Corporate Subsidies, and Dictated Management that Statutorily Excludes the Public?
By: Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg, Executive Director (retired),
The Wilderness Society
I am a fourth-generation Montanan who grew up in a U.S. Forest Service family. Guy Brandborg, my father, served as Supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest from 1935 to 1955.
I still fondly remember Gifford Pinchot, during one of his last western trips, visiting with my father in front of our fireplace. And, I still marvel at Bob Marshall’s one-day hike from White Cap Creek on the Selway River, up and over the Great Divide of the Bitterroot Mountains, and then down Boulder Creek just in time to join my family around the dining room table for supper.
After earning my Bachelors degree in Wildlife Technology in 1949 and my Masters degree in Forestry and Wildlife Management in 1951, I worked over 12 years as a wildlife biologist with the Forest Service and state wildlife agencies in Montana and Idaho. I then served as Assistant Conservation Director with the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, D.C.
I was associated over 20 years with The Wilderness Society, including 12 years as its executive director, from 1964 to 1976. I was privileged to advocate for the protection of our public lands legacy, presenting the case for wild land preservation across the Nation.
During my tenure, Congress passed landmark public lands legislation, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, creating our National Wilderness Preservation System. Since passage of the Wilderness Act, Congress has protected 110 million acres of publicly-owned wild lands as Wilderness.
We also laid the groundwork for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which, when ultimately enacted in 1980, protected as Wilderness over 56 million acres of public wild lands within our National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, and National Forest system.
For more than 70 years, I have been involved with public lands issues.
With this background, it is with deep personal concern that I share reservations about Senator Jon Tester’s “Logging and Recreation Bill,” S. 1470.
This measure, if enacted, poses a serious threat to our National Forests. The Forest Service itself has determined the bill’s mandatory logging quotas to be unachievable, unsustainable, and unaffordable.
Senator Tester’s ill-advised bill was conceived in private and written by five logging corporations and a few conservation “collaborators.”
Deliberations purposefully excluded major players – the Forest Service, local county governments, watershed and irrigation interests, local and state land, wildlife, and wilderness interests, and a broad segment of other user groups – who have concern for the long-term protection of our National Forests.
The Tester Logging Bill undermines laws and administrative procedures that have served well to protect our Nation’s public estate. These laws and regulations require use of scientific management and public processes open to all citizens.
Objective review of the Tester Logging Bill brings these questions to mind:
1. Are Congressionally-dictated quotas for logging sub-marginal and uneconomic timber in the long-term interest of our National Forests and adjacent communities?
2. Does unsustainable industrial-scale logging of nonproductive federal lands offer the best employment for workers, when compared to sustainable forest and watershed restoration programs?
3. Instead of subsidizing roading and logging of fragile forestlands lacking commercial timber, could we better place our priorities upon the plentiful jobs provided by stream bank restorations, culvert maintenance, road obliterations and reclamations, habitat restorations, tree plantings, and selective thinning within designated community protection zones?
4. Should Congress abandon over 100 years of federal resource protection laws, set in place through bipartisan actions of 50 Congresses, and begin dispensing our National Forests to any interest group that gains the ear of any Representative or Senator?
5. Is it wise to set this calamitous precedent from which any member of Congress could dictate the exploitation of public lands, thereby severing our National Forest system into 535 separate Congressional fiefdoms?
6. Do we really want to open this Pandora’s Box of special loopholes, corporate subsidies, and dictated federal lands management that statutorily excludes the public?
In years past, Congress responded to overwhelming public sentiment to protect our National Forests from raids of special interest groups.
Now, we, the people of the United States, must again raise our voices to oppose this reckless attempt to break apart our National Forest system!
————————————————————————————
Editor’s Notes:
This Op-Ed is derived from Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg’s extensive analysis of the Tester Logging Bill, published under the heading “Former Wilderness Society Chief Opposes Tester Wild Lands Logging Bill,” and available by clicking HERE.
Dr. Brandborg encourages other media to publish and post this Op-Ed. To obtain permission or further information, contact Dr. Brandborg at: 647 Foley Lane; Hamilton, MT 59840; Ph: 406-375-1122.
Many more details about the Tester Logging Bill, also known as the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, are available throughout AlterNet’s Dispatches from the Wildlands and at the Web site of the Last, Best Place Wildlands Campaign.
Dr. Brandborg is the recipient of the “Robert Marshall Award,” The Wilderness Society’s most prestigious honor. He currently lives in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley with his wife, Anna Vee.
Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg, Executive Director (retired), The Wilderness Society
Dispatches from the Wildlands™
©2010, Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg and Paul Richards
Paul Thomas Richards Legendary American Folksinger, Backcountry Traveler,
and Wilderness Advocate
James “Walkin’ Jim” Stoltz
Returns to Earth
Legendary American folksinger, backcountry traveler, and wilderness advocate James “Walkin’ Jim” Stoltz passed late Friday night, September 3, 2010, at St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena, Montana.
Stoltz, age 57, a veteran performer for 35 years with 12 CDs, one DVD and several books to his credit, earned his nickname “Walkin’ Jim,” by hiking more than 28,000 miles through wild country in North America. Packing a guitar and penning extraordinary lyrics along the trails, Walkin’ Jim’s always-humble-yet-strikingly-powerful songs voiced enormous respect and appreciation for the Earth, its wild places, and the wild critters that he carefully studied and truly adored.
A one-of-a-kind performer known for his powerful baritone timbre, stunning photography, humorous and elucidative stories, inspirational poetry, literally awesome lyrics, and emotion-packed vocals, Walkin’ Jim Stoltz toured extensively throughout North America for more than 35 years. His last public performance in Montana, where he lived, was on March 6, 2010, in Missoula, where he played a benefit concert and celebration for the Last, Best Place Wildlands Campaign and Wilderness Watch.
In addition to being a co-founder of the Last, Best Place Wildlands Campaign, Walkin’ Jim Stoltz co-founded Musicians United to Sustain the Environment (MUSE) to raise funds for designating unprotected public roadless wildlands as official Wilderness, award grants to grassroots conservation organizations, and to “utilize music to promote environmental awareness and protection of wild lands, wild waters, and wild lives. We are particularly interested in efforts to protect endangered or threatened species, protection of our nation’s waters, and preserving and restoring wildland habitats. Environmental education for our young — the soon-to-be stewards of our natural heritage – is also very important to us,” Walkin’ Jim wrote when he founded the group with Craig Wagner in 1998. Walkin’ Jim staffed Musicians United to Sustain the Environment until his death.
Musicians United to Sustain the Environment (MUSE) features such luminaries as Dakota Sid Clifford, Craig Wagner, Joanne Rand, Magpie, Libby Roderick, Paul Winter, Dana Lyons, Susan Grace, Karen Goldberg, Alice Di Micele, Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, David Elias, Joyce Rouse, Peter and Lou Berryman, Lydia Adams Davis, John McCutcheon, Larry Long, Country Joe McDonald, Casey Neill, Jez Lowe, Kate Bennett, Katherine Archer, Keith Hammer, Leah Wolfsong, Pete Seeger, Steve Schuch, Kat Eggleston, Bill Oliver, Tom Vincent, Betty and the Baby Boomers, Dean Stevens, Cindy Kallet, Tom Paxton, Tish Hinojosa, Gordon Bok, Emma’s Revolution, Bob Zentz, Josh White, Jr., and Paul Todd.
Grassroots conservation groups that have received grants from MUSE include: Hells Canyon Preservation Council, Friends of the Clearwater, Northwoods Wilderness Recovery, Swan View Coalition, Center for Environmental Equity, Friends of the Bitterroot, Northwest Ecosystem Alliance (now called Conservation Northwest), Native Forest Network, Wild Things Unlimited, Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project, Predator Conservation Alliance (now called Keystone Conservation), American Wildlands, RESTORE The North Woods, Big Sky Wildcare, Natural Resources Council of Maine, Oregon Natural Desert Association, Conservation Leader’s Network, Western Watersheds Project, Endangered Species Coalition, The Heartwood Forest Council, and Forever Wild.
In 2006, beset by cancer, Walkin’ Jim Stoltz organized a 45-state outreach tour with other musicians and authors (many from MUSE), and worked with hundreds of community organizations to support clean water and to protect all public roadless wildlands and their dependent wildlife species. In tribute, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency honored Stoltz with its “Outstanding Achievement Award” for his advocacy for nature and Wilderness across America.
Walkin’ Jim Stoltz was featured on radio and television shows and syndicated programs throughout North America, including National Public Radio in the United States and CBC/Radio-Canada.
CDs, DVDs, Books, Gift Cards, Free Songs, Chords, and Lyrics:
Click HERE to listen to full versions of some of Walkin’ Jim’s songs about North American Wildlands.
Click HERE to download up to 14 free songs, straight from the heart of Walkin’ Jim.
Click HERE for one-minute-long clips from many more Walkin’ Jim songs.
Click HERE for lyrics and chords of Walkin’ Jim’s songs.
Children are encouraged to visit “Walkin’ Jim’s Kid’s Corner” by clicking HERE. Click HERE to read TRUE animal stories written by Walkin’ Jim’s many kid fans. Click HERE for the CD that Walkin’ Jim wrote especially for kids (includes the classics: Manfred the Mopey Moose, Slugs and Bugs, It Ain’t Easy Being An Ol’ Grizzly Bear, Pika, Pika , and Wild Things Need Wild Places).
After you are tantalized by the above, click HERE to purchase Walkin’ Jim’s CDs, DVDs, Books, and Gift Cards.
Other Information and Resources:
Wildlands advocates recently dedicated The Walkin’ Jim Hiking Trail, close to Arizona’s Hells Canyon Wilderness and the Center for Biological Diversity featured Walkin’ Jim on its Web site.
Visit Walkin’ Jim’s “Keeping it Wild” Web page in which Jim helps Americans take action to protect their endangered public roadless wildlands legacy.
Walkin’ Jim Stoltz was a co-author and dedicated proponent of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) , the “wildest bill on Capitol Hill,” which, when enacted, will designate 24 million acres of our roadless public wildlands legacy in Montana, Idaho, northwestern Wyoming, eastern Washington, and eastern Oregon as Wilderness.
The Northern Rockies Ecosystem is the LAST remaining functioning ecosystem in the lower 49 states where all native species still reside!
The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), now co-sponsored by more than 100 members of the U.S. House of Representatives (for list, click HERE) and tirelessly promoted by Idaho resident and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Carole King, will protect essential habitats for many at-risk species that characterize the Wild Nature of the northern Rockies, such as the gray wolf, bull trout, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, elk, arctic grayling, northern goshawk, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, Montana vole, sage thrasher, wild bison, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal), and, perhaps Walkin’ Jim’s favorite animal, the pika, an extremely rare species, now endangered by global climate change, that lives only at high altitude rocky mountainsides.
(Many are the parents who have been driven to varying states of joy and madness by their kids’ singing Jim’s “Pika, Pika” song, from his much-loved “A Kid for the Wild” CD, over and over and over and over again.)
In the proud tradition of Montana’s famous conservationist and U.S. Senator, the late Lee Metcalf; NREPA will protect the public’s wildlands, wild animals, big game, pristine watersheds, and fisheries that make living in Montana and the Northern Rockies such a special and rare privilege.
To honor his legacy, Walkin’ Jim’s many friends and fans are already lobbying to name one of the first Wilderness Areas to be created by NREPA the “Walkin’ Jim Wilderness Area.” They contend it doesn’t really matter whether the future “Walkin’ Jim Wilderness Area” is in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, or Oregon as, since Walkin’ Jim hiked through public roadless wildlands in all five states that comprise the Northern Rockies Ecosystem. Although Montana was his home base, Walkin’ Jim was equally loyal to all North American roadless areas, no matter in what state or province they were located.
Observations, Memorials, Tributes, Wakes, Celebrations, and Funeral:
Walkin’ Jim’s family and supportive friends assembled in Helena, Montana, during the first ten days of September 2010. A celebration of Jim’s life was held on Wednesday, September 8, 2010, at the Big Sky Ranch, near the town of Unionville, just southwest of Helena.
For the latest news about this observation, funeral details, memorial funds, tributes, and, possibly sometime in 2011, a celebration of Walkin’ Jim’s life, go to the Walkin’ Jim Web site or click HERE.
To converse and share stories with Walkin’ Jim Stoltz’s friends, family, and fans, go to: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Walkin-Jim-Stoltz/113598525318345?v=desc or: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Walkin-Jim-Stoltz/113598525318345?v=stream.
