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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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.

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.

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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

Proposed High-Speed Freeway Threatens
Northern Rockies’ Wildlife Linkages from
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to
Greater Glacier/Bob Marshall Ecosystem

By Paul Richards

Many westerners are familiar with Highway 69, the scenic rural route that runs alongside the Boulder River, between the Elkhorn Mountains and Bull Mountain from Boulder to Cardwell.  The Boulder Valley is one of Montana’s most beautiful drives, filled with abundant wildlife and breathtaking scenery.

This pastoral scene is gradually turning into a nightmare.  Canadian truckers, fully aware that law enforcement on Highway 69 is minimal at best, drive in convoys at speeds up to 85 mph, endangering all local traffic.

For almost 10 years, Boulder Valley residents have petitioned the Montana Department of Transportation (MDOT) for a safer Highway 69.  We have asked for:

*  A pedestrian walkway and bicycle path along the highway’s current route;
*  Safe crosswalks at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, Boulder Hot Springs, and other frequently utilized junctions;
*  Retention of the valley’s lush aspen and cottonwood;
*  Underpasses or overpasses for elk, deer, moose, bear, pronghorn and other wildlife;
*  A full-time truck weighing station;
*  Lower speed limits for the safety of vehicles, trucks, pedestrians, ranchers and their equipment, bicycles, wildlife and livestock, and
*  Strict enforcement of these lower speed limits.

In early 2005, we submitted an official “Citizens’ Alternative” to MDOT Director Jim Lynch and MDOT Butte Division Administrator Jeff Ebert.  “MDOT is legally bound to offer a wide range of alternatives,” we wrote.  “Any public meetings to discuss alternatives need to have the above alternative before it for consideration.”

MDOT’s response was swift and deadly.  At a June 1, 2005, hearing, MDOT presented its “nuclear option” — a new high-speed freeway to be built on the river’s east bench — a stake right through the hearts of all Boulder Valley ranches.

Legally, according to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), this was a “scoping” hearing, where MDOT was supposed to receive public comments concerning features we wanted for Highway 69.

But, there was no “hearing.”  MDOT never asked what we wanted. And, MDOT never mentioned our “Citizens’ Alternative.”

Instead, MDOT told us that its already-approved “preferred alternative” for a new high-speed international highway corridor was a fait accompli.

Needless to say, MDOT’s circumvention of NEPA, its premature and illegal designation of a “preferred alternative” without any public input; the agency’s violation of state and federal public participation and environmental protection mandates; and its devastating “nuclear option” did not go over particularly well.

More than 100 Boulder Valley residents at the 2005 “hearing” unanimously shouted “NO!”

Now, flash ahead five years to MDOT’s March 23, 2010, hearing. Due to steadfast community opposition, MDOT finally announced it was abandoning its “nuclear option.”

However, in the years between the 2005 and 2010 hearings, NONE of the concerns expressed by area residents have been addressed!

Even though more than 200 residents signed petitions requesting the pedestrian walkway and bike path and even though MDOT promised us in writing in 2008 they would explore this proposal, MDOT did not mention it.

MDOT did not mention safe crosswalks, truck weighing station, lower speed limits, and enforcement of speed limits.  On questioning, MDOT said it would take an act of the Legislature to lower vehicular speeds to make our neighborhood safer.  That is absolute nonsense.

Instead of strictly-enforced lower speed limits, MDOT actually told us it wants to “speed up” Highway 69, so Canadian truckers can drive faster and get home sooner to spend more time with their wives and kids!

MDOT did not mention wildlife collisions, although the agency’s own in-house data are overwhelming.  MDOT refused to discuss underpasses and overpasses, even though studies have deemed them biologically critical to maintain existing wildlife corridors and linkages from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to the Greater Glacier/Bob Marshall Ecosystem.

MDOT told us “we have to design this highway for morons” who drive too fast for road conditions!

Montana’s magnificent Boulder Valley and the priceless wildlife corridors it provides need your help!

