Sixteen Major Errors of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill

Sixteen Major Errors of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill

Analysis by Paul Richards, PR  Media Consultants®

Sixteen Major Errors of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill:

All of the sixteen following errors, flaws, and weaknesses of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill, were covered in my July 2009 in-depth analysis posted the day that Tester announced this legislation at a Townsend, Montana, sawmill at:  www.NewWest.net.

On July 17, 2009, NewWest.Net offered Sen. Jon Tester an opportunity to rebut all of these points.  As of this writing (January 7, 2010), he is still “considering it.”

It should be noted that, on July 17, 2009, Peter Aengst of the Wilderness Society did issue statements calling this analysis and the resultant NewWest.Net investigative piece a “rant.”  Aengst refrained from addressing any specifics.

1. The public was completely shut out of the drafting of S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.  The bill was drafted in an underhanded manner by a handful of insiders, sworn to secrecy.  Rather than incorporating meaningful public involvement, Tester chose the path of “fait accompli.”  This has created enormous resentment from all quarters.

DETAILS:  I, for example, am a member of the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and Montana Wilderness Association.  I served on the board of the Montana Wilderness Association and have received the organization’s “Brass Lantern” Award.

Years ago, when these three conservation groups and the timber industry first formed the “Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership,” I approached the players.  As one who had been involved at the grassroots level with the Deerlodge National Forest for over 27 years, and as an official member of the Deerlodge National Forest Technical Advisory Committee, I thought my presence might be an asset during negotiations.  I had been involved with the successful appeal and resultant “Settlement Agreement” of the Deerlodge Forest Plan, which had been heralded region-wide as a model for citizen participation.

Over a two-year period, I sent numerous e-mails and made numerous phone calls, trying to get into the negotiations or at least monitor them.  All my attempts were rebuffed, as were all attempts by many other members of the public. We, as members of the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and Montana Wilderness Association, were kept entirely in the dark as our organizations’ staffs compromised away our public wildlands.

I have also been a member of the Wilderness Society for 40 years.  At NO time were Wilderness Society members ever appraised as to deals, trade-offs, and The Wilderness Society’s staff actually supporting the removal of current administrative and Congressional protections for our public wildlands.

Wildlands proponents weren’t the only ones excluded.  People in favor of resource development, county officials, and state legislators were also kept in the dark.  U.S. Forest Service officials, scientists, biologists, botanists, silviculturalists, and public information specialists were purposefully excluded from participation and denied access to all drafts of the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.

In short:  There was NO public information and NO  public discussion.  Countless interest groups and individuals were surgically removed from every major decision regarding their own public lands.

Instead being forged by well-informed public debate, reviewed by U.S. Forest Service scientists and experts, and exposed to the healing properties of disinfecting sunlight, Tester’s bill was clandestinely and sloppily cobbled together behind-the-scenes.

2.  S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, violates Tester’s 2006 campaign promise “to protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.”

DETAILS:  With only a week to go, polls showed State Sen. Jon Tester and State Auditor John Morrison at a dead heat in the June 2006 Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate.  Tester operative Missoula attorney Pat Smith directly contacted former state Rep. Paul Richards (me), who was running third of five candidates in the race, concerning Richards’ possible endorsement of Tester.

Richards agreed to meet twice with Tester in Helena, Montana, on Tuesday, May 30, 2006, to see if terms could be worked out for this endorsement.

As a result of these two negotiating sessions, Tester agreed to terms detailed at:  www.Richards2006.us, including the specific promise that:  “If elected, Jon Tester will work to protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.”

In exchange for these mutually-agreed-upon-with-witnesses (including Tester’s wife, Shar, and Tester’s son, Shon) terms, Paul Richards agreed to withdraw from the race for U.S. Senate and publicly ask his supporters to vote for Jon Tester.  After the agreement was reached, Richards personally contacted his extensive network of environmental advocates throughout the state, detailed Tester’s commitment to “protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas,” and asked his supporters to vote for Tester  in the June 2006 Democratic primary election, rather than Richards.