During his prolonged medical care, Walkin’ Jim incurred high bills. Please help Jim’s family defray these extensive medical bills! Click HERE, to make tax-deductible memorial tributes with your credit card to Walkin’ Jim’s Medical Fund. Or, please snail-mail your tax-deductible contributions, accompanied with brief notes explaining your checks are meant to help pay down Walkin’ Jim’s medical expenses, to Musicians United to Sustain the Environment at:
M.U.S.E.
P.O. Box 1512
Helena, MT 59624
Should you require further information, please call Musicians United to Sustain the Environment (MUSE) at 406-449-6252, or please click HERE to e-mail MUSE. THANK YOU!
Personal Note About A Dear, Dear Friend:
Walkin’ Jim’s life was his ministry. Jim walked the talk and he certainly walked the walk!
Jim consistently lived his life with grace and kindness. Jim reached so many people with his wonderfully creative, courageous, positive, gracious and loving energy! Watching him enthrall elementary school kids about with his stories, tall tales, and intimate knowledge about Wild country and its wild inhabitants is an experience never to be forgotten.
Walkin’ Jim will always be a vital wellspring for humans trying their best to live in symbiosis with Earth. Although we may feel pain with Walkin’ Jim’s passing, his legacy—already pure and luminous—will only grow more compelling, as subsequent generations take up Walkin’ Jim’s vocation and become vigorous spokespersons, musicians, poets, writers, lyricists, guitar players, harmonica players, and singers for our pubic roadless wildlands and Wilderness.
Walkin’ Jim Stoltz will always remain our steadfast and true friend. We hold dear so many treasured memories from our time spent with Walkin’ Jim! His sincere, bone-crushing hugs will be forever felt. Our hearts will be continually warmed, every time we experience the Wild that Jim so loved, every time we defend our priceless public wildlands legacy to which Jim devoted his life, every time we ponder Jim’s brilliant poetry and lyrics, every time we hum or sing Jim’s catchy tunes, and every time we again listen to his marvelous voice and heartfelt songs.
Health Complications:
Walkin’ Jim Stoltz had a successful kidney transplant, donated by John Giacalone, on March 16, 2004. In the fall of 2007, Walkin’ Jim learned that he had cancer in his tonsil chords and lymph nodes of his neck. Jim underwent surgery, followed by chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The winter of 2007-2008 was a tough one, as expenses piled up and medical bills consumed most of Jim’s financial resources.
In the summer of 2008, with his characteristic indomitability, Walkin’ Jim underwent his own self-prescribed “Wilderness Therapy” and walked 460 miles through the mountains of Idaho and Montana. In 2009, Jim walked an incredible 500-mile loop through the remote mountain ranges of eastern Nevada.
In 2009 and early 2010, Walkin’ Jim toured unwaveringly with his ever-popular “Forever Wild” show, combining live music, story-telling, and poetry with stunning, multi-image slideshows to create a stirring celebration of the natural world.
Photos, taken by Janet Zimmerman and others, from Walkin’ Jim’s March 6, 2010, benefit concert and celebration in Missoula, Montana, for the Last, Best Place Wildlands Campaign and Wilderness Watch are available upon request.
Walkin’ Jim’s aplomb was such that most of those attending his final Montana concert were unaware of his throat cancer, ensuing surgery, and extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
After Walkin’ Jim returned from his spring 2010 concert tour, doctors in Seattle and Billings found that his cancer has spread. Jim’s bills for hospitals, doctors, tests, high-cost pharmaceuticals, and medical-related travel grew exponentially.
In years past, Walkin’ Jim chose to raise funds to help pay for his kidney transplant through the National Transplant Assistance Fund (NTAF). Thanks to the generosity of Jim’s many friends and fans, those transplant-related expenses have largely been addressed.
Resolving Current Medical Expenses and Bills:
Now, Walkin’ Jim’s family urgently needs Jim’s friends and fans to again help defray extensive medical bills; these costs incurred from Jim’s cancer treatments.
Ways You Can Help:
1. Please click HERE, to make tax-deductible donations with your credit card to Walkin’ Jim’s Medical Fund. Or, snail-mail your tax-deductible contributions to: Musicians United to Sustain the Environment; M.U.S.E.; P.O. Box 1512; Helena, MT 59624. Should you require further information, please call MUSE at 406-449-6252, or please click HERE to e-mail MUSE.
2. Please click HERE to purchase Walkin’ Jim’s CDs, DVDs, Books, and Gift Cards. In addition to enriching your life and spreading Jim’s message to friends, family, and loved ones; your buying Jim’s CDs, DVDs, books, and gift cards will help his family resolve Jim’s high medical bills.
3. Walkin’ Jim’s family may designate other nonprofit organizations to receive donations, tributes, memorials, and contributions to continue Walkin’ Jim’s legacy. Click HERE to keep informed concerning Jim’s family’s decisions and please contribute generously in Jim’s name.
4. If you want to learn more about the general mission of the National Transplant Assistance Fund (NTAF), that helped Walkin’ Jim in the past, click HERE. Through 26 years of service, NTAF has helped more than 4,000 patients raise $64 million for uninsured medical expenses. If you want to contribute to NTAF in Walkin’ Jim’s name, please click HERE. (Please note: These contributions will NOT help pay Walkin’ Jim’s current cancer treatment bills–They will go directly into NTAF’s general fund to help pay medical bills for OTHER uninsured transplant patients who need transplants.) If you want to keep posted about NTAF, subscribe to the organization’s bi-monthly e-mail newsletter, by clicking HERE.
His Spirit is Still on the Run:
As I write this, I listen to Walkin’ Jim’s seminal “Spirit is Still on the Run,” the original classic vinyl album, complete with Jim’s kind personal note inscribed when he gave me the album 26 years ago. The album’s incredible title track describes a young person’s plaintive queries—“What Happened?”
Spirit Is Still On The Run
By Walkin’ Jim Stoltz
Daddy, what ever happened to the old buffalo,
I know they don’t roam here no more,
Because at school today, they say they’ve gone away,
But no one ever says just what for.
Well now listen my son, I’ll tell you how the West was won,
How the herds fell to the big needle guns,
But, the ghosts of them herds still pound o’er the earth,
And, their Spirit is still on the run.
(Chorus̶ —Upton Elementary School children singing in unison with Walkin’ Jim):
Yes, their spirit is still on the run, it’s the American dream movin’ on,
Their memory is free, left to you and to me, and the Spirit is still on the run.
Daddy, what ever happened to the ol’ grizzly bear,
I know he once roamed the west wide,
But at school today they say he’s pushed back to stay,
In the mountains where he has to hide.
Well, now listen my son, I’ll tell you about these proud ones,
Where they stalk, all others walk small,
But man to his shame, can’t stand the untamed,
And there’s some that wouldn’t have him at all.
(Chorus̶ —Upton Elementary School children singing in unison with Walkin’ Jim):
Yes, their spirit is still on the run, it’s the American dream movin’ on,
Their memory is free, left to you and to me, and the Spirit is still on the run.
Daddy, what ever happened to the big piney forests,
And the prairies that stretched out like seas,
Because the schoolbooks they say, these were all in the way,
When the settlers come a-swarmin’ like bees,
Now, listen my son, yes, all these have gone,
It’s sad, but it’s not been in vain
Their life’s blood was bought and with the Spirit it brought,
A whole country was born into fame.
(Bridge):
And all that have died or been swept to the side,
They still give us hope every one,
They give us dreams of the free, what has been and can be,
And their Spirit is still on the run.
(Chorus̶ —Upton Elementary School children singing in unison with Walkin’ Jim):
Yes, their Spirit is still on the run, it’s the American dream movin’ on,
Their memory is free, left to you and to me, and the Spirit is still on the run.
©1984 by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz and Lone Coyote Records
Walkin’ Jim Music, BMI
For those who are not old-timers enamored with bulky turntables and the good ol’ days of vinyl with absolutely gorgeous record jackets that were actually readable, Jim’s “Spirit is Still on the Run” album has been combined with his equally-great “Forever Wild” album into one CD, so you can now buy BOTH albums for only $14 by clicking HERE. In addition to “Spirit is Still on the Run,” this combined CD also includes the Jim’s indispensible sage counsel contained within “I Walk With the Old Ones” and “Follow Your Heart.”
Follow Your Heart:
For an even greater version of “Follow Your Heart,” guaranteed to give you goose bumps, purchase Walkin’ Jim’s “Oh, What A Life” CD, a remarkable live concert recorded before an enraptured audience at Jim’s beloved Lone Mountain Ranch, where, for decades, Jim hosted popular winter sleigh rides and sing-alongs. For an-all-too-brief snippet from this incredible live performance; once again to feel, hear, and touch Jim, click HERE.
Follow Your Heart
By Walkin’ Jim Stoltz
(VERSE):
In this life that we’re all living with all its twists and turns,
It’s so easy to lose our way, forget the lessons that we learned,
But, the road that leads us on will always bring us back,
Once you’ve walked your own trail, and stepped in your own tracks.
(AUDIENCE HELPS JIM SING THE FOLLOWING CHORUS):
Follow your heart, that’s where to begin
Chase down those dreams and go a-dancin’ with the wind
Listen to the love that you find along the way
Let your light shine in, and sing your life away.
(VERSE):
Truth is a word, but it’s so often hard to find,
Searchin’ through the mirrors offered up by time
To face it on your own, and to look it in the eye
Will take all you have to give, but ain’t it worth the try.
(AUDIENCE AGAIN HELPS JIM SING CHORUS):
Follow your heart, that’s where to begin
Chase down those dreams and go a-dancin’ with the wind
Listen to the love that you find along the way
Let your light shine in, and sing your life away.
(VERSE):
Listen to the song of the Earth as she turns,
Bask in the life of the sun as she burns,
Seek out the power in your own minds eye,
Listen to your heart, it’ll teach you by and by.
(AUDIENCE, ONE MORE TIME, HELPS JIM SING CHORUS):
Follow your heart, that’s where to begin
Chase down those dreams and go a-dancin’ with the wind
Listen to the love that you find along the way
Let your light shine in, and sing your life away.
©1997 by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz
Walkin’ Jim Music, BMI
Forever Wild:
In conclusion, there’s little to say that Walkin’ Jim Stoltz hasn’t already beautifully articulated. Perhaps we should conclude with Walkin’ Jim’s best known anthem, “Forever Wild.”
In 1986, we closed each of our touring “Wild West Exposition” pro-wildlands, pro-Wilderness road shows with this sacred composition. Audiences everywhere always joined the cast of the Wild West Exposition in singing the pleas of Walkin’ Jim’s chorus. At song’s end, as Jim’s final guitar chord resonated and then gradually receded into the absolute stillness of entire crowds held breathless, there were no dry eyes.
Forever Wild
By Walkin’ Jim Stoltz
There’s a magic in the air, that I feel when I am there,
It plays straight to my heart, and lays it all a’bare,
It’s in the cry of the eagle and the deer so meek and mild,
It’s in the rise of a mountain, let it stay Forever Wild.
Forever wild, Forever Wild
Let it stay, Forever Wild.
It’s in all that is not tame, and some that can’t be named,
It’s in the fog down in the valley, and the scent of summer rain,
It’s in the scream of a lion when she’s soundin’ like a child,
It’s in the song of a river, let it stay Forever Wild.
Forever wild, Forever Wild
Let it stay, Forever Wild.
Now the Earth it holds the key to all that shall be free,
It’s in the peace of the desert and the wisdom of the trees,
It’s in the grace of a swan’s wing and the grizzly when she’s riled
It’s in all the love I bear it, let it stay Forever Wild.
Forever wild, Forever Wild
Let it stay, Forever Wild.
There are those of my own kind, they’re runnin’ fast, but goin’ blind
And the only thing they worship, is their God, the dollar sign
We must fight* them with our Spirit, with our might, and with our guile
We must show them that the answer: It must be Forever Wild.
Forever wild, Forever Wild
Let it stay, Forever Wild.
Forever wild, Forever Wild
Let it stay, Forever Wild.
By Walkin’ Jim Stoltz on Wild Wind Records
©1986 by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz
Walkin’ Jim Music BMI
* Editor’s Note: In his most recent concerts, Walkin’ Jim substituted the word “teach” for “fight.”
Just How Big Is the Heart of Humankind?
Now it is time for us to pause, take deep breaths, say prayers for our dear friend, lovingly and respectfully listen to Walkin’ Jim’s “Oh, What a Life,” downloadable HERE for free, weep, and gratefully allow this magnificent gentle soul to return to Mother Earth.
Oh, What A Life We Could Live
By Walkin’ Jim Stoltz
There’s an old owl flyin’ free, and he’s callin’ out to me.