Using the contact information provided below, please tell MDOT that:

1.  You support the bicycle and pedestrian path, with well-marked crossings;
2.  You support wildlife underpasses and overpasses;
3.  Flashing signs alerting motorists to crossings and reduced speed limits have proven effective in Montana’s wildlife-rich Bitterroot Valley on Highway 93, Gallatin Valley on Highway 191, Clark Fork Valley on Highway 200, and Mission Valley on Highway 93 — MDOT must do this in the Boulder Valley on Highway 69;
4.  Since the Boulder River is officially “impaired,” MDOT cannot contribute further to its “Total Maximum Daily Loads” or “TMDLs.”
5.  Highway 69 is a rural state route, not a U.S. Highway or an Interstate Highway;
6.  Highway 69 is not designed for high-speed truck traffic, nor should it be;
7.  Nearby and parallel Interstate 15 is the north-south freeway specifically designed for high-speed truck traffic;
8.  If MDOT continues its misguided, NAFTA-driven efforts to convert Highway 69 from a pastoral rural route into a high-speed freeway for international truck traffic, the agency must first prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement.
9.  The Boulder Valley is a community of sane people that doesn’t need “morons” driving through it at unsafe speeds; and
10.  Give Boulder Valley residents, ranchers, kids, pedestrians, bicyclists, and wildlife a brake!

To comment, title your comments “Boulder South EA,” submit them on-line at: http://www.mdt.mt.gov/mdt/comment_form.shtml and http://governor.mt.gov/contact/commentsform.asp ; e-mail them to  jebert@mt.gov ; dwambach@mt.gov ; snicolai@dowlhkm.com ; jilynch@mt.gov ; and bbrosten@mt.gov ; and/or snail-mail them to:

Boulder South EA
DOWL HKM
P.O. Box 1009
Helena, MT  59624.

Provide your contact information and ask MDOT to keep you posted concerning all stages of this project and all subsequent projects concerning the Boulder Valley and Highway 69 .

Thank you!
____________________________________________________________________

Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards

Paul Richards is a Helena native, Boulder area businessman, former member of the Montana House of Representatives, and former candidate for U.S. Senate.  For further information, contact him at:  30 Brown’s Gulch Road, Boulder, MT  59632, or by e-mail at:  Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com .

Editor’s Note:

Different versions of this piece have appeared in the:

1.  (Butte) Montana Standard, located at: http://www.mtstandard.com/news/opinion/columnists/article_50f70b0e-49a6-11df-9d2c-001cc4c03286.html

2.  (Helena, MT) Queen City News, located at: http://www.queencitynews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=11387&mode=flat&order=0&thold=0

3. Boulder (MT ) Monitor.  No Internet posting–no URL.

Yellowstone Bison Translocation Team
Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks
1420 E. 6th Ave.
Helena, MT   59601
E-mail:  QFBison@mt.gov

January 7, 2010

Subject:  Comments on Wild Yellowstone Bison Translocation Draft Environmental Analysis, Phase IV Quarantine Feasibility Study

Dear Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Yellowstone Bison Translocation Team,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Park’s “Draft Environmental Assessment on the Translocation of Quarantined Yellowstone Bison.”

I would like to go on record as strongly opposed to the Quarantine Feasibility Study.  Much better solutions are available.  We need to fully protect the entire Yellowstone bison herd and encourage its growth.  We need to create wild Yellowstone bison migratory corridors throughout tribal lands, U.S. Forest Service lands, U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands, state land, wildlife refuges, national parks, roadless wildlands, and wilderness area.

We need to map out all potential bison habitat on public lands.  We need to identify all potential winter and summer range on public lands around Yellowstone National Park, with a special emphasis on designating and protecting spring calving grounds.

We need to reduce potential for wild bison to get diseases from domestic livestock.  Where any overlaps or potential conflicts might occur, we need to remove domestic livestock from our public lands, to ensure that public wildlife get the habitat they need and deserve.  On private lands in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we need stringent cattle-based brucellosis-risk management programs that will keep our Montana cattle herds completely brucellosis free.

Yellowstone’s bison are genetically and behaviorally unique – the ONLY herd with continuously wild ancestry from the days when millions of wild 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.  Yellowstone’s priceless endangered and tattered remnant herd is all that remains of 50 million wild bison!  This herd, pushed to the brink of extinction, is America’s only remaining wild migrating bison.

Wild Yellowstone bison have naturally migrated to the public lands now contained within National Forests and other public lands for millennia.  However, instead of being allowed access to their own habitat on our own public lands, this magnificent and imperiled species has been subjected to mindless slaughter by Montana Department of Livestock cowboys.

Thankfully, the Gallatin National Forest is currently mandated by its Forest Plan to “provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species.” We all need to work closely with the Gallatin National Forest to make sure it lives up to its Forest Plan.  The Gallatin National Forest needs to do everything it can possibly do to encourage wild Yellowstone bison to naturally migrate to public lands adjacent to Yellowstone National Park.