News of Richards’ endorsement appeared on front pages of most Montana daily newspapers and was prominent in all other media the final week before the election.  Tester and Richards celebrated the win jointly at a June 6, 2006, election night party in Missoula, MT.

3. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, alienates Tester’s main supporters from the 2006 election.

DETAILS:  Conservationists provided the margin of victory that allowed Tester to defeat incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns in the general election of 2006.  In tacking solely towards the timber industry, moneyed corporations that never previously supported him in any fashion, Tester has abandoned his true constituency.

To date, due to interminable efforts by countless pro-logging public relations specialists, reporters and editors that know better have been forced into states of profound stupor.  As a result of this lethargy, Montana’s corporate media have largely bought into the “spin” created by timber corporations, Tester, Baucus, Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, Montana Wilderness Association, and Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

Instead of raising necessary questions concerning potential loss of our public wildlands legacy and expenditures of well over $100 million in taxpayer timber subsidies, corporate media in Montana have cast legitimate public debate aside and joined the spinmasters’ choir, making Tester’s bill the “feel good” legislation of the year!

National media, on the other hand, will likely see through the smoke and mirrors, no matter how numerous and gregarious the spinmasters, how “nice” the legislation’s sponsor, or how desperately the sawmills crave even more taxpayer subsidies.

As the actual implications of the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill become known to public lands stakeholders throughout the nation, Tester’s credibility among public lands advocates and true conservationists will suffer accordingly.  Ultimately, this will become reflected in his in-state standing.  Instead of longtime dedicated conservationist like the esteemed Senator Lee Metcalf representing the long-term interests of our public lands legacy, Montanans are now looking at a one-term flash in the pan.

4. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, “undesignates” S 393 wildlands and loots the wildlands legacy of former Senator Lee Metcalf – Montana’s greatest conservationist.

DETAILS:  Tester’s bill is a full-scale pillaging of the legacy of Montana’s greatest conservationist and my mentor, U.S. Senator Lee Metcalf.  In 1977, Sen. Metcalf, only a year before he died, worked tirelessly to pass Senate Bill 393, the Montana Wilderness Study Act.

Sen. Metcalf’s magnificent legacy protected nine roadless wildland areas, while they were studied for official designation as wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964, a bill which Sen. Metcalf had earlier personally shepherded through Congress, with the conscientious advocacy of Wilderness Society Executive Director Stewart Brandborg and Wilderness Society Field Director Clif Merritt, both Montana natives.

Tester’s bill removes the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area and the West Pioneers Wilderness Study Area from the Congressional protection of Sen. Metcalf’s Senate Bill 393 and opens more than two-thirds of these priceless and irretrievable roadless wildlands to logging.

Only high-elevation “rocks and ice” non-timber producing tracts would be designated wilderness.  Of the 94,000 acres of public roadless wildlands currently in the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area, 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, only 26,000 acres would be protected from development.

Tester’s bill “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 excludes logging them from protective provisions of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

5. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, pulls roadless areas out from the protection of the Clinton Roadless Rule and the Obama Roadless Initiative.

DETAILS:  Tester’s bill withdraws around one million acres of public roadless wildlands on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest from the protection of the Clinton Roadless Rule and the Obama Roadless Initiative and opens them to roading and logging.

You won’t find this in the bill.  You have to go to the maps that accompany the bill, maps to which courts will undoubtedly refer, if this misguided legislation actually passes.  The maps (located at:  http://tester.senate.gov/Legislation/upload/Proposed-Land-Designations.pdf ) are very specific in reclassifying the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s currently protected roadless wildlands to a new category, officially designated “Timber Suitable or Open to Harvest.”

6. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, Congressionally overrides legitimate forest planning processes that involve full public information and participation.

DETAILS:  Tester’s bill circumvents National Forest planning laws, procedures, and regulations.  Currently, the U.S. Forest Service is required to honestly 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 mandated logging takes place in the total absence of well-established forest planning procedures that require state-of-the art science, public information, and public involvement.

