Big Sky Coalition promotes legislation, education to boost logging

Clark Fork Chronicle - Nov. 29, 2007 (Repost)

Environmentalists with common sense

by John Q. Murray

The Big Sky Coalition is moving forward with legislation, hopes to participate on the Bitterroot National Forest's restoration committee, and may seek to launch education campaigns directed at East Coast and West Coast environmentalists, organizers told the Chronicle Tuesday.

The group, which characterizes itself as “environmentalists with common sense,” drew an eye-popping 650 people to a public informational meeting in Hamilton earlier this month, with the crowd overwhelmingly in support of increased logging on the national forests as a way to mitigate catastrophic wildfires. The group has already received over $10,500 in donations.

The summer's smoke in the valley--again--frustrated a lot of Bitterrooters, explained organizer Tom Robak. “After the smoke started to die down, we spent a lot of time talking to people, and everybody had the same message---this is getting old. We need to try something different.”

He and his wife Charlotte decided to rent the county fairgrounds, advertise a meeting, and find out if other people felt the same way. “We have no ties to the logging industry. We're not loggers. Let's find out what would happen if we did that.”

The first guy he approached wrote a check for $3,000, Tom said. “I went, 'Wow, I guess I've got to do this now.'”

Organizer Sonny LaSalle explained, “This is just not the timber industry saying, 'We need more logs.' This is the common everyday citizen saying, 'I'm tired of the situation the way it is. It's only going to get worse and we want something done.' We believe there is something that can be done, and that the silent majority needs to become the vocal majority.”

That silent majority has felt disenfranchised and helpless, he said, watching from the sidelines while the courts and Forest Service interact only with litigants.

“We in the Coalition honestly believe there are things we can do, and the way we can do it is by speaking with one large voice to our elected officials at the state and the national levels. Then we can get some changes that need to be made. That takes a lot of people making as much noise as possible so the elected officials know this is just not one or two folks,” he said.

Sonny, who is retired from the U.S. Forest Service, organized the panel for the informational meeting Sunday, Nov. 4. The panel included: Forest Service historical vegetation and fire ecologist Jack Losensky showing photographs demonstrating changes in western forests over the last century; Forest Service fire manager Mick Dezell; Ravalli County commissioner Alan Thompson speaking on the impacts of Forest Service lands on the local economy; and Dr. Mark Jergens, chief medical officer at Marcus Daly Memorial Hospital, on the health effects of smoke from wildfires.

“I wanted to start with an educational effort to put as many people as possible on the same level playing field, with a basic understanding of how we got to where we are today, and what we need to do to try to fix this situation,” Sonny said. “It truly is fixable.”

Some people claim that with global warming and drought, increasing catastrophic fire is inevitable, and there is nothing that anyone can do.

“That's just simply not true,” Sonny said. “There's a lot of things we can do. We cannot prevent wildfire--we can't do that and we shouldn't. Fire has played a natural role in these ecosystems in the Bitterroot and all over the West for thousands of years. We cannot prevent it, but what we can do is lessen the impacts. It's been proven over and over that it is possible to do that by reducing the fuel loads.”

The dense buildup over the past century is not natural, especially in the Ponderosa pine zones, he said, recapping the photos presented by Jack Losensky.

Losensky's job for the past 25 years involved looking at thousands of photographs of the West as it appeared at the time of Euro-American settlement. His main resources included the U.S. Geological Survey photo library in Denver and universities throughout the west.

He selected 130 positions he thought he could find on the ground to re-photograph, and spent a few years traveling around and finding them. Those photo points included spots in the Bitterroot, Northern Idaho before and after the 1910 Burn; the Colorado River Basin, and the Gallatin area. He presented a few of those before-and-after photos at the Hamilton meeting.

In general, Sonny said, the photos showed areas that 100 years ago were open or park-like forests transformed to today's dense, unhealthy tree stands.

“Probably one of the more dramatic photos was an 1890 photo in the Gallatin area,” he said. “It showed a small community with bare hillsides behind it, all grass, and no stumps, so there was no evident history of trees ever growing there. In the more recent photo, around 1990, the whole slope behind the settlement was totally covered by trees.”

Foresters measure either the actual number of trees per area, or the basal area, Sonny explained. By all measurements, there are two to four times more trees than can be sustained by the amount of moisture available. That means the trees are stressed, and when they become stressed, the bark beetles get them, and the dead trees provide fuel for catastrophic wildfires.

“We have to balance the number of trees drawing moisture from the ground with the amount of moisture available in the ground,” Sonny said. “That means we have to do a lot of thinning. To me it's nothing but common sense. I get exasperated and a little short trying to understand why people want all of this to burn. They talk about it being natural, but it really isn't. The kind of stand-replacement fires we're having in the ponderosa pine forest type are not natural.”

The second speaker was fire manager Mick DeZell, Bitterroot born and raised, who started working for the Forest Service in the 1950s.

Mick told about extensive salvage logging after the 28,000-acre Sleeping Child Fire of 1961. The main logging activity went on for a solid two years, and included the construction of firebreaks on the east side of the valley, while smaller salvage operations continued on even longer. When the fires burned through the Bitterroot in 2000, they did not burn through the Sleeping Child, but went around it.

“It fingered in but actually had to burn around it,” Sonny said. “If you fly the area you'll see this great big green patch of trees, while everything around it was burnt. The same can be seen in some of the old clearcuts done here in the 50s and 60s. Some of those burned in 2000 but most of them did not. That's a fairly obvious example of what most of us that have a lot of years of fire experience have seen--there is a direct relationship between fuel and fire. The heavier the fuel, the harder the fire is to manage or contain.”

Ravalli County Commissioner Alan Thompson spoke about the impacts of the forest and forest management on the county. Ravalli County is 73 percent Forest Service land, and heavily impacted by what happens on the national forest. While it can help draw growth, the forest can also contribute heavy smoke for a long period of time.

Alan talked at length about the volume of trees killed on the 300,000 acres burned in 2000, the small amount harvested, and its economic impact on the county. He pointed out that the annual harvest is now less than the natural mortality rate, let alone the new growth rate. That discrepancy, harvesting far below the sustainable amount, has led to a huge buildup of fuel.

“We're not even taking out what is dying, so we're not even close to taking out what grows,” Sonny said.

Dr. Mark Jergens talked about the health effects of wood smoke. While there have been no long-term studies, nothing in wood smoke is beneficial, Sonny said. Everything in it is harmful, and it is known to include carcinogens.

The group is considering a similar meeting in Missoula as they continue to build an environmental organization with a full-time staff that can participate in decision-making regarding public lands. They also hope to continue to develop broad public support to push legislation through Congress.

“The most positive thing we've got going right now is, we've got some legislation in the pipeline that we wrote about two weeks ago,” Tom said. “One of the things I'm finding out is that it's taken years to get where we are. Years of legislation have basically just hog-tied the Forest Service to the point where they can't do anything. It's really hard for them to manage the forest in any way, shape, or form. They need some relief if we're going to bring them back to being able to manage the forest properly.”

While Tom and Sonny did not offer details, their comments suggested that the legislation would require litigants to post bonds when they seek to halt emergency thinning projects.

Sonny said he found it hard to believe that Congress intended the National Environmental Protection Act to become the administrative burden that it has become for the Forest Service and other federal agencies.

NEPA and its implementing regulations state very simply: “The responsible official needs sufficient information to make a reasoned decision.” But over the years, litigation has doubled the costs of NEPA documentation. In the Ninth Circuit, it has become almost impossible to write a NEPA document that can make it through the entire system without being thrown out, he said.

“It's also very costly—it can take 18 months and over a million dollars to write an EIS on a controversial project, and you still run the risk of being overturned in the Ninth Circuit.”

That offers two basic alternatives, he said. “You can get the people who want to go to court to agree with what you're trying to do, or you can make it a hell of a lot more difficult for them to take you to court.”

One potential approach is to require litigants suing to stop a project to post a bond. “In an emergency situation, if you are going to stop a project, you need accountability,” Sonny said.

Another possible activity for the group is to reach out to east coast and west coast environmentalists, he suggested. After this year's California wildfires, more people are starting to understand that with global warming, action must be taken to mitigate the effects of the west's natural wildfires. The group would encourage them to join the Big Sky Coalition in putting their environmental donations to the best possible use.

Sonny expressed great appreciation for the restoration committees being formed on the Bitterroot and Lolo national forests and said he hoped the Coalition would be an active participant in landscape-level restoration projects.

“Those 13 principles are excellent and they are the kinds of principles that should be supported by everybody,” he said.

The Big Sky Coalition is establishing partnerships with the Montana Wilderness Association, the National Wildlife Federation, and Montana Trout Unlimited. “Having a healthy forest and healthy habitat is beneficial to everything and everybody,” Sonny said.

The enormous turnout for their kickoff meeting energized the organizers.

“I've been involved in public meetings for 40 years and I've never seen a turnout like that,” Sonny said. “It sends a message to me that people really are frustrated and they want change. The status quo is not acceptable anymore and the Forest Service and our elected officials need to be responsive to that change.”

Tom said he received a 100-page briefing document from Bill Ward that described how we arrived at our present state. After reading it, he said he understood why each of the agencies and groups had made their decisions at the time.

The Forest Service started cutting timber after World War II to serve the returning veterans and create a building boom. Their targets were often far too aggressive and caused environmental damage, which caused the environmental groups to organize and seek to halt the projects. Their success put a lot of loggers out of work. “I think the loggers got a raw deal here. We treated them a lot like the Vietnam vets coming back from the war-- it wasn't their fault. They did a great job,” he said.

Tom said as he put himself into each of those actors' shoes—the politicians, the Forest Service official, the man who borrowed his last dime to start a logging mill, the environmentalists—he saw that each had a good reason to act as they did. “I would have done the same thing,” he said. “They made the right choices at the time.”

Having said that, he acknowledged that it is time to make a new choice. “Today we are at another crossroads,” he said. “What we've been doing isn't working. We need a new plan.”

He said he and his wife Charlotte were now fully committed to helping develop that new plan over the long haul.

“Char and I both feel a great responsibility now,” he said. “We had a feeling like, if only 50 to 100 people showed up we could walk away, but the opposite happened. There were 650 people there, and they've given us over $10,000. Now we feel like a great responsibility has been put on our shoulders.”

For more information about the group, see their website http://www.bigskycoalition.org, or email Tom at tom@bigskycoalition.org.

You can make tax-deductible contributions through the Bitter Root RC&D, 1709 North First, Hamilton, MT 59840 (write “Big Sky Coalition” in the memo field), or make non-tax-deductible contributions to Tom Robak, PO Box 335, Darby, MT 59829.