Supports Agather's commentary, warns of implications

Letter to the Editor,

This is in response to a couple of letters I read recently in The Western News, one by Max Agather that Tester’s Wilderness Bill will not help loggers, the other by Wayne Hirst that it will help loggers.

For starters, Agather’s article was right on. Tester’s Bill is nothing more than a wilderness bill. They want in excess of 600,000 acres more wilderness in exchange for 100,000 acres of logging during a 15-year period. That’s the gist of this bill. I would hope we would see through this smoke screen by eco-extremists. Once this is passed, it will be wilderness forever. Furthermore, the administration will want to have a one- to two-mile buffer zone around the wilderness that won’t have to be voted on.

Now let’s get to the numbers: 100,000 acres equates to 156.5 square miles. If you square that, it is 12.5-by-12.5 miles square during15 years, or 10 square miles a year in the whole state of Montana, with no guarantee that it wouldn’t be litigated. Also, they could use any kind of stewardship to be called logging, whether it was one or 200 stems per acre. So, there is nothing in this bill that would make a company of any size spend the money to design a mill in this area without some agreement of a raw-material supply. Those are the things that create solid and steady jobs. And this won’t happen under this bill.

And Mr. Hirst, I don’t know what mill owners you talk to, but I was on a new mill design team here in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and we traveled around to a good number of mills. They were all worried about raw-material supply. Most are no longer in business. There is only one mill left in Lincoln County, and it is a small cedar-mill in Troy. And there are a few custom-cutting mills.

I have seen the numbers on the growth rate of the Kootenai National Forest. It is somewhere more than 300 million board feet per year, and as near as I can find out, there hasn’t been more than 45 million feet logged in any given year. In other words, 16 percent of the annual growth rate since 1990 or before. And these numbers can be anything from teepee poles, whips, and post and poles. Wood permits for commercial or personal use are integrated into these numbers.

I’ll go one bit further than Max Agather: The last thing we need in Montana is more wilderness. I have been an outdoor person and hunter all my life. I have climbed, hunted and fished all over the Cabinet Wilderness, and a great deal of areas with no roads, for the past 60 years, and they get very little use. I will state I doubt less than one-half of 1 percent of people will ever venture into these areas. Such as the Bob Marshall, Great Bear and a portion of the Selway Bitterroot or the Cabinet Mountains are used very little. And we sure don’t need more of them in Montana.

Furthermore, there are miles and miles of area with no roads in the three forests I am familiar with, the Kootenai, Lolo and Flathead, in which the eco-extremists have already stopped the logging and mineral extraction on, with litigation at every turn.

The national forests used to be a source of income for the National Treasury that would put between $800 million to $1.2 billion in the coffers every year, and that was in 1980 dollars. Now, they are a liability instead of an asset. Once again, there is nothing in that bill that will help produce steady jobs in Lincoln, Sanders or Flathead counties, or any county in Montana for that matter.

Also, all natural resource jobs are known to create at least four other jobs in a community and surrounding areas.

They have been logging for more than 500 years in Norway and Sweden. Timber will always be a renewable resource. I guess this country is rich enough to waste it, lock it up and pay to let it burn or rot?

— Charles Resch

Libby