What can I tell him as the big trees fall?
And he slips on through the cracks. Oh, I can’t turn my back,
For his kind is our kind, and the writing’s on the wall.
If we could see this world through the eyes of those
Who keep sharing when there’s nothing left to give
If we could walk this land with respect for all
Oh, what a life we could live.
There’s a salmon swimmin’ deep, her destiny to keep,
How can I tell her, she’s the last of her kind?
Oh, a thousand times around, from the sea to the spawning ground,
What a cost! What a loss! To all memory, and all Time!
If we could see this world through the eyes of those
Who keep sharing when there’s nothing left to give
If we could walk this land with respect for all
Oh, what a life we could live.
Oh, what a life we could live.
Oh, what a life we could live.
If we could walk this land with respect for all
Oh, what a life we could live.
(Bridge):
She wolf howling in the night,
She knows there’s a lesson comin’ soon.
Just how big is the heart of humankind?
Won’t you stand back and give her room?
(Audience now joins Walkin’ Jim on chorus)
If we could see this world through the eyes of those
Who keep sharing when there’s nothing left to give
If we could walk this land with respect for all
Oh, what a life we could live.
Oh, what a life we could live.
Oh, what a life we could live.
If we could walk this land with respect for all
Oh, what a life we could live.
(Audience again joins Walkin’ Jim on chorus):
If we could see this world through the eyes of those
Who keep sharing when there’s nothing left to give
If we could walk this land with respect for all
Oh, what a life we could live.
Oh, what a life we could live.
Oh, what a life we could live.
If we could walk this land with respect for all
Oh, what a life we could live.
(Just Walkin’ Jim):
Oh, what a life we could live.
Oh, what a life we could live.
©1997 by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz
Walkin’ Jim Music, BMI
Legendary Folksinger Walkin' Jim Stoltz Happily Returns to Mother Earth
Jim, thank you for being…..
With the deepest possible love and appreciation,
Your Forever Friend,
Paul Richards
30 Brown’s Gulch Road
Boulder, MT 59632
406-225-4235
Dispatches from the Wildlands:
http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/
(All Walkin’ Jim Stoltz’s Copyrights Accompany His Above Lyrics)
Excepting All of Walkin’ Jim’s Copyrights Above, This Memorial
©201o, Paul Richards, Dispatches from the Wildlands™
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Henry David Thoreau
Editor’s Note: This eulogy utilizes colored underlined “hyperlinks” known as “Uniform Resource Locators” or “URLs.” A URL is also known as a “domain name” or an “Internet address.” To fully activate and utilize these URLs, just go to the hyperlink and push down on your “Ctrl” or “Control” button on our keyboard and left click your mouse.
Walkin' Jim at Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign Celebration in Missoula, MT, on March 6, 2010. Brett Haverstick, Larry Campbell, Walkin' Jim Stoltz, and Paul Richards. (Photo by Janet Zimmerman).
Paul Thomas Richards FORMER WILDERNESS SOCIETY CHIEF OPPOSES TESTER WILD LANDS LOGGING BILL
Statement of Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg,
Former Executive Director of The Wilderness Society,
to the Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests,
U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources,
Concerning S. 1470, “The Tester Logging and Recreation Bill”
FOREWORD:
The following statement was written by Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg, former executive director of The Wilderness Society. As described below, Dr. Brandborg worked more than 20 years with The Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C., including 12 years as the Society’s executive director, from 1964 to 1976.
During Dr. Brandborg’s tenure as the head of The Wilderness Society, the U.S. Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964, landmark legislation that created our National Wilderness Preservation System and designated 9.1 million acres of National Forest wild lands as Wilderness. Since passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, Congress has protected 110 million acres of publicly-owned wild lands as Wilderness.
Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg, Executive Director, Retired, The Wilderness Society
INTRODUCTION:
I am Stewart M. Brandborg. I am a fourth-generation Montanan. For more than 70 years, I have been involved with and worked on public lands issues. I have lived the early and late years of my life in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana.
I grew up in a Forest Service family. Guy M. Brandborg, my father, worked a variety of positions in the Forest Service in Montana and Idaho and served as Supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest from 1935 to 1955. I earned my Bachelor of Science Degree in Wildlife Technology in 1949 and my Master of Science Degree in Forestry and Wildlife Management in 1951 from the University of Montana, where I met my wife, Anna Vee. The University of Montana and its School of Forestry awarded me an Honorary Doctor of Science in 2010.
I worked more than 12 years as a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service and with state wildlife agencies in Montana and Idaho. My early career research work in the Bob Marshall and Selway-Bitterroot Areas gave me early, lifelong appreciation of Montana’s and Idaho’s Wilderness.
I worked for three decades for national environmental organizations and agencies in Washington, D.C. I served for four years as Assistant Conservation Director with the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, D.C. I was then associated over 20 years with The Wilderness Society, including 12 years as its executive director, from 1964 to 1976.
During these years, I was privileged to advocate for the protection of our public lands legacy, presenting the case for wild land preservation across the Nation – from Alaska to Florida – before public agencies and the Congress.
During my tenure, the U.S. Congress passed landmark public lands legislation, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, and laid the groundwork for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which, when ultimately enacted in 1980, protected as wilderness over 56 million acres of public wild lands within our National Park, National Wildlife Refuge, and National Forest Systems.
Since passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, Congress has protected 110 million acres of publicly-owned wild lands as Wilderness.
I submit this information concerning S. 1470 to help the Public Lands and Forests Subcommittee and the entire U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources carry out their responsibilities for wise and farsighted stewardship of our Nation’s priceless public lands legacy, including necessary protection of the public’s wild lands and the irreplaceable species that depend upon these wild lands for their very survival.
S. 1470 Threatens Our National Forests And Other Publicly-Owned Lands
It is with a deep personal concern that I share my insights and reservations about Senator Jon Tester’s Logging and Recreation Bill, S. 1470. This measure, if enacted by Congress, poses a serious threat to our National Forests and other publicly-owned lands. It was conceived in private, it revokes protections currently in place for public lands and it places National Forest management in the hands of local extractive user groups.
I have a special appreciation of Montana’s nine million acres of roadless wild lands, richly endowed with wildlife that is not to be found in such diversity and abundance anywhere else in the world. This grew out of my 12 years of research as a professional wildlife biologist in the Bob Marshall, Selway-Bitterroot, and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Areas, and my experience in National Forest backcountry on timber and range surveys and lookout fireman jobs.
We have the best of it, to be enjoyed by all who value unspoiled, natural ecosystems and the bounty that these public wild lands provide us: Hunters, anglers, students of nature, and the many others who seek solitude, peace of mind, refreshment of spirit, and the privilege of experiencing the best of life in the backcountry.
This wild backcountry must be preserved for those generations who follow us.
S. 1470 Is A Product Of Closed Door Deliberations
The Tester bill is described by its supporters as a product of a collaborative effort that brought all parties – all stakeholders – together in its drafting. In fact, it was conceived and put together by a few corporate logging entities and a half dozen staff members of a few conservation groups.
Major players were excluded from the closed door deliberations – local county governments, watershed and irrigation interests, local and state land, wildlife, and wilderness interests, and a broad segment of other user groups – who have a primary concern for the long-term protection of our National Forests. In forming the Tester bill, a handful of people negotiated behind-the-scenes, in complete absence of much-needed broadly-based public involvement.
S. 1470 Is A Repudiation Of Meaningful Public Involvement
Senator Tester deserves credit for his stated desire to bring people together to work cooperatively in resolving our public land issues. Ultimately, this must occur in our communities, if present polarization and divisive politics are to be overcome in favor of sound, research-based management policies.
But closed-door negotiations between self-appointed agents from a few carefully screened special interest groups are hardly the proper methods for managing our public lands.
From my more than 70 years’ involvement in public lands management, I know firsthand that respectful discussion must encompass extensive research-backed public information and spirited open debate. I know that real cooperation among all members of our communities promotes respect between all parties. This involves processes for bringing people together to build trust and working relationships in which they can honestly express their opinions, hammer out differences, and find common ground.
Meaningful communication concerning our public lands legacy must start with extensive scientific information and continue on to open public review, discussion, and understanding of that information. This will ensure the fullest possible constructive and educational dialogue.
Many of us in Montana would welcome the opportunity to participate in such well-informed and cooperative community building. An important first step in this direction will be a collective decision by all involved to implement genuine grassroots projects for this purpose, avoiding the serious breaches of the public interest that we have seen in the drafting of S. 1470.
Senator Tester’s stated desire to bring people together to work to resolve our public land issues is a good idea but one that Senator Tester clearly did not accomplish. He limited the people he invited to the timber industry that will benefit from his mandated subsidized logging and to a few foundation-funded big environmental groups. Closed-door negotiations between these carefully winnowed and self-appointed circles are hardly the proper methods for managing our public lands.
S. 1470 Revokes Current Protections For Public Wild Lands
The Tester bill places public roadless wild lands in Montana in jeopardy. Specifically authorized are requirements for taxpayer-subsidized roading and logging on 100,000 acres of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and 30,000 acres in the Kootenai National Forest’s critical grizzly bear habitat. Ranges of threatened, endangered, and sensitive species – wolverine, lynx, fisher, grizzly bear, wolf, and bull trout – would be written off for logging and development.
The Tester bill calls for only minimal designations of seriously fragmented “wilderness areas,” and removes the necessary protections for roadless wild lands now provided under the Clinton and Obama Presidential Roadless Initiatives and under the 1977 law, Senate Act 393, carefully shepherded through Congress by Montana’s late Senator Lee Metcalf. If the Tester bill passes, a precedent will be set to allow the greater part of these roadless wild lands to be opened for development without mandated wilderness reviews.
S. 1470 Overrides 100 Years Of Federal Forest Management Policies
Through its maze of prescriptions—acreages mandated for logging, fragmented “wilderness areas,” motorized recreational and vehicle use, etc. —Senator Tester’s bill ignores or abrogates long-established management programs of the U.S. Forest Service and other public land agencies.
The complicated and multitudinous micro-management provisions spelled out in Senator Tester’s bill defy the framework of Federal Laws that Congress has wisely passed to define management policies for our Nation’s public lands over the past 100 years: The Organic Act that established our National Forest System, the Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the National Forest Management Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
In short, Senator Tester’s bill overrides the statutory policies and management requisites that the U.S. Congress enacted for the protection for the 193 million acres of our publicly owned National Forests and Grasslands. It unwisely dictates acreages and deadlines for logging of 100,000 acres of National Forest land. It subverts requirements for habitat preservation of endangered, threatened, and sensitive species.
S. 1470 Threatens Proper Congressional Management Of Other Federal Land
Similarly threatened by the sort of preemption of Federal laws promoted by the Senator Tester’s bill are all of our other Federal land jurisdictions: The National Park System, the National Wildlife Refuge System, and the public domain lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
Responding to the voice of the people, Congress has been successful in protecting our public lands legacy from the raids of special interest groups. Congressional supporters of public lands thwarted the D’Ewart grazing bills of the 1940s and 1950s. The House of Representatives defeated the lumber industry’s National Timber Supply Act of 1970. These bills sought to profit small segments of private users – grazers and lumbermen – at the expense of each of us who share in the ownership and stewardship of these public lands, and our right to use them in ways that best serve the public. In each instance, the U.S. Congress responded when the American people spoke out in opposition to these raids on their public lands legacy.
S. 1470 Places National Forest Management In The Hands Of Local Extractive User Groups
Senator Tester’s bill opens the door to the calamitous precedent from which any one of the 535 members of Congress could dictate how National Forests and other Federally-administered lands would be used. In place of the resource protection of our Federal Laws, management would be dictated by local advisory committees. Local pressures for any special interest – mining, logging, damming, oil and coal development, et al – would come into play solely for the benefit of personal or corporate profits. Senator Tester’s bill’s prescriptive requirements would abrogate the law and administrative procedures that have served so well to protect our public estate through the generations.
If Congress were to endorse Senator Tester’s bill and others like it, more than one hundred years of Federal resource protection laws, set in place through the bipartisan actions of 50 Congresses, could be overridden by prescriptions of any interest group that gained the ear of any Congressman or Senator.
We Need Long-Term Jobs, Revitalized Rural Communities, And Sustainable Local Economies
Objective review of Senator Tester’s bill brings these questions to mind:
1. Is the mandated designation of over 100,000 acres of public National Forest lands for taxpayer-subsidized commercial logging of sub-marginal timber in the long-term interest of our communities?
2. Is industrial-scale subsidized commercial logging the best possible employment for forest-dependent workers, when compared to the economic and environmental benefits of long-neglected forest and watershed restoration programs?