We need to utilize the Gallatin National Forest’s mandate to“provide habitat for viable populations of all indigenous wildlife species” as a model for all National Forests and other public lands within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.  Every other National Forest within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem needs to incorporate similar language into their Forest Plans and their resultant administrative actions.

Public lands must be managed for public wildlife.

America’s public lands legacy deserves vibrantly healthy migrating herds of wild bison within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.  National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the States of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and all other public land managers need to take administrative actions necessary to enlarge the wild Yellowstone bison herd, to promote the natural migration of Yellowstone bison, and to provide the publicly-owned habitat so essential for the prosperity of these magnificent wild animals, the very symbols used to portray the American West and the U.S. National Park Service itself.

These solutions worked perfectly for tens of thousands of years.  If we are wise enough to return to them, the genetic strength and population of the Yellowstone bison herd (both now under relentless assault by the Montana Department of Livestock) will again become tenable.  Yellowstone bison have naturally migrated to these public lands for millennia.  The restoration of wild bison within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will become a success story heralded worldwide, perhaps rivaling the proud creation of Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park.

You, as our Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, need to work closely with the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies to provide for migration of Yellowstone bison into all National Forests and other public lands around Yellowstone National Park.  Yellowstone bison are just like elk.  They need access to these public lands.

You, as the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, need to closely coordinate with the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and other agencies to cancel grazing of diseased domestic livestock on public lands in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, to facilitate the return of public wildlife such as the Yellowstone bison to full abundance.

You, as the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, need to strip the Montana Department of Livestock of any and all authority to regulate or manage in any way the wild Yellowstone bison.  We all understand that the wild, migrating Yellowstone bison are not domestic livestock!  The disgraceful, disrespectful, and outdated policies of slaughter and gross mismanagement by Montana Department of Livestock cowboys completely ignorant of genetic diversity and strength, healthy ecosystems, biological integrity, and biodiversity are over!

Again:  Our public lands must be managed for public wildlife, such as the wild Yellowstone bison.  Our public lands’ legacy is NOT well served by converting our priceless National Forests into mere commercial cattle feed lots or taxpayer-subsidized mono-culture tree farms.

Let the Yellowstone bison flourish!

Below are some of my specific concerns with your Draft Environmental Assessment:

1.  You have not provided adequate time for meaningful public input. With release of this  Environmental Assessment to the public at 11:00 a.m. MST on December 15, 2009, the public has been given only 28 days to comment, most of it during the Holiday season.  This is unacceptable.  The short public comment period for this Draft Environmental Analysis, timed to exactly coincide with everyone’s vacations, hardly allows meaningful opportunities for the public to thoroughly digest the disseminated information, ask appropriate questions, and contribute helpful comments.  Thus, I hereby formally request that you extend the official public comment period by AT LEAST 90 days.

2.  The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP) has disseminated misinformation to the public, disguised as fact.  MFWP issued a news release on December 15, 2009, announcing the release of its Environmental Assessment to translocate quarantined Yellowstone bison.  In the release, MFWP states, “Many Yellowstone bison are infected with brucellosis.”  Reputable wildlife biologists and those who closely follow this issue know full well that this statement is NOT true!  While some estimate that 50 percent of Yellowstone bison have been exposed to brucella abortus, the actual rate of infection is far less.  MFWP news releases need to state the fact that “Few Yellowstone bison are infected with brucellosis.”  MFWP statements must reflect scientific and biologic reality, rather than Montana Department of Livestock bullshit.

3.  All public agencies involved in this mess to date have failed to properly plan for the eventual return of quarantined Yellowstone bison to public and tribal lands.  Officially, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks says “The aim of the project is to determine the feasibility of capturing, raising and breeding bison calves from Yellowstone National Park that are free of brucellosis exposure for the establishment of new wild herds.”  Yet, on the ground, MFWP and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service wasted more than FIVE YEARS, ignoring their publicly stated goal to determine suitable habitat on public or tribal lands.  They dropped the ball!  They didn’t coordinate with the appropriate state, federal and tribal governments!  MFWP and USDA’s APHIS utterly failed to honor their promise to the public to develop a plan that would ensure the goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study be met.  They have done little to nothing to ensure that public Yellowstone bison will be returned to public and/or tribal lands.  Those who sanctioned this inaction need to be removed from their positions.  Immediately.  Since they are NOT doing their jobs, they should NOT be paid!    MFWP and USDA’s APHIS need to hire competent professionals that will actually do their jobs, honor their word, and prepare proper alternatives that benefit and encourage the wild Yellowstone bison population.