Tester’s bill Congressionally mandates cut 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 prioritizes logging above all other uses.

Under Tester’s bill, taxpayer subsidies to timber corporations are more important than anything, be it elk hunting (which would diminish as elk security is logged away by mandated timber cutting), fishing (drastically debilitated by inevitable water degradation caused by unsustainable logging), steady supplies of clean irrigation water (logging causes much faster watershed runoffs and increased sedimentation), pure community water supplies (most western Montana cities get their water from our public roadless wildlands), diminished wildlife habitat, you name it.

7. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, promotes “logging without laws.”

DETAILS:  By mandating timber cuts be placed above all other concerns, Tester’s bill could statutorily exempt timber cutting 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, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.  This is a point of contention.  Tester claims environmental laws will be adhered to.  To the uninitiated, that sounds just great!  However, the initiated know full well that when Congress mandates timber cutting quotas, federal courts have consistently held that the Congressional mandate to cut down the public’s trees trumps federal environmental and land use laws.

We’ve been through all this before.  For over 20 years, politicians have claimed environmental laws would be followed, at the same time that they have imposed mandatory cutting quotas on public lands.  While Tester’s public relations have lulled gullible “conservationists” into believing we can get the cut out and follow environmental laws, the courts consistently rule that the mandated cuts are paramount and that environmental laws don’t have to be respected.

The legal track record is available to anyone that can Google.  The court precedents have already been established:  If you have a conflict in law, “the specific overrides the general.”  That is, Congressionally-mandated 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.

Thus, despite proclamations to the contrary from Tester’s “conservation” collaborationists, if the Tester bill’s forced cutting quotas are approved by Congress, environmental laws would likely fall helplessly by the wayside.

8. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, mandates a cut of 7,000 acres a year for 10 years on a forest that sustainably produces, according to Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest officials, only between 500 and 2800 acres a year.

DETAILS:  As a lifelong resident of the area and as a long-time member of the U.S. Forest Service’s Technical Advisory Committee, I know full well that the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest is not productive timberland.  Much of the forest is east of the Continental Divide, receives little precipitation, and has an extremely short growing season, due to its high altitude.  Due to these limiting factors, it costs the public at least $1,400 per acre to log in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.

Tester claims the mandated cut will come from the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s suitable timber base and that inventoried roadless areas are not threatened.  But, Tester is ignoring reality.  In recent years, logging professionals with the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest have established the Forest’s sustainable yearly harvest at 500 acres.  The most they’ve cut, even during the years of the housing boom, is 2,800 acres a year.

Can Tester mandate a cut of 70,000 acres (7,000 acres a year for 10 years) on a forest that is not productive timberland, without entering and developing undeveloped (roadless) lands?  For a clue, review the maps located at:  http://tester.senate.gov/Legislation/upload/Proposed-Land-Designations.pdf and note that, under the Tester bill, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s inventoried roadless wildlands are officially re-designated as “Timber Suitable or Open to Harvest.”

9. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, mandates a cut of 30,000 acres of grizzly bear habitat on the Kootenai National Forest, causing distress and disturbance that some biologists say will force the dwindling Yaak grizzly bears into insecure habitat and ultimately extinction.

DETAILS:  Wildlife consultant Brian Peck reports, “I have worked for 15 years to try and save the imperiled 30-40 grizzlies in the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem in a landscape where the “Cores” are too small, the “Buffers” are over-logged and roaded, and the “Linkages” are non-existent.

Tester’s bill mandates the cutting of 3,000 acres per year for ten years on the Kootenai National Forest, a forest that already looks like a moonscape in many areas from decades of U.S. Forest Service abuse. How is another 30,000 acres of logging not going to be the last nail in these bear’s coffin?”

10. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, could have a severe adverse impact upon rare, threatened, and endangered species.