3. Are there better ways to create sustainable local economies? Can Congress better help provide restoration and reclamation jobs, recreation, pure water, clean air, and excellent wildlife habitats for many generations?
4. Instead of subsidizing the roading and logging of fragile and marginal forestlands lacking commercial timber, could not we better place our priorities upon stream bank restoration, culvert maintenance, road obliteration and reclamation, habitat restoration, tree planting, and selective thinning within designated community protection zones?
5. Is it the best role for Congress to exacerbate conflicts between short-term resource extraction and long-term public lands stewardship? Can Congress facilitate the transition from short-term “timber-dependent” communities to long-term “forest-dependent” communities?
S. 1470 Fails To Bring About Long-Term Jobs
With its emphasis on the very short-term, Senator Tester’s bill fails to bring about long-term jobs that will revitalize and sustain our rural communities in the West.
The long-term jobs our rural communities need will only be provided by directly addressing and correcting the Forest Service’s enormous backlog of reclamation, restoration, and habitat improvement programs.
For years, the Forest Service promised these reclamation, restoration, and habitat improvement programs, as conditions for obtaining approval of past timber sales. It is now time for the agency to deliver. Instead of pitting neighbor against neighbor, trying to get the last possible cut out, regardless of cost, Congress needs to honor its stewardship responsibilities.
Let’s look at old logging roads, for example. They have great deleterious effects on forest ecosystems, including dramatically altering natural drainage patterns and causing landslides, changing wildlife behavior, fragmenting wildlife habitat, and promoting weed infestations. Large amounts of sediment originating from roads ultimately reach our National Forest’s streams and rivers, degrading water quality and impairing fish reproduction.
Road decommissioning involves removing culverts and unstable road shoulders, re-contouring to restore natural slopes, and re-vegetation with native species. This restoration mitigates environmental damage, improves aquatic habitats and provides increased security for big game like deer, elk, moose, and bears.
All of this needed work requires heavy machinery and creates highly skilled well-paid jobs for rural economies. As resource extractive industries continue to lose jobs, removal of unnecessary roads and practicing forest restoration have great potential for employment throughout our forest-dependent communities.
Instead of expensive short-term subsidies to four timber corporations to log sub-marginal timber, Congress needs to provide for long-term restoration of National Forests and their watersheds. Reclamation and habitat improvement programs will provide perpetual dividends for eons to come.
We will all benefit when forest restoration provides extensive recreation and restoration jobs, steady flows of pure water for agricultural irrigation and community water systems, better fishing and hunting, improved wildlife habitats, increased public recreational opportunities, more non-consumptive resource utilization, and continued sustainable harvests from our fiber producing lands.
S. 1470 Does Not Provide Needed “Shovel-Ready” Forest Jobs
Senator Tester is right concerning one thing: People in our forest-dependent communities need and deserve work. If there is to be subsidized timber cutting and tree thinning, let it occur in the critical community protection zones that most need it. Fuels reduction projects in these zones, based upon the best available science, will make our communities safer and enhance habitat. Forest restoration jobs, described in the previous section, will make our forest-dependent communities more stable.
We are talking about a fresh beginning for our National Forests – a bright new day that we welcome with open arms. The desperate need for these “shovel ready” community protection zone fuels reduction and forest restoration jobs is now firmly proven. We must now call upon Congress to think creatively and adequately fund the abundant employment opportunities produced by needed community protection and forest restoration.
Of course, our wild lands’ backcountry will continue providing virtually unlimited long-term benefits: Jobs for rangers, trail crews, scientific researchers, packers, guides, outfitters, non-extractive resource users and student conservation corps, and public recreation for hunting, fishing, backpacking and trail riding.
S. 1470 Continues A Failed Policy of Taxpayer-Subsidized Logging
Ninety percent of National Forest logging is subsidized through the agency’s road construction investment and the sale of timber at below-cost prices. Will untouched watersheds, wilderness, and wildlife preservation values be better served by opening these now-Presidentially-and-Congressionally-protected roadless wild lands to short-term taxpayer-subsidized resource extraction, as opposed to their being preserved for the long term as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System?
S. 1470 Constitutes A Direct Threat To Sound Public Lands Management
While we must encourage efforts to bring every public land shareholder – each of us – to the table in answering these and the myriad of other questions brought into focus by Senator Tester’s bill, we come down to the pivotal questions: Does the bill serve the public interest of all of us who share in the National Forests’ ownership? Or, does the bill serve the private interests of merely four logging corporations?
Does Senator Tester’s bill manage the public’s land for the public good? Or, does it initiate a dangerous precedent-setting mandate that any one of the 535 members of Congress can dictate what will be done with Federally-owned public land in their individual Congressional jurisdictions?
Is it in the public interest to override the legacy of more than 100 years of protective management under the laws laid down by Congress, in order to promote 535 separate and disparate Congressional fiefdoms?
S. 1470 Opens A “Pandora’s Box” Of Loopholes and Subsidies
The Tester bill must be recognized as a well-intentioned effort – at great public financial and environmental expense – to rescue an impoverished logging industry and the workers who depend on it for their livelihoods. However, with the lumber market near collapse, this large public investment would better be made hiring local contractors and woods workers for critically-needed forest restoration work.
We need not open this Pandora’s Box of special loopholes and subsidies for a handful of corporations.
We need not forsake our remaining public wild lands heritage.
We need not diminish the purity of the water that freely flows from our pristine roadless areas to our farms, ranches, and communities.
We need not erode the habitat of fish and wildlife species that mean so much to those of us fortunate enough to live here.
We need not subvert the functioning of our precious ecosystems, upon which we depend for life and sustenance, for the short-term economic gain of a few.
Let Us Honor The Basic Tenets For Protection Of Our Public Lands
Many of my dearest friends and colleagues – Howard Zahniser, Sigurd Olson, Harvey Broome, Ernest Oberholtzer, Bernard Frank, Benton MacKaye, Harold Anderson, George Marshall, David Brower, Olaus and Mardy Murie, Charles H. Callison, Benton Stong, Ken Baldwin, Don Aldrich, Doris Milner, Justice William O. Douglas, Congressmen John Saylor and Morris Udall, Senators Frank Church, Hubert Humphrey, and Lee Metcalf have passed on.
I have been so privileged to have known these fine spirits and to spend my life working side-by-side with them in dedication to America’s public lands! Let us not let political shortsightedness, greed, or desperation strip us of the priceless legacy they fought so hard to bequeath to us.
Let us work to bring long-term jobs and stability to our rural communities. Let us respect the countless hunters, anglers, and outdoors people that fully appreciate the true value of Wilderness and that have valiantly defended it with their hearts, minds, words, and actions through the ages.
We Montanans are blessed to live in this “Last, Best Place” with our plains and rolling prairies, snow-capped mountains, and beautiful valleys and streams. Wilderness and roadless wild lands are an irreplaceable part of this heritage. They deserve the fullest possible protection if they are to be preserved for those who follow us. Senator Tester’s bill places them in peril.
Thank you for the privilege of submitting this testimony.
Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg
647 Foley Lane
Hamilton, MT 59840
Phone: 406-375-1122
Dispatches from the Wildlands™
©2010, Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg and Paul Richards
_________________________________________________________
Editor’s Note: Dr. Brandborg wrote all of his draft language for this statement in pencil on yellow legal-sized notepads and mailed roughly-organized “chapters” via bursting-at-the-seams envelopes to Paul Richards, a Montana-based journalist with 42 years’ experience as writer and editor. Many months of respectful, productive, good-natured, and comprehensive telephone conversations between Dr. Brandborg and editor Richards produced the above final text.
Paul Thomas Richards FORMER WILDERNESS ASSOCIATION OFFICIALS
DISOWN TESTER WILDLANDS LOGGING BILL
“It is with heavy hearts we are compelled to oppose the organization we once proudly served as Officers and Governing Council Members.”
We, the undersigned former Officers and Governing Council Members of the Montana Wilderness Association (MWA), respectfully urge Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) to withdraw Senate Bill 1470, the “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act,” to rectify severe problems outlined by Agriculture Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.
Sherman testified that the Tester bill dictates timber cutting quotas that are “not reasonable,” “likely unachievable and perhaps unsustainable.”
Sherman also charged that the Tester bill’s “enormous” costs and mandated logging could create a harmful precedent for other National Forests. For example, the Tester bill mandates logging 7,000 acres a year for 10 years in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest—seven times the current annual average.
“The levels of mechanical treatment called for in the bill far exceed historic treatment levels on these forests, and would require an enormous shift in resources (away) from other forests in Montana and other states to accomplish,” Sherman told the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
We, as former leaders of the Montana Wilderness Association, cannot support the legislation as now written. We must diverge from our organization, because we believe that the Tester bill degrades both the quantity and quality of some of America’s most cherished wildlands in Montana. We encourage consideration of the issues we have outlined below that would be necessary in order for us to support it.
We endorse the 10-point position paper, Keeping It Wild! In Defense of America’s Public Wildlands, submitted by the Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign, a coalition of more than 55 grassroots conservation organizations.
The Tester bill legislates the net loss of hundreds of thousands of roadless area acres, including Senate Bill 393’s Wilderness Study Areas, designated in 1977 by Montana’s late U.S. Senator Lee Metcalf. This will create widespread environmental damage and the loss of an irreplaceable legacy for which future generations would, quite correctly, hold ours accountable.
Also, the Tester bill’s Congressional mandate for timber cut levels sets a dangerous precedent. Subsidizing these “below-cost” timber sales will cost federal taxpayers more than $100 million. And, the bill’s proposed new “wilderness” areas are small, often disjointed, primarily “rock and ice” parcels that would fail to protect fragile wildlands habitat and wildlife ecosystems and corridors.
To make matters worse, the Tester bill includes special provisions for new “wilderness” units that defy both the intent and letter of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and the spirit of Wilderness that so many Americans believe is a vital and wondrous part of this great Nation’s Heritage. Motor vehicles, including helicopters, simply have no place in designated Wilderness. Yes, we need more Wilderness—lots of it—but we want it to be real Wilderness!
The bill also codifies secretive negotiated agreements—such as the Beaverhead-Deerlodge “Partnership”—that excluded many individuals and groups who have long been involved in the public process. This, and similar agreements, have been sealed by the Montana Wilderness Association and others over the objections of excluded organizations and individuals, of whom most live and work close to the land and know the compromised areas intimately.
It is with heavy hearts we are compelled to oppose the organization we once proudly served as MWA Officers and Governing Council Members. Most of Montana’s undeveloped wildlands are long gone, and we cannot afford to lose big chunks of what remains.
We believe that, in recent years, the Montana Wilderness Association has clearly compromised its long-held mission of vigilant advocacy for protection of public wildlands. We know many former and current MWA members who agree.
In fact, most grassroots conservationists and activists in the region are convinced that, quite simply, MWA has lost its way. We are saddened to now count ourselves among them.
The Tester bill currently supported by the Montana Wilderness Association will irreparably damage Montana’s and the Northern Rockies’ dwindling public roadless wildlands legacy. It will salt the gaping wounds cut into the conservation community by MWA’s recent actions.
The Tester bill degrades the Wilderness Act of 1964 with provisions that damage both Wilderness and the values of what Pulitzer-Prize-winning Western author Wallace Stegner termed the “Wilderness Idea” in his seminal 1960 “Wilderness Letter.”*
In conclusion: The Tester bill is a bad deal for future generations of Montanans, who will need Wild country more than ever, in an increasingly crowded and uncertain future.
Again, we respectfully urge Sen. Tester to withdraw this bill.
Sincerely for Wild Montana,
Loren Kreck (Co-Founder of the Montana Wilderness Association, MWA Council, and past MWA Vice-President) (Please see Editor’s Note concerning Kreck below) – Columbia Falls, MT
Lou Bruno (MWA Council and past MWA President) – East Glacier, MT
Joan Montagne (MWA Council and past MWA President) – Bozeman, MT
Elaine Snyder (MWA Council and past MWA President) – Kalispell, MT
Dan Heinz (MWA Council and past MWA Vice-President) – Reno, NV
Paul Edwards (MWA Council and past Chairman, MWA Wilderness Committee) – Helena, MT
Paul Richards (MWA Council and Recipient of MWA’s Brass Lantern Award, “For leadership in defending unprotected public wildlands contained within the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest”) – Boulder Valley, MT
Larry Campbell (MWA Council) – Darby, MT
Susan Colvin (MWA Council) – Great Falls, MT
Randall Gloege (MWA Council) – Billings, MT
Keith Hammer (MWA Council) – Kalispell, MT
Steve Kelly (MWA Council) – Bozeman, MT
Lance Olsen (MWA Council) – Missoula, MT
Bob Oset (MWA Council) – Hamilton, MT
Ross Titus (MWA Council) – Big Fork, MT
George Wuerthner (MWA Council) – Helena/Livingston, MT
Janet Zimmerman (MWA Council) – Pony, MT
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Co-writing and signing the above statement was the final of countless acts taken by Dr. Loren Kreck to protect our nation’s priceless public wildlands legacy.