4.  Under section 2.5.3 in the Draft Environmental Analysis, there is an alternative for placing Yellowstone bison in Wildlife Management Areas.  This alternative makes sense.  It actually supports the publicly stated goals of the quarantine project.  Placing wild Yellowstone bison in Wildlife Management Areas has considerable support from the public.  As MFWP is Montana’s state wildlife agency, it is much more suitable for Yellowstone bison to be placed in a Wildlife Management Areas, than tossing them to Montana Department of Livestock cowboys for unconscionable slaughtering.  Wildlife Management Areas may help the quarantined Yellowstone bison regain their wild integrity, lost to their unfortunate imprisonment, being treated as though they were domestic livestock, and being routinely harassed during quarantine.

5.  If cattle are present on any Wildlife Management Areas that are suitable for wild Yellowstone bison, the domestic livestock must be removed.  The Wildlife Management Areas must be actually managed for wildlife!  Placing quarantined Yellowstone bison on Wildlife Management Areas follows the stated goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study.  Therefore, MFWP must identify many potential Wildlife Management Areas and prepare environmental analyses for these proposed sites.  MFWP must work closely with all other state and federal agencies and to secure funds, equipment, and personnel for the purpose of placing Yellowstone bison on these Wildlife Management Areas to be managed by MFWP.

6.  The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP) has hundreds of thousands of acres of public land where wild Yellowstone bison can be relocated.  Right now!  Yet, MFWP has failed to adequately assess potential public lands’ bison habitat and disseminate the necessary  information to the pubic.  The Robb/Ledford Wildlife Management Area, for example, is suitable public habitat that is currently available.  “The primary goal of Montana’s Wildlife Management Areas is to maintain vital wildlife habitat for the protection of species and the enjoyment of the public,” claims MFWP.  “MFWP’s Wildlife Management Areas are managed with wildlife and wildlife habitat conservation as the foremost concern,” the agency’s Web site continues.  “Wildlife Management Areas protect important wildlife habitat that might otherwise disappear from the Montana landscape.”  (http://fwp.mt.gov/habitat/wma.html )

7.  The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks can better achieve its goals of conserving soils, protecting watersheds, and restoring indigenous plant and wildlife diversity within these Wildlife Management Areas by utilizing wild bison, instead of perpetuating the destruction caused by domestic livestock ill-suited for the arid West.  Thus, I hereby respectfully request that MFWP prepare proposals to reintroduce Yellowstone bison on Wildlife Management Areas and submit those proposals to the public to give us the opportunity to review and comment upon them.

8.  The U.S. Department of Interior is the agency responsible for restoring the wild Yellowstone bison to public and tribal lands.  This agency is the largest public land owner in the United States.  Given that the U.S. Department of Interior has developed a “Bison Conservation Initiative,” they should immediately be made full partner in planning and assisting with placement of quarantined Yellowstone bison on public and tribal lands.

9.  The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation have submitted proposals for locating the quarantined Yellowstone bison “on tribal and public lands in a manner that promotes cultural enhancement, spiritual revitalization, and ecological restoration.”  These tribes have been working in earnest to bring bison back home for many years now.  The appropriate state and federal agencies need to quit equivocating and fully support these tribes!  The tribes want to establish a permanent herd from Yellowstone bison on 22,000 acres.  It is the hope of many that wild bison will ultimately occupy even more of the Fort Belknap reservation’s 675,000 acres.  What possible rationalization is there for the State of Montana and the U.S. government to deny the tribes this life-giving opportunity?  How can the State of Montana and the U.S. government possibly deny that the stated goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study are to return Yellowstone bison to public and tribal lands?  It is now time to support the tribes!

10.  Privatizing the public’s wildlife resources and the Yellowstone bison entirely abrogates the goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study.  Transferring wild Yellowstone bison to Ted Turner effectively removes our public wildlife from the public trust.  Any alternatives that undermine the stated intents and goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study need to be discarded without a further thought.

