HAMILTON - Tom Robak knew he'd struck a public chord that day he opened up his post office box.
A week hadn't yet passed since Robak and others had hosted a meeting in Hamilton earlier this month that drew close to 650 people on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The crowd had come to learn about the new group - Big Sky Coalition: Environmentalists with Common Sense - that planned to challenge forest management policies it believed were causing catastrophic wildfires.
“We had no idea when we started if this was something that people would be interested in,” Robak said. “Now we know there are people out there who want to see something different happening on forestlands.”
All around the state, people from all walks of life are looking for answers to the complicated question of just what should happen on the millions of acres of national forests in Montana.
Some call for more logging to thin the forests. Others want a hands-off approach, allowing nature to take its course. Some say timber cutting should pay for restoration efforts to rebuild streams, control noxious weeds and improve wildlife habitat. Others say that amounts to ecological extortion.
To find their answers, they'll have to wade through years of controversy, a lingering distrust and a forever-changing marketplace.
“It's a complex issue with a lot of emotion attached to it,” said Friends of the Bitterroot president Jim Miller. “There is so much bitterness and distrust over many of these issues. I do wish we could get past it.”
The 600-member Friends of the Bitterroot has been monitoring the Bitterroot National Forest's timber sale program since 1988. It's challenged the forest's timber sales with both administrative appeals and litigation.
“There was a huge amount of timber being cut in an unsustainable manner starting in the 1960s and continuing right through the '80s,” Miller said. “A large part of the forest is still suffering from that industrial logging era.”
Today's focus on wildfire doesn't change that, Miller said.
“There's a lot of science that tells us that climate change is impacting the way wildfires burn,” he said. “There have been a lot of wildfires that have burned right through areas that have been managed with logging.
“The lesson we see is that regardless of the treatment on the landscape, when the conditions are just right - when days are hottest and driest - you're going to have large landscape wildfires.”
Challenges to timber management on the national forests began on the Bitterroot decades ago, after the public began questioning large clearcuts and a move to terrace some hillsides to grow trees more efficiently.
It was all part of a nationwide move by the U.S. Forest Service to get the cut out, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing for several decades.
Thousands of acres were clearcut and a vast network of roads was blazed across the landscape to carry logs to market. The public finally balked at the environmental impacts, and a variety of laws were passed to protect the forested lands.
Those complex set of laws required the Forest Service to spend more time and money documenting and analyzing potential impacts of its timber sale program. Following internal and court challenges, the agency's timber program virtually dried up.
Retired Forest Service official Bill Worf said the agency has itself to blame.
“We sold more timber than we should have been selling and that continued from the 1960s right into the late 1980s,” Worf said. “And then we didn't do the commercial thinning of those new stands. We starved the industry, and mills have gone out of business.
“As a result we've lost our ability to go out and do some of this silvicultural work that needs to be accomplished,” he said.
In a letter to Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell, Worf told of how he'd seen the agency ramp up in the 1950s to meet the post-World War II building boom and then not follow up with commercial thinning.
The agency geared up and encouraged sawmills to do the same as the cut began to climb. Before the boom began, the agency averaged timber production of less than 3 billion board feet a year. In 1963, it topped 10 billion board feet and remained there for the next 28 years - through 1990, Worf said.
Since then, it's dropped steadily down to 2 billion feet in 2001.
The agency didn't meet its mandate for a sustained yield under the Multiple Use, Sustained Yield Act of 1960, Worf said.
“Our failure to comply with our sustained yield mandate has resulted in serious economic impacts on many communities where the timber industry is a part of the economic base,” he said. “What is more, our failure to complete needed pre-commercial thinning has exacerbated the wildfire problem. The wildfire problem, in turn, has resulted in huge funding impacts to the whole Forest Service program.”
He told the chief he'd like to be part of the answer.
“I personally share in responsibility for this failure to meet our legal mandate,” Worf said. “I saw the lack of pre-commercial silvicultural weeding and thinning, and I became increasingly aware of the public disenchantment with what they were seeing. I should have pounded the table and hollered more loudly.”
Now, the Forest Service is looking for new ways to do business with a focus on forest restoration.
Recently, a diverse group of conservationists, timber industry officials and government leaders met for months to develop a set of 13 principles to guide future restoration work on the Bitterroot and Lolo national forests.
The hope is that since the principles are the result of a time-consuming consensus process any resulting restoration projects will move forward more quickly, without appeals or litigation.