Dr. Kreck, a co-founder of the Montana Wilderness Association in the 1950s, and, for the last six decades, one of Montana’s premier conservationists, died peacefully in his Columbia Falls, MT, home earlier this year. Homage to Dr. Kreck will soon be posted upon this “Dispatches from the Wildlands” Web site.
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* Stegner submitted his seminal “Wilderness Letter” to the University of California at Berkeley’s Wildland Research Center, after what he termed considerable “prodding” from passionate outdoorsman David Brower.
“I want to speak for the Wilderness Idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
“Without any remaining wilderness, we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved–as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds–because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health, even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there–important, that is, simply as an idea.”
DEDICATION:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF MONTANA’S “LIVING LEGEND”
Dr. Loren Kreck, Co-Founder of the
Montana Wilderness Association (MWA)
Dr. Loren Kreck, Co-Founder, Montana Wilderness Association
Dispatches from the Wildlands™
Paul Thomas Richards Tester’s Logging Bill Ignores
Forest Service Experts
By: Bill Worf, Deputy Regional Forester (Retired)
U.S. Forest Service
I am a Montana native who graduated with a degree in Forestry from the University of Montana in 1950, when I started a career in the U.S. Forest Service.
When the Wilderness Act passed in 1964, I was serving as supervisor of the Bridger National Forest in Wyoming.
Forest Service Chief Ed Cliff and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman immediately tapped me to serve in the national office to oversee implementation of the Wilderness Act.
I moved from Wyoming to Washington, D.C., to administer the National Wilderness Preservation System established by the Act. I served in that position until 1969, when I was appointed Deputy Regional Forester for Wilderness, Recreation and Lands in Missoula.
Although I retired in 1983, I have remained involved in National Forest issues. In this capacity, I have strong feelings about the Logging Bill (S. 1470) introduced by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT).
I share the senator’s concern about growing fire and insect problems in our National Forests.
The senator’s heart may be in the right place, but his proposed solution would result in severe long-term damage to the Forest Service as an institution.
The Forest Service is one of the most respected agencies in government. It contains the finest collection of natural resource professionals in the world. I spent my professional career as a proud member.
With his Logging Bill, Tester is saying he knows more about how forests ought to be managed than professionals who work for the Forest Service. Tester is telling us what to do and how to do it, even though what Tester wants may violate other federal laws.
If Tester gets away with dictating forest management in Montana, every senator and every representative in Congress will try to do the same. Instead of being managed by one professional agency that considers all the views of public stakeholders from throughout the country, our National Forests would be managed by local interests primarily geared toward resource extraction.
By effectively dissolving the Forest Service, Tester’s Logging Bill would create 535 fiefdoms, all with different management mandates dictated by different members of Congress. This would take away Americans’ rights concerning our public lands.
What Tester may not know is that the National Forest System was established in 1897 by Congress. Congress also established the Forest Service to administer these National Forests for the benefit of all Americans of present and future generations.
Subsequent laws provided additional guidance, including the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, the National Forest and Range Land Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974, and the National Forest Management Act of 1976.
Congress passed these laws to ensure our National Forests are administered in a planned and sustainable way — in perpetuity.
Because Tester is a Hi-Line farmer, I figured he may not know much about Forest Service history.
So, I attended an open house on Oct. 26, 2009, concerning his logging bill. I shared with the senator that heavy corporate and political pressure had caused the violation of the 1960 Act mandating “sustained yield.” This unwise overcutting of our National Forests resulted in the closure of mills in Montana and elsewhere.
I followed up my Oct. 26, 2009, direct conversation with Sen. Tester by sending him a detailed letter on Nov. 12, 2009.* I included a 20-page comprehensive analysis of Forest Service reports which clearly shows the failure to maintain a “sustained yield” throughout the entire National Forest System.*
I strongly disagree with Tester that the answer to overcutting in the past is to overcut in the future!
Congressionally mandating logging quotas and legislatively dictating management would convert our National Forests into “private local forests.”
This is directly contrary to 113 years of precedence. When Congress passed the Organic Act in 1897, lawmakers were assured that National Forests would remain open to the public and not restricted to private companies or privileged groups.
The Tester bill effectively says that a handful of local extractive interests have greater knowledge than the professionals of our Forest Service.
This dangerous precedent would be viewed with glee by special interest groups of all kinds!
For that reason, I must oppose the Tester bill.
USFS Deputy Regional Forester (Retired) Bill Worf
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Editor’s Notes:
1. Retired Deputy Regional Forester Bill Worf of Missoula, Montana, worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 33 years.
2. * Despite his Oct. 26, 2009, personal promise to the retired Deputy Regional Forester, made in the presence of many witnesses, Sen. Tester never honored his commitment to respond to and address Bill Worf’s concerns. As of September 2010, Worf has not received any reply of any type from Tester or Tester’s staff regarding information verbally presented to Tester on Oct. 26, 2009, followed up by a November 12, 2009, personal letter to Tester, accompanied by 20 pages of detailed analyses, documenting Forest Service overcutting of timber and the agency’s past failures to provide for “sustained yields.” (Although blind, Worf devoted weeks of effort to researching, preparing, and typing this 20-page report for Tester).
3. “Hi-Line” is a colloquialism referring to northern Montana.
4. Bill Worf was born in 1926 on an eastern Montana homestead. A Marine during World War II, Worf is one of the few remaining survivors of the fierce battle for Iwo Jima, immortalized forever by Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the raising of the U.S. flag on top of Mount Suribachi by five Marines and one Navy Corpsman. Worf witnessed the original flag raising on the morning of Feb. 23, 1945. Rosenthal’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph was a reenactment. Sculptors later used Rosenthal’s photo as the model for the cast bronze United States Marine Corps War Memorial, commonly referred to as “The Iwo Jima Memorial,” at Arlington National Cemetery.
5. In 1989, Bill Worf co-founded Wilderness Watch – A citizens’ nonprofit organization dedicated to providing oversight to those federal agencies involved in administration of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Worf continues working as an active member of the Governing Board for Wilderness Watch. The following is from: http://www.wildernesswatch.org/ :
WILDERNESS WATCH is America’s leading conservation organization dedicated solely to protecting the lands and waters in the 110 million-acre National Wilderness Preservation System. We strive for proper stewardship of these remarkable Wilderness reserves through citizen oversight, education, and continual monitoring of federal management activities. Please join us in ensuring that America’s Wilderness remains full of mystery, adventure, and biological wealth. Learn more >>
6. Bill Worf can be contacted at: wworf@bresnan.net or at: 406-251-6210.
7. This piece was edited by Paul Richards, owner of PR Media Consultants®, a leading public interest consulting firm since 1968, and an AlterNet blogger. Richards’ “Dispatches from the Wildlands,” which focuses on resource issues and Western politics is located at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ . Richards can be contacted at: Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com .
8. Sen. Tester, the timber industry, and Washington DC-based Big Green, or “Gang Green,” “conservation” collaborators have used many terms for Tester’s logging bill. The Tester bill’s official number is “S. 1470.” Tester, the timber industry, and “Gang Green” collaborators have interchangeably used: “Tester Forest Jobs and Recreation Act,’’ “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act,” “Tester Forest Jobs Bill,” “Forest Jobs Bill,” “Forest Jobs and Stewardship Bill,” and the “Tester Forest Jobs and Stewardship Bill.”
9. Editors and reporters, who should know better, mistakenly call S. 1470 the “Tester Wilderness Bill.” This is a grave misnomer. Tester himself is very clear that his legislation is NOT a wilderness bill! “Because there are many components to the legislation, calling it a ‘wilderness bill’ is a mischaracterization,” writes Tester. “It is a ‘forest jobs and stewardship’ bill.”
10. Editors and reporters have also called S. 1470 the “Tester Forest Management Bill” and the “Tester Public Lands Legislation.”
11. Grassroots conservationists generally lean toward more truthful monikers, such as “Tester Logging Bill,” “Tester Logging-Without-Laws Bill,” and “Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.”
12. “Tester Logging Bill” is now the term most utilized by the general public, with the more accurate “Tester Wildlands Logging Bill” preferred by many grassroots wildlands supporters.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™
©2010, Bill Worf and Paul Richards
Paul Thomas Richards 
Big Nose Karma
Tools for Maintaining a Rural Zen Practice
By Paul Richards
Boulder Valley, Montana
Introduction:
Montana and the Northern Rockies Ecosystem are lands of many spaces. That’s good!
My home is 167 miles away from my “Sangha,” or organized spiritual community. How to maintain a rural Zen practice, in the absence of frequent in-person visits to a Sangha gathering?
It’s easy! I’ve got a dog, Karma (see picture), who takes me for walks. A mile down the road is a river I can listen to. I watch the clouds and the sunsets. I love wildlife viewing. And, gradually, I am learning how to occasionally do nothing.
There is much support available to rural people like me. It really helps to have an Internet connection, although it is not essential. Here are some of my favorite sources, with contact information for those with or without ready access to the Internet and the World-Wide Web.
Is Zen Complicated?
No.
In both East and West, intellectuals try their utmost to make Zen unnecessarily complicated, inaccessible, and even masochistic.
In stark contrast, this article highlights media that provide easy to understand, loving, and fun approaches to Zen and Buddhism .
This article also focuses on Vietnamese Zen master Thích Nhất Hanh , also called “Thây” (pronounced “Tie”) – an affectionate Vietnamese term meaning “teacher.”
By teaching directly from the heart, Thích Nhất Hanh avoids the cerebral traps common to many Buddhist experts, scholars, interpreters, teachers, and practitioners. Thây’s writings and spoken words are refreshingly simple, forthright, and honest.
Even though it is his third language after Vietnamese and French, (Thây is also fluent in Chinese, Sanskrit, Pāli, and Japanese), Thích Nhất Hạnh has mastered writing and speaking in English. His words, written and spoken, are wonderfully comprehensible for readers, viewers, and listeners of all ages, educations, cultures, and persuasions.
Tricycle:
Every day, I look forward to the “Daily Dharma,” concise and cogent quotes about Zen and Buddhism from the fine folks at Tricycle Magazine. Here is one of my favorites:
Watermelons and Zen Students
grow pretty much the same way.
Long periods of sitting
till they ripen and grow
all juicy inside, but
when you knock them on the head—
to see if they’re ready—
sounds like nothing’s going on.
Essential Zen (Harper Collins)
You can sign up for your free “Daily Dharma” at: http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=001uxu9h741ik0LIOgRSyiOAQ%3D%3D . Each “Daily Dharma” contains a hyperlink, if you want to learn more about the author or book quoted.
Tricycle Magazine bills itself as “the independent voice of Buddhism.” The home page of its Web site, located at: http://www.tricycle.com/ , is full of incredibly compelling and educational articles, audios, videos, and on-line discussions.
You can join the Tricycle on-line community for free at: http://community.tricycle.com/ .
A subscription to this excellent magazine is $24 a year at: https://subscribe.pcspublink.com/magazine/Trym/subscribeFormPD3.asp?track=JC49&pub=TRYM&term=4 .
For $30 a year, you can become a “Sustaining Member” and receive the print edition of Tricycle, Tricycle’s digital edition, unlimited access to the Tricycle archives (two decades of Buddhist wisdom), and free access to paid on-line programs and teachings. Just go to: https://subscribe.pcspublink.com/magazine/Trym/subscribeFormD.asp?track=JCOM30&pub=TRYM&term=4 .
Those who lack ready Internet access, can contact Tricycle: The Buddhist Review at 92 Vandam Street, New York, NY, 10013. For subscriptions, call: 800-873-9871. For other inquiries, call: 212-645-1143.
Why “Tricycle?” Buddhism itself is often referred to as the “vehicle to enlightenment,” and the tricycle’s three wheels allude to the three treasures: 1. The Buddha, 2.The Dharma, and 3. The Sangha; or: 1. The enlightened teacher, 2. The teachings, and 3. The community. The wheels also relate to the turning of the wheel of Dharma, or skillfully using the teachings of the Buddha to face the challenges that the circle of life presents.
Shambhala Sun:
Another amazing resource is the Shambhala Sun, whose home page is located at: http://www.shambhalasun.com/ . It, too, is very rich with incredible articles, audios, videos, and on-line discussions.
