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
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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.