11.  The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, MFWP’s partner agency in the Quarantine Feasibility Study, has stated publicly their opposition to privatizing our public wildlife, by converting these wild Yellowstone bison into a commercial commodity.  A U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarian has criticized this privatization, saying it goes against the original intent of the Yellowstone bison relocation program launched in 2005, according to the November 11, 2009, Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

12.  The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP) has not outlined any plans or entertained any public discussions for the eventual release from Ted Turner Enterprises, Inc. to public and/or tribal locations after the five years of quarantine following translocation.  Again, the stated purpose of the Quarantine Feasibility Study was to use these Yellowstone bison to help repopulate public and tribal bison herds, and to restore bison to public and tribal lands.  Any alternative that allows Ted Turner Enterprises, Inc., or any other private entity, to claim possession of our publicly owned wild Yellowstone bison does NOT meet the stated goals of the project and, therefore, MUST be eliminated!

13.  Any alternatives that allow Ted Turner Enterprises, Inc., or any other private entity to TEMPORARILY hold any of the public’s Yellowstone bison must incorporate irrevocable commitments that the ultimate placement of these original quarantined Yellowstone bison and all of their offspring will be onto public and/or tribal lands.  Specific time limits must be enacted to expedite removal of our public wildlife from private hands and to restore public wildlife to the public or tribal commons.

14.  No alternative should be considered that allows Ted Turner to keep ANY of the quarantined Yellowstone bison’s offspring born during ANY temporary placement on Turner’s private properties, as this would directly undermine the intent of the Quarantine Feasibility Study.  Allowing Ted Turner to “increase genetic diversity” of his own private Castle Rock bison herd solely benefits a private commercial business at the considerable expense successfully repopulating  public and/or tribal herds.  How can we make this any more clear?  Wild Yellowstone bison are PUBLIC wildlife, NOT Ted Turner’s private domestic livestock!

15.  The preferred alternative to translocate captured wild Yellowstone bison to the private lands of Ted Turner Enterprises, Inc., is ridiculous, because it effectively removes public wildlife from the public trust, and removes the potential for Yellowstone bison to be returned to tribal lands, both of which are the stated goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study.  See Yellowstone National Park Permit #YELL-2007-SCI-5506 (See page 3 of 4).

16.  Proposing the translocation of wild Yellowstone bison out of the public trust to Ted Turner or any other private landowner demonstrates a dismal failure to fully evaluate and meet the stated goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study, which are to:  “determine the feasibility of capturing, raising and breeding bison calves from Yellowstone National Park that are free of brucellosis exposure for the establishment of new wild herds,” (MFWP Press Release 12/15/09).

17.  ALL Yellowstone bison and progeny MUST be reintroduced into public and/or tribal herds as part of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks’ policy of “direct management” after the five-year quarantine period following translocation

18.  Need we say it one more time?  NO wild Yellowstone bison or progeny should be permanently turned over to Ted Turner!  This privatization of public wildlife would result in the loss of wild Yellowstone bison genetics that could otherwise be used to repopulate public and/or tribal herds.  Exploiting these Yellowstone bison or any of their offspring for private commercial gain is against the stated goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study.  Therefore, any alternative involving transferring of ownership of the public’s wild Yellowstone bison offspring to private bison ranches must be eliminated!  Please refer to Yellowstone National Park Permit #YELL-2007-SCI-5506 (page 3 of 4).

19.  Alternative C, 2.3, in the Draft Environmental Analysis calls for placing 14 wild Yellowstone bison in Wyoming’s Guernsey State Park for five years with NO planning for long-term placement.  This temporary placement of Yellowstone bison in a state park would confine these wild, migratory beasts into too small of an area.  In other words: A ZOO!  Zoos do NOT protect the inherent wild traits that define American bison as wildlife.

20.  Alternative C, 2.3, in the Draft Environmental Analysis calls for retaining 30 wild Yellowstone bison in quarantine facilities and slaughtering 40 of the wild Yellowstone bison.  This proposed slaughter makes a farce of the stated goals of Quarantine Feasibility Study.  Please refer to Yellowstone National Park Permit #YELL-2007-SCI-5506 (page 3 of 4).  Again, NO more wild Yellowstone bison can be slaughtered!  NO alternatives that provide for slaughtering any wild Yellowstone bison should receive ANY consideration.  How many times do we have to say this?  We’ve been saying it for more than 20 years now!

21.  ANY slaughter of any wild Yellowstone bison does NOT meet the stated goals of Quarantine Feasibility Study and, therefore, must be entirely eliminated as options.  All alternatives prepared by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP) must recognize the need to manage Yellowstone bison as an imperiled wildlife species, not as diseased domestic livestock.

22.  Yellowstone National Park’s wild bison temporarily transferred to quarantine must NEVER be exploited for commercial or revenue-generating purposes.  Again, please refer to Yellowstone National Park Permit #YELL-2007-SCI-5506 (page 3 of 4).