You can sign up for the Shambhala Sun newsletter for free at: http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Ite&Itemid=341 .
Subscribing to this exceptional publication costs $19.95 for one year or $34.00 for two years at: https://subscribe.pcspublink.com/magazine/Ssun/subscribeForm.asp?track=JECOMM&pub=SSUN&term=6 .
If want to save money and/or trees, you can browse much of the most current issue on-line at: http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=114 .
Ample free on-line archives are available at: http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2837&Itemid=260 .
Dozens of audio clips featuring teachers and practitioners from around the world are available at: http://www.shambhalasun.com/sunspace/?tag=audio . These clips are usually from five to ten minutes long.
For the latest in Buddhist videos, go to: http://www.shambhalasun.com/sunspace/?p=11402 . If you have a sense of humor about your practice, check out Arj Barker’s Buddhist rap video, about what it means to be the “sickest” Buddhist, kicking Buddha-Butt.
A special “Spotlight Section” on Thích Nhất Hạnh is located at: http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=226 .
And, for the latest Buddhist news, go to: http://www.shambhalasun.com/news/ .
Those without ready Internet access can subscribe by calling the Shambhala Sun, toll-free, at: 877-786-1950. For general inquires, call: 902-422-8404. The Editorial and Business Offices of the Shambhala Sun are located at: 1660 Hollis Street, Suite 701, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3J 1V7. The U.S. subscriptions mailing address is: P.O. Box 469095 Escondido, CA 92046-9095 USA.
The Mindfulness Bell:
Another outstanding magazine is The Mindfulness Bell, located at: http://www.mindfulnessbell.org/ . The Mindfulness Bell is an inspiring resource for those practicing mindfulness in daily life. Each issue features Vietnamese teacher Thích Nhất Hanh, whose teachings about “engaged Buddhism” and Zen are particularly accessible.
The Mindfulness Bell Web site has easy access to Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Five Mindfulness Trainings at: http://www.mindfulnessbell.org/5mt.htm and his Fourteen “InterBeing” Mindfulness Trainings, located at: http://www.mindfulnessbell.org/14trainings.htm .
Subscriptions to The Mindfulness Bell can be ordered on-line at: http://www.smartcart.com/ubcgateway/cgi/search.cgi?terms=Mindfulness_Bell::&category=Mindfulness_Bell . It costs $24 for one year, $45 for two years, $63 for three years, or $18 for a one-year low income subscription.
If you lack ready Internet access, you can subscribe by contacting: The Mindfulness Bell, c/o David Percival, 745 Cagua SE, Albuquerque NM 87108-3717, or by calling: 505-266-9042.
Thích Nhất Hạnh:
Thích Nhất Hạnh – Poet, writer, “Dharma” teacher, “Sangha” builder, speaker, peace advocate, and human rights activist – is one of the best known and most respected Zen masters in the world today.
Nhất Hạnh was born Nguyễn Xuân Bảo in Thừa Thiên (Central Vietnam) in 1926. At the age of 16, he entered the monastery at Từ Hiếu Temple near Huế, where his primary teacher was Master Thanh Quý Chân Thật.
The Vietnam War confronted Buddhists with questions of whether to adhere to contemplative lives and remain meditating in the monasteries, or to offer help to farmers and villagers suffering from the targeted destruction of their agricultural and community infrastructures, invasions and massacres, strafings and bombings, aerial spraying of Agent Orange and other toxins, conscriptions, rapes, religious oppressions, forced relocations to “strategic hamlets,” diseases, and malnutrition and starvation.
By emerging from the cloistered confines of monasteries and committing themselves to social activism in defense of the Vietnamese people, Nhất Hạnh and a handful of others founded the “engaged Buddhism” movement.
Nhất Hạnh and his “Sangha,” or spiritual community, responded to and addressed the suffering they saw around them, seeing this work as part of their meditation and mindfulness practices, not apart from it.
Since then, the term “engaged Buddhism” continues to apply to Buddhists who seek to apply insights from meditation practice and Dharma teachings to situations of social, political, and economic injustice.
Because he helped all those in need regardless of ideologies, Nhất Hạnh was condemned by the United States, its South Vietnamese puppet government, indigenous Viet Cong guerillas in South Vietnam, and the Communist governments of North Vietnam, Soviet Union, and China.
After visiting the United States and Europe on peace missions, he was banned from returning to Vietnam in 1966. Nhất Hạnh changed the course of history when he helped the noted African-American civil rights leader and practitioner of non-violent civil disobedience, Dr. Martin Luther King, understand the immorality of the Vietnam War.
As a result, Dr. King’s courageous public opposition to the Vietnam War was one of the most important factors reversing domestic pro-War sentiment and turning American public opinion towards the peace movement.
In a January 25, 1967, letter to the Nobel Institute in Norway, Dr. King nominated Nhất Hạnh for the Nobel Peace Prize. “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of this prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam,” King wrote. “His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”
Thích Nhất Hạnh is pronounced “Tick N’yat Hawn.” His name is sometimes misspelled as Thich Nhat Hahn, Thich Nhat Han, and Thich Nat Han.
For more information about Thích Nhất Hạnh, go to: http://www.parallax.org/about_tnh.html or: http://buddhistlinks.org/ThichWorks.htm ; or: http://www.plumvillage.org/thay.html .
Engaged Buddhism has grown worldwide, with prominent figures including: Robert Aitken Roshi, Joanna Macy, Gary Snyder, Alan Senauke, Sulak Sivaraksa, Maha Ghosananda, Sylvia Wetzel, Anthony Stultz, Diana Winston, Fleet Maull, Joan Halifax, Tara Brach, Natalie Goldberg, Stephanie Kaza, Sister Chan Khong, Noah Levine, Albert Low, Caitriona Reed, and Leila Seth.
Parallax Press:
Thích Nhất Hạnh has written more than 100 books, with about 40 currently available in English. Parallax Press is the outfit that publishes most of his books. Parallax Press has a dynamite Web site, located at: http://www.parallax.org/ .
All of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s books are delightful and well worth reading. Although you will find certain themes repeated, “Thầy” is never boring or dogmatic.
You can view Thích Nhất Hạnh’s many books at: http://www.parallax.org/cgi-bin/shopper.cgi?search=action&category=BOOK&keywords=hanh .
For audio resources, go to: http://www.parallax.org/audio.html .
For videos, go to: http://www.parallax.org/video.html .
For contact information for Parallax Press, go to: http://www.parallax.org/contact_staff.html . For additional inquiries, you can e-mail Parallax at: info@parallax.org .
You can subscribe to Parallax Press’s free monthly newsletter at: http://www.parallax.org/about_news.html .
For a free Parallax Press catalog, go to: http://www.parallax.org/catalog.html .
Those lacking ready Internet access can order the Parallax Press catalog or books by calling, toll-free: 800-863-5290, or by writing: Parallax Press, P.O. Box 7355, Berkeley, CA 94707. For inquiries, call: 510-525-0101.
Amazon:
For more about Thích Nhất Hạnh books, kindles, audio books, calendars, CDs, and DVDs, and MP3s, go to: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=Thich+Nhat+Hanh&x=20&y=17/buddhistlinks-20 . Those lacking Internet access, can utilize Amazon’s toll-free customer service by calling: 866-216-1072. Amazon will call you right back.
Powell’s:
If you prefer independent book stores, Powell’s in Portland, Oregon is hard to beat! Their Thích Nhất Hạnh materials are located at: http://www.powells.com/s?header=Search+Form&kw=Thich+Nhat+Hanh . Those without Internet access can call Powell’s, toll-free, at: 800-878-7323.
Other Special Sites (North America, Alphabetical):
Blue Cliff Monastery
The home page of the Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, New York, is: http://www.bluecliffmonastery.org/ .
Buddhist Peace Fellowship
The Buddhist Peace Fellowship is located at: http://www.bpf.org/ . This Web site contains an Action Center, links to Turning Wheel Magazine, and a sign up form for free Buddhist Peace Fellowship newsletters.
To view Thích Nhất Hạnh’s “What Is Engaged Buddhism?” go to: http://www.bpf.org/socially-engaged/what-is-socially-engaged-buddhism .
Deer Park Monastery
The home page of Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, California, is: http://dpweb.org/ .
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey talks with Thích Nhất Hạnh at: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Oprah-Talks-to-Thich-Nhat-Hanh/2 .
Other Special Sites (International, Alphabetical):
European Institute of Applied Buddhism
The home page of the European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Waldbröl, Germany is located at: http://eiab-maincampus.org/EIAB_Germany/Home.html . You can sign up for e-mailings from the European Institute of Applied Buddhism and the Unified Buddhist Church on this Web page.
International Network of Engaged Buddhists
The International Network of Engaged Buddhists includes individuals and organizations from more than 20 countries. Out of this diversity, an understanding of engaged Buddhism has emerged which integrates the practice of Buddhism with social action for a healthy, just, and peaceful world.
This network trusts compassion, non-violence, and co-existence as revealed by the Buddha. Patrons include the Venerable Thích Nhất Hạnh of Plum Village, France, and Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, temporarily living in exile from Chinese-occupied Tibet in Dharamsala, a city in the state of Himachal Pradesh in northern India.
Contact the International Network of Engaged Buddhists at: http://www.inebnetwork.org/web/ .
Kids’ Web Sites in Four Languages
Children and parents are encouraged to visit: http://mindfulkids.wordpress.com/ .
Plum Village, France
The home page of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Sangha in France is located at: http://www.plumvillage.org/ .
Vietnamese Religious Freedom
To support religious freedom in Vietnam, you can sign the petition located at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/6/religious-freedom-in-viet-nam .
Young People’s Network
Wake Up, located at: http://www.wkup.org/ , is a world-wide networking Web site for young Buddhists and non-Buddhists practicing the living art of mindfulness. There are plenty of links to writings, audio, and video.
Even More Information!
The above is just a start.
To explore other Zen and Buddhist teachers and philosophies, go to: http://buddhistlinks.org/ .
This Web site has more than 7,000 links!
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Editor’s Notes:
1. This article utilizes colored underlined “hyperlinks” known as “Uniform Resource Locators” or “URLs.” A URL is also known as a “domain name” or an “Internet address.” To fully activate and utilize these URLs, just go to the hyperlink and push down on your “Ctrl” or “Control” button on our keyboard and left click your mouse.
2. This article is written by Paul Richards, a professional editor, researcher, writer, and the owner of PR Media Consultants®; Public Interest Media Since 1968; 30 Brown’s Gulch Road; Boulder, MT 59632; www.PRMediaConsultants.com and www.Richards2006.us . A former newsman with The Associated Press, Mr. Richards is a specialist in resource issues and politics of the western United States.
3. For reprint permission, to commission other projects relating to this subject matter, or for additional researching, writing, or editing assignments, please e-mail Mr. Richards at: Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com .
Karma in the Sunset
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards
Paul Thomas Richards Keeping It Wild!
In Defense of America’s Public Wildlands
United by our common understanding that Montana’s wild country is its greatest treasure;
And, that once degraded or impaired, this wild country can never be restored or replaced;
And, cognizant of Thoreau’s belief that “In wildness is the preservation of the world;”
And, schooled by Aldo Leopold who long ago warned that wilderness can only shrink and not grow;
And, keenly aware of the definition of wilderness in the Wilderness Act of 1964 as being “untrammeled by man,” where “man himself is a visitor who does not remain;”
And, fully recognizing that the Northern Rockies ecosystem is the only functioning ecosystem in the lower 49 states where all native species still reside;
And, being of one mind in our desire and determination to protect and preserve what remains of our public wildlands to the greatest extent possible;
We hereby state our intention to work together to achieve the most inclusive and comprehensive protection under the law for all remaining publicly-owned de facto wilderness in Montana.
In full affirmation of the above and, after having been unsuccessful in our earnest efforts to improve Sen. Tester’s so-called “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act,” or “S. 1470,” we must now unanimously oppose this bill.
The bases for our opposition are exhaustively catalogued in separate analyses and papers, but we submit this foundational document to concisely articulate our chief objections. They are as follows:
1. The Tester bill specifically eliminates from mandated protection large portions of the late Senator Lee Metcalf’s wildlands legacy, Congressionally designated as Wilderness Study Areas in 1977 by his farsighted bill, S. 393. By eliminating this protection, the Tester bill opens these priceless public wildlands for road building, logging, and other development.
2. The Tester bill undermines the overwhelmingly popular Clinton Roadless Rule and Obama Roadless Initiative. Over one million acres of federally-inventoried roadless wildlands protected under the Roadless Rule and the Roadless Initiative would be classified as “Timber Suitable or Open to Harvest.” (See map).