DETAILS:  Since the Tester bill Congressionally-mandates timber cuts, curtails forest planning, and severely restricts the U.S. Forest Service from accurately assessing logging’s impacts; environmental protections provided by the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act (mistakenly called the “National Environmental Protection Act” by Tester’s bill), National Forest Management Act, Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and Wilderness Act will likely be preempted.

If this scenario plays out, the public will never know the full extent to which secluded, rare, threatened, and endangered species will be adversely impacted, particularly in the Kootenai National Forest and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.

By forcing unsustainable industrial-scale logging upon our public lands, Tester’s bill would irrevocably harm essential habitat 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).

11. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, ignores the scientific need to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species.

DETAILS:  Conservation biologists have long understood the need to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species, with 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.

The “conservation” collaborationists (Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, Montana Wilderness Association, and Greater Yellowstone Coalition) publicly boast that, by supporting Tester’s bill, they are “creating” new wilderness areas.

These areas fail to pass scientific muster.  A handful of nonproductive, high-altitude, limited-habitat “rocks and ice” wilderness areas, allocated to human recreational enjoyment does nothing for the vast majority of forest species.  Unconnected islands of  “rocks and ice” provide no biological integrity and no potential for sustaining biodiversity.

12. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, costs over $100 million for taxpayer-subsidized timber sales and lavish new sawmill power plants.

DETAILS:  It costs the public at least $1,400 per acre to log in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.  Mandating logging of 7,000 acres will cost the public $9,800,000 a year.  Mandating this level of cutting for 10 years, as Tester proposes, will cost taxpayers at least $98 million dollars.

In fact, the cost of these timber industry subsidies will be considerably higher, as the above economic figures date from the housing boom, three-to-four years ago.  Now, that we are in economic depression, there is no housing construction and hardly anyone is buying timber.

In today’s depressed market for timber, the “hard money” subsidies for loggers that the Tester bill mandates will likely reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 10 years.

In addition to these taxpayer subsidies, Tester wants additional untold millions in taxpayer subsidies to build costly on-site power plants for the timber corporations promoting his bill.  The taxpayer-financed power plants will only serve the timber corporations, not the communities of western Montana.

It is more corporate pork, plain and simple.

Tester’s power plants also make absolutely no sense.  Trucking biomass to large, centralized power plants is grossly inefficient, when compared to utilizing numerous small-scale portable decentralized facilities.

It is far more practical to truck numerous inexpensive portable generators to the biomass, than to truck the biomass increasingly long distances to expensive and instantaneously obsolete centralized power facilities at sawmills.

13.  S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, negligently ignores the fact that there is no current demand for timber.

DETAILS:  Since there is no demand for sawmills’ lumber, Tester’s bill defies basic common sense.  The legislation is blatantly undisguised in its privatization of public resources and its forcing the public assumption of lumber mills’ private debt.

A mere four corporations:  Pyramid Mountain Lumber (Seeley Lake), Roseburg Lumber (Missoula), RY Timber (Townsend and Livingston), and Sun Mountain Lumber (Deerlodge) will receive well over $100 million courtesy of the kind Senator, with taxpayers picking up the tab in tax dollars spent, watersheds degraded, habitat lost, and public wildlands destroyed.

14. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, mandates timber cutting, while leaving ensuing forest restoration optional.

DETAILS:  This is the elephant in the living room.  If Tester’s bill passes, by Congressional mandate, public wildlands will be roaded and their trees cut down.  Then, after the trees are long gone, there will be no forest restoration.

Tester’s bill contains absolutely NO restoration mandates.

National Forests are littered with giant messes of logging restoration left unfunded and undone.  It’s the U.S. Forest Service’s dirtiest secret:  After the public’s trees are cut down and the logs hauled out, somehow, the agency just never seems to be able to find the money to honor its once-so-earnest promises of restoration.

There isn’t a national forest in the country that has actually delivered on its past commitments to restore public lands and watersheds wounded by logging.  When it comes to budget priorities, post-logging forest reclamation and restoration has always been the U.S. Forest Service’s neglected and unwanted step-child.

