“By any other word would still smell as sweet.”
- William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet”
Not the idea of it, mind you, just the word itself.
Seems every time the Kootenai National Forest supervisor uttered the word, someone was ready to ram it back down his throat.
“Wilderness,” Castaneda said, had become a “conflict word.”
So he changed it.
The conflict, of course, remains, but from now on it will be a rose known by another name, albeit still thorny.
“Locally,” he said, “I think this is a better way to describe things.
“But,” he was quick to add, “on the ground, it's exactly the same thing.”
Castaneda is in the middle of revising the Kootenai's forest plan, a guiding document that looks out a decade or so. The existing plan, written back in 1987, is out of step with the times, he said, and he's been called on to craft a new one.
One of the first chores in doing so was to create what he called a “starting option,” a map that showed how he proposed to use different areas of the forest.
Some “management areas” would be open to logging. Others would emphasize motorized recreation. A few would be recommended for wilderness protection.
Problem was, “up here, the word ‘wilderness' really bothered some people.”
Still, when Castaneda released his starting option he promised not to make any big changes unless diverse groups could first come to consensus regarding specific recommendations.
That, not surprisingly, didn't happen.
But all were surprised this week when Castaneda released a new map on which each and every “recommended wilderness” label was suddenly absent. The 163,000 acres of recommended wilderness from the first map had been reduced to zero acres on the second.
Snowmobilers and other motorized recreationists were elated, declaring the map a huge victory for forest use. Wilderness advocates were stunned and angry.
But neither, Castaneda insists, should be overly reactive. The fact is, he said, nothing much has changed. Sure, there's a bit more motorized use allowed here and there, but overall, he said, “it's the same wilderness management.”
In fact, the latest map adds a new land-use category that replaces “designated wilderness” with “wild lands.” But the definition of the two, he said, is identical, promising to “protect those wilderness traits that will allow for future consideration of these lands as wilderness by Congress.”
Both categories allow trail building and non-motorized recreation. Both prohibit logging, road building and snowmobiles.
But somehow that wasn't the message many of the players took home from a meeting earlier this week with Castaneda.
Many, in fact, thought the new “wild lands” category would in some way allow more flexibility for roads, logging and, most specifically, all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles.
But Castaneda insists that reading is incorrect. The new land-use category, he said, will be managed in exactly the same way as the old, in effect creating de facto wilderness pending action from Congress.
Castaneda said he hoped that by changing the name he might be able to bring divided interests back to the collaborative table.
But currently, many involved seem not to trust the process overly much. Conservationists suspect that hidden beneath the new name are watered-down protections. Motorized recreationists say they don't care what it's called, only how it's managed and for how long.
“We need to deal with the substance of the conflict,” said John Gatchell of the Montana Wilderness Association. “Changing the name isn't going to help. It's only going to confuse people and erode trust in the agency.”
But Greg Kujawa, a spokesman on the Kootenai forest, disagrees. The old designation, “recommended wilderness,” meant exactly what it said - forest managers were recommending that Congress act to protect those lands as formal wilderness.
The “wild lands” designation, he said, carries no such recommendation, and it's unlikely any lawmaker would push for wilderness designation without it.
And so although on-the-ground management will not change in the slightest - lands still will be preserved in their wilderness state - no one's actually “going down the road of permanence,” Kujawa said.
“That's what people are afraid of, is the permanence,” agreed Donna O'Neil, president of the 200-member Kootenai Snow-Kats snowmobiling club.
O'Neil figures Castaneda's new nomenclature “really defused a bomb.”
The lands still will be managed as if they were wilderness, she said, but without Castaneda's “recommendation” it's unlikely they'll ever receive a more permanent protection.
“I don't have a problem with wilderness values,” O'Neil said. “I have a problem with permanence. Do you know what's going to happen in 100 years? I don't. No one does.”
But wilderness is forever, she said, “like having a backyard, putting a fence around it and never doing anything - just letting the weeds grow.” That fence, she said, needs some gates big enough to drive a mower through if ever the future need should arise.
Castaneda sees this move as “a placeholder,” Kujawa said, a way to protect wilderness values while allowing all the players more time to work together toward a wilderness consensus.
“What he's given them is more opportunity to deal with it,” Kujawa said. “Bob took a drastic move here,” he added, calling the shift to a new name “creative” and “unique.”
But for the stakeholders, changing the name hasn't much changed the debate.
“The fact that it's controversial is all the more reason to tackle it,” Gatchell said. “Logging's controversial, but we still call it logging. It just seems honest to me to call it what it is.”
And as for “placeholder” decisions, he said, it's Castaneda's job to make the call. If local constituents cannot come to an agreement on national lands, Gatchell said, the federal leadership can't simply abdicate its decisionmaking role and choose not to choose.
Instead, he said, a leader is required to listen to all sides, to collect all the information, and then to make a decision.
The fact that locals aren't unanimous is no excuse for not acting, he said.
The Kootenai, Gatchell said, has more miles of roads (8,000 miles) and less designated wilderness (4.2 percent of 2.2 million acres) than any national forest in the state.
Even the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks - looking out for hunters and anglers - encouraged more recommended wilderness than Kootenai officials suggested, writing that “FWP supports maintaining existing roadless areas or designating them as wilderness.”
Such designation is not likely, however, without first a recommendation from the local forest supervisor - and now no such recommendation is included in the draft plan.
That could change, Castaneda said, once the draft goes to the general public early next year for a 90-day review. Nothing, he said, is set in stone.
Including, apparently, the language used to frame the debate.
“A word like ‘wilderness' just seems to lead to controversy,” Castaneda said, and too often controversy shuts down discussion. “Lots of people thought we needed a new category.”
O'Neil was one of those, and she applauds his creativity.
Currently, Castaneda said, the existing 1987 forest plan includes some 74,000 acres of recommended wilderness. The “starting option” bumped that to 163,000 acres. The new draft includes 124,000 acres of “wild lands,” which would be managed precisely as if they were recommended wilderness.
By comparison, some 1.42 million acres are classified as “general forest” in the plan, lands where pretty much anything goes so far as premitted forest activity, including road-building, logging and motorized recreation.
The debate, then, is not about whether wilderness will trump snowmobiling and logging. Rather it's about the fate of about 6 percent of the Kootenai's acres.
“Wilderness has always been kind of in the back of the bus on the Kootenai,” Gatchell said. “It's already out of balance (between motorized and non-motorized categories) and these new changes go way far overboard.”
Still, he said, he remains hopeful, regardless of what forest managers choose to call these wild places.
“I know from experience,” he said, “that it's possible for reasoned people to sit down and negotiate and make good decisions. We'll all keep working on that.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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