3. The Tester Bill surrenders decisions about our National Forests to a handful of local bureaucrats and extraction-oriented corporations, thereby promoting fragmentation of America’s national public lands legacy into locally controlled fiefdoms.
4. The Tester bill undermines the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by imposing unrealistic and arbitrary requirements that preclude the Forest Service from accurately assessing environmental impacts of road building, logging, habitat loss, water degradation, weed infestation, and other costs of developing public wildlands.
5. The Tester bill mandates unsustainable logging quotas regardless of environmental costs, thereby jeopardizing safeguards provided public lands by the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Forest Management Act, Wilderness Act, and Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
6. In its effort to isolate decisions to log wildlands from national attention, the Tester bill disenfranchises public lands stakeholders, by overriding legitimate science-based forest planning that involves full public information and participation. It deprives the public of our rights to be included in irreversible decisions concerning our own land.
7. The Tester bill mandates cutting at least 100,000 acres over 10 years. It dictates at least 7,000 acres be logged per year for 10 years in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. In recent years, the Forest Service has set its sustainable cut level for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest at 500 acres per year. In past years, when the Forest Service was dedicated to “getting the cut out,” an average of 3,213 acres per year was logged, from 1954 to 1996, in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. On the Three Rivers Ranger District of the Kootenai National Forest, Tester’s bill mandates logging of 3,000 acres per year for 10 years in fragile Yaak grizzly bear habitat, already severely damaged by decades of overcutting. While logging at least 100,000 acres would be compulsory, the Tester bill contains no accompanying mandates for restoration, leaving all post-logging reclamation and forest restoration optional.
8. The Tester bill fails to address at least $100 million in costs to U.S. taxpayers that would be incurred by the Forest Service for subsidizing “below-cost” timber sales and power plants for the few specially-privileged timber corporations involved. The bill interferes with free enterprise, by mandating that five favored private mills be subsidized with perpetual supplies of National Forest trees, at huge economic costs to taxpayers. The bill ignores the financial realities that the United States currently face: Economic crises and a lumber “depression,” with new home construction down 70 percent and demands for lumber down 55 percent.
9. By forcing unsustainable industrial-scale logging upon our public lands, the Tester bill would irrevocably harm essential habitats of species that characterize the wild nature of the northern Rockies, such as the gray wolf, bull trout, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, elk, arctic grayling, northern goshawk, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, Montana vole, sage thrasher, wild bison, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, and grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal).
10. The “wilderness” areas in the Tester bill are fragmented and unconnected islands of largely “rocks and ice,” with limited biological integrity and no potential for sustaining biodiversity. The minimal “wilderness” designated in the bill fails to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species with core areas, buffer zones, and connecting biological corridors. The bill promotes numerous abuses that are clearly in violation of the 1964 Wilderness Act, including motorized access into and through “wilderness,” military aircraft landings in “wilderness,” possible “wilderness” logging, and other intrusions that violate the principles of Wilderness.
Due to these severe deficiencies, we intend to see that the Tester bill is not endorsed by Congress. Instead, we will constructively stand for a scientifically-sound, ecologically-based Wilderness Bill that preserves the greatest amount of our priceless and rapidly-vanishing public roadless wildlands in Montana.
We, the following members of the Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign, are conservation organizations and citizens dedicated to wildlands protection, Wilderness preservation, and the sound long-term management of our federal public lands legacy.
Our coalition includes small-business owners, scientists, educators and teachers, health care practitioners, hikers and backpackers, hunters and anglers, wildlife viewers, outfitters and guides, veterans, retired Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management officials, ranchers and farmers, craftspersons, and community leaders – all stakeholders committed to America’s public wildlands legacy.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Editor’s Notes:
1. This “Keeping It Wild! In Defense of America’s Public Wildlands” Declaration, detailed analyses, and extensive commentary on the Tester bill are located at: http://testerloggingbilltruths.wordpress.com/ .
2. This Declaration has been endorsed by more than 55 grassroots conservation groups that comprise the Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign. For the latest listing of groups, further information, or to sign up your group, go to: http://testerloggingbilltruths.wordpress.com/ .
3. Individuals can sign this “Keeping It Wild! In Defense of America’s Public Wildlands” Declaration by going to: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/keeping-it-wild-in-defense-of-america39s-public-wildlands .
4. Tester, the timber industry, and “conservation” collaborationists have used so many terms for this bill, the public has no idea how to refer it. Due to this plethora of names, the bill’s purposefully obfuscatory text, and its many loopholes; confusion is rampant. The Tester bill is suffering accordingly.
The Tester bill’s official number is “S. 1470.” Tester, the timber industry, and Big Green (or Gang Green) “conservation” collaborationists have interchangeably used: “Tester Forest Jobs and Recreation Act,’’ “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act,” “Tester Forest Jobs Bill,” “Forest Jobs Bill,” “Forest Jobs and Stewardship Bill,” and the “Tester Forest Jobs and Stewardship Bill.”
Editors and reporters, who should know better, mistakenly call it the “Tester Wilderness Bill.” This is a grave misnomer! Tester himself is very clear that his legislation is NOT a wilderness bill!
“Because there are many components to the legislation, calling it a ‘wilderness bill’ is a mischaracterization,” writes Tester. “It is a ‘forest jobs and stewardship’ bill.” Editors and reporters have also called S. 1470 the “Tester Forest Management Bill” and the “Tester Public Lands Legislation.”
Grassroots conservationists have leaned towards more truthful monikers, such as “Tester Logging Bill,” “Tester Logging-Without-Laws Bill,” and “Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.”
“Tester Logging Bill” is now the term most utilized by the general public, with the more accurate “Tester Wildlands Logging Bill” preferred by grassroots wildlands supporters.
5. After securing input from Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign groups, Paul Edwards, a Montana rancher who, years ago, wrote episodes of the television series “Gunsmoke,” penned the first 516-word draft of this Declaration.
6. With continued participation from Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign, Paul Thomas Richards, a professional writer and editor from southwestern Montana’s Boulder Valley, wrote two dozen subsequent drafts, including this final 1034-word “Keeping It Wild! In Defense of America’s Public Wildlands” Declaration.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™
©2010 Paul Thomas Richards
Paul Thomas Richards Restoring Indigenous Wildlife Species to All National Forests
National Forest Management Act
New National Forest System Planning Rule
Editor’s Notes:
The Forest Service was established in 1905 and is an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of public lands in National Forests and National Grasslands throughout the country.
On December 17, 2009, the Obama Administration announced that it was taking the first step toward adopting new regulations to govern National Forest System planning and management. The four-page scoping notice was published the next day in the Federal Register (74 Fed. Reg. 67165-67169, Dec. 18, 2009) and is available on-line at: http://fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5110264.pdf . The new agency planning rule will guide public land managers as they develop, amend, and revise land management plans for all 155 National Forests and 20 National Grasslands in the National Forest System.
The 60-day public comment period on the scoping notice ended on February 16, 2010. The U.S. Forest Service expects to publish the “Draft Environmental Impact Statement” for the new planning rule in December 2010, the “Final Environmental Impact Statement” in October 2011, and its “Record of Decision” in November 2011. For further information, contact: Larry Hayden at: 202–205–0895 or: lhayden@fs.fed.us .
Below are testimonies concerning restoring indigenous wildlife species to all National Forests submitted to Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, Region # 1 Forester Leslie Weldon, and Gallatin National Forest Supervisor Mary C. Erickson by Paul Richards and endorsed by former Deputy Regional Forester Bill Worf.
Brief Biographies:
Bill Worf. Former Deputy Regional Forester for the U.S. Forest Service, Bill Worf of Missoula, Montana, worked for agency for 33 years. Worf was born in 1926 on an eastern Montana homestead. As a Marine during World War II, Worf fought in the fierce battle for Iwo Jima, immortalized forever by Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the raising of the U.S. flag on top of Mount Suribachi by five Marines and one Navy Corpsman. He is one of only a handful of Iwo Jima survivors still living.
Tom Tidwell. Currently Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Tom Tidwell grew up in Boise, Idaho. He has 32 years’ experience with the Forest Service, working as District Ranger, Forest Supervisor, Legislative Affairs Specialist, and Deputy Regional Forester for the Pacific Southwest Region. Tidwell then served as Regional Forester for the Northern Region, with responsibilities for all National Forests and National Grasslands in northern Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and portions of South Dakota. His official biography, located at: http://www.fs.fed.us/aboutus/chief/ , says Tidwell supports providing “protection for the values of unroaded landscapes.”
Paul Richards. Boulder, Montana area businessman Paul Richards is a Helena native, former member of the Montana House of Representatives, and former candidate for U.S. Senate. Biographies available at: www.PRMedaConsultants.com or: www.Richards2006.us . Contact Richards at: 30 Brown’s Gulch Road, Boulder, MT 59632, or at: Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com .
—————————————————————
From: Tom Tidwell <ttidwell@fs.fed.us>
Date: February 17, 2010 6:09:15 AM MST
To: Bill Worf <wworf@bresnan.net>
Subject: Re: NFMA Planning Rules: PLEASE enact mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” throughout entire National Forest System.
Thank you Bill.
Tom
————————————————————————————
From: Bill Worf <wworf@bresnan.net>
Sent: 02/16/2010 05:40 PM
To: TOM TIDWELL <ttidwell@fs.fed.us>
cc: fspr@contentanalysisgroup.com
Subject: NFMA Planning Rules: PLEASE enact mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” throughout entire National Forest System.
Dear Chief Tidwell;
Pasted below are comments for consideration of the NFMA Planning Rules prepared by Mr. Paul Richards. I have studied them in detail and endorse them completely.
Chief, I spent 30 plus years as an active member of the Forest Service. I believe it is crucial that, if we are to meet the intent of Congress when it passed the Organic Act establishing the National Forests, followed by the Multiple Use/Sustained Yield Act, we must base our management in the principle of maintaining the indigenous wildlife species.
Please consider the views expressed by Mr. Richards as also those expressed by Bill Worf.
William A. Worf
Still Forest Service.
—————————————————————————————————–
From: Paul Richards [mailto:Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com]
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 9:37 PM
To: (ttidwell@fs.fed.us); (fspr@contentanalysisgroup.com); (R1@fs.fed.us) (lweldon@fs.fed.us)
Cc: (Gallatin@fs.fed.us); (mcerickson@fs.fed.us)
Subject: NFMA Planning Rules: PLEASE enact mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” throughout entire National Forest System.
U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell
Forest Service National Planning Rules and Regulations
Region # 1 Forester Leslie Weldon
Dear Chief Tidwell, Forest Service National Planning Officials, and Region # 1 Forester,
I hope this note finds you all happy and well.
On December 17, 2009, the Obama Administration announced that it was taking the first step toward adopting new regulations to govern National Forest planning and management. The four-page scoping notice was published the next day in the Federal Register (74 Fed. Reg. 67165-67169, Dec. 18, 2009) and is available on the internet at: http://fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5110264.pdf .
The 60-day public comment period on the scoping notice ends on February 16, 2010. Please fully integrate this scoping comment.
Please refer to the detailed comments below concerning restoration of indigenous wildlife species on the National Forest System. These comments, wholly applicable to the new planning rule for the entire National Forest System, were first submitted on November 6, 2009, to Mary Erickson, Supervisor of the Gallatin National Forest. The current Gallatin National Forest Plan mandates that the Forest Service “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species.”
I am a strong supporter of mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” and I believe these mandates should be implemented throughout the entire National Forest System through this new planning rule initiated by 74 Fed. Reg. 67165-67169, Dec. 18, 2009.
Look what mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” would do for the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, for example — the ONLY functioning ecosystem in the lower 49 states where all native species still reside.
These indigenous species mandates would protect remaining habitat of at-risk and secluded species that characterize the wild northern Rockies, such as the bison, gray wolf, bull trout, otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, elk, arctic grayling, northern goshawk, pika, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, Montana vole, sage thrasher, sage grouse, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), and grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal).
Mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” would ensure the survival of crucial almost-extirpated forest carnivores, such as: Wolf, lynx, wolverine, fisher, grizzly bear, and pine marten – all key indicators of forest health and all dependent upon undisturbed mature-to-old growth forests.