23.  According to the Scientific Research and Collecting Permit issued by Yellowstone National Park to USDA’s APHIS and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks; quarantined bison captured from Yellowstone “may be used for scientific or education purposes only, and shall be dedicated to public benefit and be accessible to the public in accordance with National Park Service policies and procedures.”  ALL alternatives proposed by MFWP or any other agencies must comply with this mandate.  If an alternative does not comply with this mandate, it should not be considered.

24.  Additionally, the Scientific Research and Collecting Permit issued by Yellowstone National Park to USDA’s APHIS and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks unequivocally states that Yellowstone bison removed to quarantine “may not be used for commercial or revenue-generating purposes unless the permittee has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement or other approved benefit-sharing agreement with the National Park Service.  The sale of collected research specimens or other unauthorized transfers to third parties is prohibited.”  Again:  ALL future alternatives proposed by MFWP or any other agencies must comply with this mandate.  If an alternative does not comply with this mandate, it can no longer be considered.

25.  The Scientific Research and Collecting Permit issued by Yellowstone National Park to USDA’s APHIS and Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks also states that Yellowstone bison in quarantine are still considered “Federal property.”  The National Park Service must be contacted prior to any quarantined Yellowstone bison being.  The permit specifically states:  “They shall not be destroyed or discarded, without prior National Park Service authorization.”  ALL alternatives proposed by MFWP or any other agencies must comply with this mandate.

26.  ALL alternatives proposed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks or any other agencies must fully acknowledge the authority of Yellowstone National Park and the U.S. Department of Interior to intervene and prevent the slaughter of ANY more wild, migrating Yellowstone bison, whether these bison are contained within a quarantine process or left unmolested in the wild.

27.  Yellowstone National Park’s permit prevents bison from being used for commercial benefit.  The U.S. Department of Interior’s National Park Service and Yellowstone National Park have unimpeachable jurisdiction over all bison and their offspring remaining in quarantine.  Therefore, it is within the National Park Service’s responsibilities to intercede and prevent any commercialization of bison.  ALL alternatives proposed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks or any other agencies must fully acknowledge this fact.

28.  The USDA’s APHIS, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, or Montana Department of Livestock cannot be allowed to slaughter ANY more wild Yellowstone bison.  An alternative must be prepared to immediately strip the Montana Department of Livestock of any and all authority to harass, slaughter, intimidate, or otherwise attempt to control wild Yellowstone bison.  In this alternative, other state and federal agencies must commit themselves to the migration of wild Yellowstone bison onto National Forest lands.  As the National Forests of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem reach their capacity, bison from these public lands can continue replenishing tribal efforts to reestablish wild migrating bison on their reservations and adjacent public lands.

29.  The Quarantine Feasibility Study fails completely to meet goals set by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.  State and federal agencies have thus far wasted millions of tax dollars in their misguided attempts to destroy the biological integrity of the last remaining wild migrating bison herd in the world!  Due to the absence of competent long-range planning and lack of public information or discussion regarding MFWP’s eventual “direct management” (an ominous term repeatedly used by MFWP, but NEVER actually defined) over quarantined Yellowstone bison and their offspring, ALL alternatives presented to date are therefore incomplete.

30.  We need to start anew, with scientifically-backed alternatives that place quarantined wild Yellowstone bison back onto public and/or tribal lands.  We need alternatives where the state and federal actually support the preparation of tribal lands for receiving and maintaining quarantined wild Yellowstone bison.

31.  As repopulating tribal herds are stated goals and priorities in the Quarantine Feasibility Study,  all agencies involved need to commit themselves to an alternative that placed wild Yellowstone bison in existing tribal herds or reintroducing bison to tribal lands.  Once placed, the agencies need to ensure that all bison are allowed to migrate to the fullest extent possible throughout reservations and adjoining public lands.

32.  Alternative B, 2.2, the “No Action” alternative in the Draft Environmental Analysis, calls for slaughtering 58 wild bison for “research.”  This alternative is disgusting!  It effectively negates five full years of scientific research.  It fails to meet the stated goals of the Quarantine Feasibility Study.  Alternative B, 2.2 must therefore be eliminated from being considered a legitimate option.

33.  With the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks’ and the USDA’s APHIS’s failure to plan for and secure tribal and/or public habitat for these Yellowstone bison, as is the stated goal of the Quarantine Feasibility Study, further quarantine of wild Yellowstone bison captured for the purpose of study must immediately be halted.