Maintaining a brave posture in the face of this undeniable track record, Tester claims that revenues from mandated logging will pay for forest restoration projects.  But, inconvenient truth again rears its ugly head:  In lodgepole pine-dominant forests, there simply won’t be any revenues!  At taxpayer-subsidies of $1,400 for every acre logged, just how will Tester’s restoration funds be magically generated?

This giant Ponzi scheme will likely be the undoing of the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.

15. “Conservation” collaborationists supporting S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, have all received massive funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, which works to “confine wilderness legislation to rocks-and-ice regions by co-opting gullible or calculating people in the wilderness movement.”

DETAILS:  The Pew Charitable Trusts are an independent nonprofit organization–the sole beneficiary of seven individual charitable funds, with assets of $5.2 billion at the end of June 2008, established by two sons and two daughters of Sun Oil Company founder, Joseph N. Pew, and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew.

Pew works to “confine wilderness legislation to rocks-and-ice regions by co-opting gullible or calculating people in the wilderness movement,” according to former Montana Wilderness Association President Elaine Snyder and former MWA Board Member Ross Titus.

“Organizations that have gained access to Pew money are expected to show short-term gains in wilderness protection regardless of the cost to other public resources and political efforts,” according to Snyder and Titus.

The Montana Wilderness Association has received tens of thousands of dollars of Pew money.  The National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and the Wilderness Society have each received many millions of dollars from the Pew Charitable Trusts.  National Wildlife Federation staffers are even housed at Pew’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.

Pew tipped its hand concerning the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill with a preemptive Thursday, July 9, 2009, e-mail “Alert” entitled “Sen. Tester Leads on Wilderness” from Mike Matz, executive director of the Pew-funded “Campaign for America’s Wilderness” (formerly known as the “Pew Wilderness Center”).  “We need to THANK Senator Tester for showing positive leadership to protect the best of Montana’s pristine national forests,” Matz wrote.

“His bill would add the first new wilderness in Montana in more than a quarter of a century,” Matz continued. “Sen. Tester needs to hear that Montanans want to protect their special places as wilderness, for Montana families, clean water and wildlife.  Please take a moment to call Senator Tester today and make a difference for Montana’s wilderness.  Dial the nearest local office now and tell them you appreciate Sen. Tester’s leadership on wilderness,” Matz concluded.  Matz then listed the telephone number for each of Tester’s eight Montana field offices.

Matz was asking well-intentioned wilderness advocates, who don’t know the funding sources of the “Campaign for America’s Wilderness,” to praise Tester for a wildlands logging bill that Tester refused to allow the public to see!

On the same afternoon, the Wilderness Society, sent out its own “Wild Alert,” under the name of Kathy Kilmer.  “Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester is considering legislation that would give Montana its first new wilderness designations in decades,” Kilmer wrote.  “Sen. Tester needs to hear that Montanans want to protect their special places as wilderness, for Montana families, clean water and wildlife.  Please call Sen. Tester and thank him for showing positive leadership to protect the best of Montana’s pristine national forests,” Kilmer concluded.  The Wilderness Society used the exact same non-alphabetical listing of Tester’s eight Montana field offices as Matz.

Besides the eeriness of identical non-alphabetical listings and the same language (“Sen. Tester needs to hear that Montanans want to protect their special places as wilderness, for Montana families, clean water and wildlife.”), the incredible thing about the preemptive Pew-funded e-mail campaigns of July 9, 2009, was that no one anywhere had actually seen the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, other than the timber industry and its collaborationists!  Yet, we grassroots wildlands supporters were supposed to sign a blank check, call Tester, and thank him for drafting a public lands bill in secret!

When I first reported on the Pew-orchestrated campaign, Peter Aengst of the Wilderness Society wrote the following to Jared White of the Wilderness Society:  “Can you check with Kathy Kilmer and see if it is possible to remove certain unsupportive people from our Wild Alert lists?  Like Paul Richards (see his direct quoting of our alert).”