Throughout our western National Forests, this indigenous wildlife species language will help the: Peregrine falcon, bald eagle, boreal owl, flammulated owl, black-backed woodpecker, ferruginuous hawk, northern bog lemming, Western big-eared bat, mountain plover, Preble’s shrew, Yellowstone cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus Clarki Bouvieri), and westslope cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus Clarki Lewisi)
The few remaining pure westslope cutthroat trout and bull trout populations are threatened by domestic stock pollution, excess silt and turbidity, stock overuse, lack of bank vegetation, and lack of spawning habitat. Many of these populations are limited to two kilometers or less distribution. Only a few populations are distributed over a stream length of ten kilometers.
Mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” will protect key “management indicator species,” such as:
Hairy woodpecker (overall forest management indicator species);
Goshawk and three-towed woodpecker (old growth management indicator species);
Western jumping mouse (meadows management indicator species);
Belted kingfishers and willow flycatchers (shrub riparian management indicator species);
Northern water shrew and warbling vireo (tree riparian management indicator species);
Montana vole (grasslands management indicator species); and the
Sage thrasher (shrublands management indicator species).
Mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” would ensure the survival of the Yellowstone bison. Yellowstone’s bison are genetically and behaviorally unique – the ONLY herd with continuously wild ancestry from the days when 50 million bison migrated freely across the Great Plains. After the government-sponsored holocaust of these bison and the Indigenous Peoples that depended upon them, only 23 wild bison survived, taking refuge in Yellowstone’s remote Pelican Valley.
Now, Yellowstone’s tattered remnant herd is all that remains of 50 million wild bison! This herd is America’s ONLY free-roaming, wild, genetically-pure, unfenced population. With mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species,” the Forest Service and the National Forest System could encourage this herd to naturally migrate to publicly-owned habitat adjacent to Yellowstone National Park so essential for this herd’s prosperity.
These are just a few examples of how nationwide mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” throughout our National Forest System would restore biological health to our public lands. This could be the most significant improvement in public lands management since Congress established the National Forest System in 1897.
In conclusion: PLEASE incorporate mandates to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” in all future planning, rules, and regulations for all units of the National Forest System. Please refer to my below November 06, 2009, e-mail to the Gallatin National Forest for more information and details.
Thank you for your consideration. Please keep me informed concerning all of these rules and regulations that will ensure the biological integrity of our priceless public lands legacy.
All my best,
Paul Richards
30 Browns Gulch Road
Boulder, MT 59632
Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com
——————–
From: Paul Richards [mailto:Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com]
Sent: Friday, November 06, 2009 5:12 AM
To: (mailroom_r1_gallatin@fs.fed.us); (mcerickson@fs.fed.us)
Cc: Paul Richards (Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com)
Subject: PLEASE retain current Gallatin National Forest Plan to “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species.”
November 6, 2009
Mary C. Erickson
Forest Supervisor
Gallatin National Forest
10 East Babcock
P.O. Box 130
Bozeman, MT 59771
Ph: 406-587-6701
Fax: 406-587-6758
E-mail: mcerickson@fs.fed.us
Dear Supervisor Mary Erickson,
I hope this note finds you happy and well.
PROPOSED GALLATIN NATIONAL FOREST FOREST PLAN “CLEAN UP” AMENDMENTS:
I have heard that the Gallatin National Forest is considering many new “Proposed Gallatin National Forest Plan ‘Clean Up’ Amendments.” I looked on your Web site for these proposed amendments, but could not find them. If these proposed amendments ARE somewhere on your Web site, I hope you will e-mail me with the URL of their location. Thank you.
I am concerned about one “Proposed Gallatin National Forest Plan ‘Clean Up’ Amendment” in particular. The current Gallatin National Forest Plan mandates that the Forest Service: “Provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species and for increasing populations of big game animals.”
Your proposed “Proposed Gallatin National Forest Plan ‘Clean Up’ Amendment” would drastically diminish this mandate, by removing the current Forest Plan’s language to “provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” in its entirety!!
This is hardly a “Clean Up Amendment”! By deleting the protection of “viable populations for all indigenous wildlife species,” this so-called “Proposed Gallatin National Forest Plan ‘Clean Up’ Amendment” would, if adopted, cripple the Forest Service’s management mission and severely weaken the Gallatin National Forest’s commitment to wildlife.
The proposed “Clean Up” Amendment would “replace” the current language (“provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species and for increasing populations of big game animals”) with the following weakened and immaterial language: “Habitat for big game will be managed to help meet management goals of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP).”
FOREST CARNIVORES:
This abandonment of a much-needed public lands management emphasis for all indigenous wildlife species does not bode well for non-big-game species. What about forest carnivores such as wolf, lynx, wolverine, fisher, grizzly bear and pine marten?
They are all key indicators of forest health. All are dependent upon undisturbed mature-to-old growth forests. Forest carnivores are threatened by the cumulative effects of development and human intrusion, effects you must now consider, under the indigenous wildlife species provisions of your Forest Plan.
Forest carnivores are secluded species that require large blocks of undisturbed land. Forest carnivores also need different types of wildlands.
Lynx, for example, need enough mature and old growth to provide cover for their kittens and dens, yet they also need enough new growth to provide food for the snowshoe hare, the lynx’s principal prey.
So little is known about wolverines, which may have territories of hundreds of miles, that scientists have not yet established accurate and reliable wolverine populations. Viable wolverine populations are found only in Idaho and Montana in the lower 49 states. Actually, some scientists no longer consider these populations “viable” – ever the more reason to manage our remaining public wildlands, including the Gallatin National Forest, for their viability.
What about pine marten? They have an extremely narrow range of habitat, requiring late successional stands of moisture-loving conifers and lots of woody debris near the ground. In the winter, pine marten spend much time beneath the snow, hunting voles and other small mammals. How does this affect forest management? Pine marten, their prey, and the prey’s vegetative food are all extremely vulnerable to artificial compaction of snow layers by snowmobiles. If we follow the current Forest Plan and manage for “viable populations” of pine marten, we’ll eliminate this deadly motorized compaction.
With the current “provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” Forest Plan mandate; recreation management in the Gallatin National Forest MUST take into account the special needs of the secluded forest carnivores mentioned above. These secluded forest carnivores can not handle the stress and harassment of very loud high-speed machinery. Some of these animals have less than 4 percent body fat. There is absolutely NO surplus with which to deal with undue torment during the winter.
WITHDRAWING PROTECTION FROM OTHER NON-BIG-GAME SPECIES:
How about other species?
If you change your Forest Plan emphasis away from indigenous species; what will happen to the: Peregrine falcon, bald eagle, boreal owl, flammulated owl, black-backed woodpecker, ferruginuous hawk, wild bison, northern bog lemming, Western big-eared bat, mountain plover, Preble’s shrew, Yellowstone cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus Clarki Bouvieri), and westslope cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus Clarki Lewisi)?
Now, apparently there is debate concerning actual distinctions between Oncorhynchus Clarki Bouvieri and Oncorhynchus Clarki Lewisi. I don’t really understand this debate, because I am not an ichthyologist.
What I do understand is that, east of the Continental Divide, where I have lived my entire life, the westslope cutthroat trout has been reduced to 7 percent of its historic range, with genetically-pure populations down to about 1 percent of historic range, according to both the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (1996).
Historically, there were approximately 3,600 streams that supported westslope cutthroat trout populations in the Upper Missouri River Basin. By the late 1980s, this figure had dropped to approximately 80 streams. Individual populations recently have gone extinct in five streams in the Upper Missouri River Basin.
The few remaining pure westslope cutthroat trout populations are threatened by domestic stock pollution, excess silt and turbidity, stock overuse, lack of bank vegetation, and lack of spawning habitat. Many of these populations are limited to two kilometers or less distribution. Only a few populations are distributed over a stream length of ten kilometers.
An assessment of the extinction risk for westslope cutthroat trout in the upper Missouri Basin indicates that, of the 144 remaining populations with genetic purity greater than 90 percent, 103, or 71 percent, of the 144 populations have a very high risk of extinction or very low “probability of persistence,” 27, or 18 percent, were assigned a high risk of extinction and 14, or 10 percent, were assigned a moderate risk of extinction.
Both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have found no populations with a low rate of extinction.
In this light, your staff’s proposal to eliminate the Forest Plan’s indigenous species management mandates flies in the face of the scientific reality of the precarious situation of the westslope cutthroat trout.
If the indigenous species Forest Plan mandate is continued and re-emphasized, Gallatin National Forest management would ensure no further stream degradation, protection of all existing westslope cutthroat trout populations, and sizeable habitat enhancement to allow for more creek segments with increased westslope cutthroat trout populations.
MANAGEMENT INDICATOR SPECIES:
If you eliminate the current Forest Plan’s management emphasis for indigenous species, what will happen to critical “management indicator species” that gauge the overall health of forest ecosystems?
If you replace the Gallatin National Forest Forest Plan’s indigenous species mandate with “Habitat for big game will be managed to help meet management goals of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP);” what would that spell for the future of:
Hairy woodpecker (overall forest management indicator species);
Goshawk and three-towed woodpecker (old growth management indicator species);
Western jumping mouse (meadows management indicator species);
Belted kingfishers and willow flycatchers (shrub riparian management indicator species);
Northern water shrew and warbling vireo (tree riparian management indicator species);
Montana vole (grasslands management indicator species); and the
Sage thrasher (shrublands management indicator species)?
HABITAT FOR AMERICA’S LAST REMAINING MIGRATING HERD OF WILD BISON:
By eliminating the current Gallatin National Forest Forest Plan’s indigenous species mandate, you could engender the ultimate extinction of America’s last remaining migrating herd of wild bison. Yellowstone’s bison are genetically and behaviorally unique – the ONLY herd with continuously wild ancestry from the days when approximately 50 million bison migrated freely across the Great Plains.
After the government-sponsored holocaust of these bison and Indigenous Peoples that depended upon them, only 23 wild bison survived, taking refuge in Yellowstone’s remote Pelican Valley.
Yellowstone’s tattered remnant herd is all that remains of 50 million wild bison! This herd is America’s ONLY free-roaming, wild, unfenced population.
The Yellowstone bison have naturally migrated to the public lands now contained within the Gallatin National Forest for millennia. As such, the Gallatin National Forest MUST, at the direction of your Forest Plan, do everything it can possibly do to encourage this herd to naturally migrate to public lands adjacent to Yellowstone National Park.
To escape slaughter by the Montana Department of Livestock (MDOL), the Yellowstone bison desperately need access to our National Forest lands; access mandated by your current Forest Plan to “provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species and for increasing populations of big game animals.”
PUBLIC LANDS MUST BE MANAGED FOR PUBLIC WILDLIFE:
Supervisor Erickson, I hope you strongly agree that public lands must be managed for public wildlife. The current situation of the Montana Department of Livestock slaughtering all bison that innocently migrate across the boundary of Yellowstone National Park is clearly untenable.
America’s public lands deserve a vibrantly healthy migrating herd of wild bison. If you adhere to the current Gallatin National Forest Forest Plan’s management mandate to “provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species,” you will take appropriate administrative actions to promote the migration of Yellowstone bison onto and into the Gallatin National Forest and to provide the publicly-owned habitats and birthing grounds so essential for this herd’s prosperity.
If you allow for this common sense solution – a solution that worked perfectly for tens of thousands of years – the genetic strength and population of the Yellowstone bison herd (both now rapidly diminishing due to SEVERE mishandling by the Montana Department of Livestock) could again become tenable. This would be a success story heralded worldwide, perhaps as much as the creation of Yellowstone National Park itself.
You hold the future of wild bison and many other indigenous species of the Gallatin National Forest in your hands. PLEASE retain your current Gallatin National Forest Forest Plan’s language to “provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” and studiously manage our public lands to fully realize this mandate. Thank you.
THE NECESSITY OF BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY, OR “BIODIVERSITY”:
I am merely a stakeholder committed to the imperative for biological diversity, or “biodiversity,” on our public lands. Since I am not a scientist, I could be mistaken concerning some of the above. I welcome any corrections and/or suggestions you may have for further exploration and development of these issues.
Please acknowledge, via e-mail or snail-mail, your receipt of these comments.
Please include these comments in any and all public comment files; comments on the current Gallatin National Forest Plan; comments on the proposed Gallatin National Forest Forest Plan; comments on the “Proposed Gallatin National Forest Plan ‘Clean Up’ Amendments;” comments on the management of all the species mentioned herein; and all land use decisions by the Gallatin National Forest’s forest supervisor and the five district rangers affecting all species mentioned above and/or other indigenous species. Thank you.
Please also place me on all of your supervisor’s mailing list and of your five district ranger offices’ mailing lists for any further development concerning the Gallatin National Forest’s mandate to “provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species and for increasing populations of big game animals.”
Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully yours,
Paul Thomas Richards
30 Browns Gulch Road
Boulder, MT 59632
Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards
