Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Happy anniversary
Posted Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 5:38 PM
When that extraordinary piece of legislation arrived on President Johnson’s desk, it had already been through an 8-year legislative process that produced 66 drafts of the original bill. The first sponsor of the Wilderness Act in the Senate was Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat from Minnesota. The man who finally carried the bill through the House was Pennsylvania Republican John Saylor. After many compromises on all sides, a final version of the bill passed the House 374–1 and was eventually approved by a unanimous voice vote in the Senate. All told, more than a decade of collaboration between diverse interests was required to pass the original Wilderness Act.
While this part of the wilderness story is rarely told, Montanans have not forgotten that it takes years of cooperation and creativity to make our forests work for everyone. Sen. Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act represents years of grassroots organizing and countless kitchen table conversations. It puts all the pieces together: harvesting timber at sustainable levels and funding habitat restoration through timber sales, while conserving wild country for our children and grandchildren. For these reasons, the forest bill is supported by statewide and national wilderness groups, Montana timber mills and local snowmobile clubs right here in Missoula County. In fact, new polling shows that 70 percent of Montanans are backing the bill.
This kind of broad support is hard to conjure, but the Wilderness Act had it 45 years ago and Tester’s forest bill has it today.
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It's worth pointing out that Gabriel Furshong is the Wilderness Campaign Director for the Montana Wilderness Association, one of the main architects of Sen Tester's logging bill.
MWA was one of the three groups that got together with five timber mills nearly four years ago to form the "Beaverhead Partnership." This "Partnership" can best be described as an exclusive, secret, self-selective, non-transparent entity that engaged in a non-public process using their political connections to decide for the rest of us what the management of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest should be.
This process was not in any way, shape or form an open and inclusive "collaborative" process to deal with public lands issues, despite what slick talking points we get from MWA or from Sen Tester's staff.
This is one of the main reasons why the majority of conservation groups and citizen activists working every day on public lands issues dealing with forests, wildlife, logging, restoration and wilderness oppose the Beaverhead Partnership's process and proposal, which now forms the meat of Tester's Mandated Logging Bill.
This is also why much of the leadership of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest opposes Tester's bill and this whole approach. Tester's approach basically takes public lands management away from people and puts it more firmly into the hands of industries and multi-million dollar special interest groups with political connections.
Seems to me that Mr. Furshong also needs to do some brushing up on his Wilderness Act history, especially if he's going to shameful use the 45th Anniversary of the Wilderenss Act to support Tester's logging bill.
Perhaps he could start by reading the seminal book on the subject, titled "Battle for the Wilderness" from friend and Wilderness movement elder-statesman Michael Frome. It's available at: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780874805….
In the book, Mr. Furshong would be introduced to the Bitterroot Valley's own Stewart Brandborg, another friend, mentor and hero to anyone who loves Wilderness. As the former executive director for the Wilderness Society, Brandborg was instrumental in the passage of the Wilderness Act, In fact, Brandborg worked closely with Howard Zahniser, the principle author and architect of the Wilderness Act and took over the Wilderness Society after Zahniser's death in 1964.
The public should know that even though Brandborg is well in his 80s, he is deeply disappointed and concerned with the approach of groups such as MWA's and he is currently doing everything he can do to educate Tester's staff about the serious shortcomings of their bill.
In fact, just last week Brandborg got together a delegation of citizens who were excluded by the Beaverhead Partnership (despite the fact that this group of people has a twenty year history of working on Beaverhead-Deerlodge management issues) and met with Tester's staff to ask for amendments to Tester's bill. Despite repeated talking points from Tester's spokesman claiming that Sen Tester introducing the bill is "only the start of the process," this group of concerned citizens was told that no amendments would be made to Tester's logging bill at this time.
When I spoke with Brandborg last week and asked him directly what Wilderness in America would look like today if, 50 years ago, people like himself and Zahniser would have employed the questionable approach used today by MWA and the Beaverhead Partnership, Brandy just laughed and said, "We'd have trams running up every valley in the Bitterroot and worst!"
Similar concerns about Tester's bill and approach are expressed in today's Indy article featuring author and wilderness hero Rod Nash at http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/missou… . At what point will MWA, the Beaverhead Partners and Sen Tester's office own up to their questionable approach and the sloppy, vague and misleading language in their proposal?
You see, Wilderness heros of the past and present recognize that while there are always threats to Wilderness and some special interests or industries are always looking to create loopholes in the Wilderness Act (such as Tester's bill allowing, for the first time ever, military aircraft landings within Wilderness), once you start chipping away at this provision or that, or allow motorized access into Wilderness, pretty so we'll have a Wilderness Act and Wilderness Areas in this country that bear little resemblance to what they do today...and certainly little resemblance to what the visionary leaders in the Wilderness movement fought for 45 years ago. Thanks.
- Matthew Koehler, WildWest Institute
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Gabe - What they did 45 years ago was called "negotiation" -- not "collaboration." There's a big difference. "Collaboration" came into being as the preferred method for solving natural resource issues in a late 90s document titled En Libra that was issued by the Western Governor's Association under, wouldn't you know it, one of Montana's worst-ever governors for the environment -- Republican Marc Racicot. He was horrific for the environment, that's for sure, but he wasn't dumb. And he figured if you paint the people who will "collaborate" as the "solution" and label negotiators -- or what we used to call "advocates" -- as "extremists," then you already win most of the battle. As you confirm, his political strategy is working, and it's sad to see so many former advocates fall for the ruse of "collaboration." Even worse, apparently you don't understand that your collaborative, back-room deals still are subject to change in the legislative process. So you start with half-way and go downhill from there.
Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back on the process you now embrace...so far, it hasn't produced a single new acre of wilderness in Montana and, if the horrible provisions of Tester's bill remain, it will significantly reduce the real meaning and value of wilderness by allowing motorized sheep herding and military landings in "wilderness" where the hand of man is supposed to invisible.
By the way, I remember in the 1989 wilderness bill, that passed both houses of Congress only to be pocket-vetoed by Reagan, that the Badger-Two Medicine was included in WILDERNESS, which is should be, not a 'conservation management area." By your own admission: "The Coalition’s proposal would designate less acreage than is currently recommended by the Lewis and Clark National Forest Plan (there are no recommendations in the Helena Forest Plan)." So what happened? Did the Badger-Two Med suddenly lose it's wilderness characteristics? Or did collaboration just take them away from the future?
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