“There are a lot of changes occurring right now,” said Gary Dickerson, acting assistant director of timber management for the Forest Service's Northern Region office in Missoula. “A lot of them are for the good.
“When we're looking at projects for restoration, we're looking at large landscapes with multiple resource objectives.”
The focus might be on improving a watershed or big-game habitat or controlling noxious weeds. Commercial timber harvest might be one component of the project and could help pay for the other kinds of restoration work, Dickerson said.
“It can be a means to an end,” he said. “We're focused on what's left after all the work is accomplished.”
Is the watershed healthier? Has there been an improvement in big-game habitat? Were undersized culverts replaced or work completed on roads to keep sediment out of streams?
Across the Northern Region, Forest Service officials are using a relatively new system of overlaying detailed maps to prioritize areas for upcoming restoration efforts, Dickerson said.
By overlaying maps that detail areas in need of watershed restoration, noxious weeds or hazardous fuel reduction work, the agency can perform something akin to triage.
These days, the Forest Service has to stretch every dollar as far it can.
“With our budgets continuing to drop for a lot of different reasons, we have got to be smarter with our funding if we want to restore ecosystems,” Dickerson said. “It costs a great deal of money to do the analysis for any project. We want to make sure we're focused on the areas with the most need first.”
The Forest Service often relies on money it receives for timber to pay for replacing culverts, spraying weeds or upgrading roads. Stewardship contracts allow the agency to put timber receipts back into the area where they were generated.
In the Northern Region, 67 stewardship projects have either been completed, or are under contract or proposed. So far, the 13 projects that have been completed have generated about $7 million to pay for other work on the ground.
“Considering our reduced budgets, that's been quite helpful in getting some of this other work completed,” Dickerson said.
Not everyone agrees with stewardship contracting. Some groups equate it to ecological blackmail and insist the government should find a way to pay for restoration work without having to cut trees.
There are others looking for a different solution.
Twenty years ago, Sun Mountain Lumber owner Sherm Anderson and the Montana Wilderness Association's John Gatchell would have had a hard time finding anything nice to say about one another.
Back then, mainstream conservation groups like MWA, the National Wildlife Federation and Trout Unlimited were at loggerheads with the wood products industry over the country's timber sale program.
Now, these same conservation organizations are working hand in hand with Anderson and others in the timber industry to push forward an accord that would both set aside thousands of acres of wilderness in southwest Montana and create a stable supply of timber for local mills on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.
Gatchell said the Montana Wilderness Association has a long history of reaching out to other organizations to find consensus that both sides can live with. Back in the mid-1990s, MWA worked with the Montana Logging Association to help craft legislation that established stewardship contracting.
“It made sense to reinvest timber receipts back into the land where the logs were harvested,” he said. “It was a different approach that worked for both sides. We need to get away from those old battles where there's a winner and loser.”
By taking an approach that looks at large landscapes, there are opportunities for collaboration and agreement, he said.
“Montana is a large state, but a small neighborhood,” Gatchell said. “I did some logging back in the '70s and all the people I worked with loved wilderness. When they weren't working, they were in the wilderness.
“Unless we can get past the old dialogues and lines drawn in the sand, then we're never going to be able to accomplish anything,” he said. “We have to learn to give and take, to look for balanced approaches.
“We've fed the edges for so long without building the middle. Now it's time to build the middle.”
It's not been easy for anyone to reach out and look for a different way.
“These were the same groups that I was adamantly opposed to 15 to 20 years ago,” Anderson said. “These are the same people. Back then, we drove around with bumper stickers that said ‘No More Wilderness' and we wouldn't have thought about talking to each other.”
Something has changed, Anderson said. People are reaching out and saying they're willing to talk, to listen and to look for common ground.
“I'm more optimistic now than I've ever been,” he said. “From my perspective, I think maybe we've turned the corner. Public perception is changing. Whether people like it or not, that's what drives this country.
“People are seeing the huge wildfires. They're seeing the forest dying and they're saying that something needs to be done.”
Anderson said Montana's timber industry is facing a difficult time.
“It's terribly challenging right now,” he said. “It seems like every day we set some new kind of record - a 10-year low today, an all-time low tomorrow.”
The downturn in lumber prices began last June and forecasters say the housing market could languish through 2010.
So at a time when the industry faces a shortage of timber and high stumpage prices, it's also being paid less for what it produces, Anderson said.
“It's making it nearly impossible to survive,” he said. “It's killing everybody.”
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