34.  Any and all slaughter of the wild migrating Yellowstone bison must cease immediately.  Slaughter is absolutely unnecessary, as there are millions of acres immediately available on state, tribal, U.S. Department of Interior, and U.S. Forest Service lands, where wild Yellowstone bison must be allowed to migrate.  Please refer to Yellowstone National Park Permit #YELL-2007-SCI-5506 (page 3 of 4).

35.  As the Quarantine Feasibility Study has proven to be a complete failure, I am strongly opposed to it in its present form.  The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP)  and the USDA’s APHIS have demonstrated extreme ignorance concerning how the quarantine process, in all of its aspects, adversely affects the behaviors of imprisoned wild Yellowstone bison.

36.  The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP) and the USDA’s APHIS have failed to properly plan to ensure that the stated goals of returning Yellowstone bison to public and tribal lands would be met.  MFWP and the USDA’s APHIS have had years with which to evaluate suitable public and tribal lands, and to work with state, federal and tribal governments to ensure that the objectives of the Quarantine Feasibility Study would be satisfied.  As the agencies have thus far failed to achieve any results, they need to go back to the drawing board, hopefully with new, competent staff.  In these new efforts, MFWP and the USDA’s APHIS must acknowledge that there have NO benefits from harassing, capturing, imprisoning, and quarantining this severely-imperiled keystone native wildlife species.

37.  The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP) needs to immediately release the Yellowstone bison currently being held in the quarantine facility back to the wild – to suitable tribal or public lands habitat.   See Yellowstone National Park Permit #YELL-2007-SCI-5506 (See page 3 of 4).

38.  The many management failures of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks of the USDA’s APHIS, described above, must be quantified, documented, and fully disclosed to the public, news media, federal, state, and tribal agencies, and Congress.  This could best be done in an entirely new and comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement that addresses all of the concerns raised herein.

39. The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks must prepare Environmental Impact Statements that map out all potential bison habitat, including winter, spring, and summer range, designated calving areas, and migratory corridors.

CONCLUSION:

The wild Yellowstone bison population is the LAST continuously wild population of American bison to occupy their native range.  The wild Yellowstone bison are the only bison remaining on Earth that retain their identity and integrity as a true wildlife species.

The ongoing mismanagement of this endangered keystone species by the Interagency Bison Management Plan and all of its components including quarantine and indiscriminate slaughter, directly jeopardizes the evolutionary potential and wild integrity of a species that is critical to the ecological health and restoration of North America’s grassland and prairie ecosystems.

By forestalling the migration of the wild Yellowstone bison throughout public lands of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, our Nation is deprived of its national heritage.  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!

It is now time to address and correct the U.S. government-sponsored holocaust of these bison and the Indigenous Peoples that depended upon them.  The relationship between bison and First Nations cultures can no longer be disrespected or subverted throughout the government’s wholesale slaughter of wild bison.  All proposed alternatives to the Quarantine Feasibility Study and all subsequent wild Yellowstone bison management proposals must start by recognizing First Nations’ cultures that hold bison sacred as an integral part of their lives, traditions, and spirituality.

With the Yellowstone bison, we are charting the future for the world’s only wild migrating bison herd.  All agencies involved in the Interagency Bison Management Plan and its various management facets must seek the wisdom, guidance and direct participation of First Nations in order to ensure that this irreplaceable population of American bison is not placed in further jeopardy.

ALL future alternatives presented to the public must truly respect the wild Yellowstone bison by  encouraging genetic diversity, guaranteeing biological integrity, increasing migration, and establishing viable wild bison populations throughout tribal land, U.S. Forest Service land, U.S. Bureau of Land Management land, state land, wildlife refuges, national parks, and wilderness areas.  All environmental reviews and documents of all federal, state, and tribal agencies need to start with these basic assumptions.

Thank you for this opportunity to comment.  Please heed these comments.  Please enter them into any hearing record or other similar assemblage of public comments.

Please keep me thoroughly informed concerning all proposals, decisions, and management actions affecting our last free and wild migrating Yellowstone bison.

Sincerely,

Paul Richards
30 Brown’s Gulch Road
Boulder, MT   59632
Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com

Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards

Official Testimony

S. 1470 – The Tester Wildlands Logging Bill

January 7, 2010

Submitted To:
U. S. Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests,
U. S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources

c/o Hon. Sen. Ron Wyden, Chairman, Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests
c/o Hon. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, Ex Officio Member, Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests
c/o Hon. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Ex Officio Member, Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests
Fax:  202-224-7970
Fax:  202-224-6163

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

Requests:
Please include this testimony in the “Official Hearing Record regarding S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill,” heard by the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’ Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests on December 17, 2009.

Please keep me informed as to your deliberations and decisions concerning the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.  Thank you.

Weaknesses of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill

Analysis by Paul Richards, PR  Media Consultants®

Submitted January 7, 2010, to the Official Hearing Record of S. 1470,

The Tester Wildlands Logging Bill,

Heard by the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’

Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests on December 17, 2009.

Weaknesses of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill:

All of the following 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 bill”:

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

Francis did not say this very often.  But, in the rare times he did say it, legislators listened.  They knew Francis did his homework.  They knew Francis always researched exhaustively and deliberated studiously, before arriving at his opinion.  As a result, Francis’s peers listened carefully and consistently heeded Francis’s warning that “This is a BAD bill.”  They voted the bad bill down.

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

There is a well-researched alternative to S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.

Thankfully, there is a sound, well-researched, and well-written alternative to Sen. Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill that complies with existing Federal environmental and forest management laws.

Twenty-four years ago, after talking with our region’s leading scientists and conservationists, I wrote the first draft of what was-to-become the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA).

To preserve the biological integrity of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, the LAST remaining functioning ecosystem in the lower 49 states where all native species still reside, NREPA designates as wilderness nearly 7 million acres of public roadless wildlands in Montana, 9.5 million acres in Idaho, 5 million acres in Wyoming, 750,000 acres in eastern Oregon, and 500,000 acres in eastern Washington.  Included in this total are over 3 million acres of backcountry wilderness in Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton National Parks.

Detailed Comparison:  HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (the House bill) to S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill (the Senate bill).

To assist you as you fulfill your role as elected stewards of our priceless and irretrievable public wildlands legacy, I offer you the following comparison between HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (the House bill) and S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill (the Senate bill):

1. By officially designating our remaining public roadless wildlands as wilderness, HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), provides the strongest protection that the federal government can confer on public wildlands and dependent species.  Instead of protecting different elevation habitats and their dependent species, S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, would only set aside meager high-altitude “rocks and ice,” with no biological integrity and no potential for sustaining biodiversity.

2. Since it was co-written by our nation’s leading wildlife and aquatic biologists, HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), protects the habitat essential for the survival 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).  S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, does not.

3. At last count, HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, is sponsored by 103 members of the House of Representatives.  S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, has but one sponsor.

4. HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, is completely compatible with the 1964 Wilderness Act.  In stark contrast, S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, which would endorse 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, is totally incompatible with the 1964 Wilderness Act.

5. It should come as a secret to no one that HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, has consistently been supported by the 1964 Wilderness Act’s leading proponents, former Wilderness Society Executive Director Stewart Brandborg, former Wilderness Society Field Director Clif Merritt, and former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Regional Forester Bill Worf, all Montana natives.  S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, has no prominent supporters from the 1964 Wilderness Act era.

6. HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, has been subjected to careful review by the public for 24 years now.  Every section of HR 980 has been gone over with fine-tooth combs by hundreds of scientists, conservation and outdoor groups, agency officials, business leaders, Congressional staffers, and attorneys.  While HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, may be the best written public lands legislation since the original 1964 Wilderness Act; S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, ridden with loopholes, and cleverly designed to be incomprehensible to all, was cobbled together behind-the-scenes; with NO scientific input, NO comprehensive legal review, NO Congressional review, NO agency review, and NO public involvement.

7. HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, is supported by over 100 grassroots groups.  S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, is backed only by a handful of “collaborationist” staffers from top-heavy, out-of-touch, Pew Charitable Trusts-funded Beltway-based “Big Green” or “Gang Green” bureaucracies.

8. HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, will hopefully pass the House this year (2010).  S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, has been deemed unsupportable by the U.S. Forest Service, due to extremely high subsidies from taxpayers, entirely unsustainable timber quotas, and severe damage it would wreck upon our environment and public lands legacy.

I offer the above information with great hope that it helps you, as you deliberate between the carefully-written and long-term vision for our public lands legacy provided by HR 980, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act; and the loophole-ridden and nearsighted economic and environmental Hindenburg that is called S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill

If you have any questions, or if I can provide any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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

I remain yours,

Sincerely,

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

(Note: This testimony is located at:  http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ .  For 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