How dramatically have millions of Pew dollars caused the Wilderness Society to stray from its original mission, once pursued so faithfully by such courageous stalwarts as Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, Robert and George Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Howard Zahniser, Stewart Brandborg, and Clif Merritt?

How could today’s Pew-funded Wilderness Society take me, a member of 40-years-standing, OFF of its mailing lists for being pro-wildlands and pro-wilderness?

How could today’s Pew-funded Wilderness Society exclude the public from public land decisions; support throwing away untold millions of dollars of pork for taxpayer-subsidized timber sales and lavish new sawmill power plants; exempting public wildlands from federal laws and the protection of a new earnest President; “undesignating” the legacy of Montana’s greatest conservationist; and destroying an irretrievable portion of Montana’s priceless roadless wildlands heritage?

16. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, fragments the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, the ONLY functioning ecosystem in the lower 49 states where all native species still reside.

DETAILS:  Northern Rockies wildlands are the only place in the lower 49 states where all native species and wildlife remain!

These are our public wildlands, belonging to all Americans.

The Tester Wildlands Logging Bill strips away the protection of these public wildlands currently provided by the Clinton Roadless Rule, the Obama Roadless Initiative, and Sen. Lee Metcalf’s incredibly farsighted Senate Bill 393.

By fragmenting the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill is a direct assault on the scientific principles of biodiversity and biological integrity for which so many dedicated citizens have worked so hard for the last quarter century.      If Tester’s bill passes:  Secluded, rare, threatened, and endangered species will be adversely impacted, particularly in the Kootenai National Forest and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.

By forcing unsustainable industrial-scale logging upon our public lands, Tester’s bill would irrevocably harm essential habitat of species that characterize the wild nature of the northern Rockies, such as the gray wolf, otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, pika, elk, northern goshawk, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, sage grouse, Montana vole, sage thrasher, wild bison, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, arctic grayling, bull trout, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), and grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal).

The “wilderness” areas in the Tester bill are fragmented and unconnected islands of largely “rocks and ice,” with no biological integrity and no potential for sustaining biodiversity.

These minimal “wilderness” designations in Tester’s bill fail entirely to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species with core areas, buffer zones, and connecting biological corridors.

The Tester Wildlands Logging Bill promotes numerous abuses and violations that are clearly incompatible with the 1964 Wilderness Act, including motorized access into and through “wilderness,” low-level military overflights of “wilderness,” military aircraft landings in “wilderness,” possible “wilderness” logging, and other intrusions that violate the intrinsic principles of Wilderness.

As Montana State Rep. Francis Bardanouve used to say:  “This is a BAD, BAD bill”:

As my very dear friend and companion, the late Rep. Francis Bardanouve, the highly-respected Dean of the Montana Legislature, sometimes proclaimed, when I served with him in the Montana House of Representatives, “This is a BAD, BAD bill!”

Francis rarely said this.  But, the few times he did say it, legislators paid attention.  They knew Francis did his homework.

House members understood that Rep. Francis Bardanouve ALWAYS researched exhaustively and deliberated studiously, before arriving at his opinion.  As a result, Francis’s peers in the House of Representatives listened carefully and consistently heeded Francis’s warning that “This is a BAD, BAD bill.”  They always voted the bad, bad bill down.

For all the errors, flaws, and weaknesses detailed above and for many other reasons raised by countless groups, officials, and citizens:  S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill, is a BAD, BAD bill.  It needs to die a quick death.

In support of lasting protection for our Nation’s priceless and irretrievable public wildlands legacy,

Respectfully submitted,

Paul Richards
PR  Media Consultants®
Public Interest Media Since 1968
30 Brown’s Gulch Road
Boulder, MT   59632
Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com

www.PRMediaConsultants.com
www.Richards2006.us
http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/

(Editor’s Note: For further extensive in-depth analyses and commentary about the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill and for information about The Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign, a coalition of 55 conservation groups opposed to the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, go to:  http://testerloggingbilltruths.wordpress.com/ ).

Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards