Senator Jon Tester's Forest Jobs and Recreation Act is truly a unique piece of legislation that recognizes the diverse demands and expectations placed on our national forests. Historically, public land legislation has promoted a single use out of context thus not seeing the forest for the trees. Rather than propose a stand-alone logging bill to promote jobs or a wilderness bill to preserve pristine areas or a recreation bill to ensure access, Tester utilizes collaboration and compromise as the cornerstones of this comprehensive forest stewardship legislation.
In Senator Tester's own words, the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act is "a common-sense bill that will create jobs in Montana's forests, keep communities safe, protect clean water and safeguard Montana's hunting and fishing habitat for future generations." One objective of the bill is to create and protect timber jobs from logging operations to sawmills. Tester's "light-on-the-land" approach proposes logging in areas already containing road networks and specifically targeting beetle-kill timber harvest that will reduce community fire risk. In conjunction, forest restoration projects will be funded to improve water quality and wildlife habitat by installing culvert drainage systems, decommissioning and restoring logging roads plus conducting weed abatement and prescribed burns.
In addition to prohibiting logging from Montana's inventoried roadless areas, the bill would successfully designate Montana's first new wilderness since 1982. Tester's forest bill converts twelve wilderness study areas into eight different protected wilderness parcels. In all, twenty-five areas totaling 670,000 acres of Montana's most spectacular backcountry will be permanently preserved as wilderness. Recognizing that all Montanans need to access forest lands, Tester has also proposed half a dozen new recreation and special management areas that would cater to a wide variety of user groups seeking access to public lands.
Granted there are many critics of Tester's Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. Stalwart extraction and multiple-use advocates do not support any additional wilderness designations. Staunch wilderness activists have rejected the bill due to its mandated logging objectives. Some wildlife proponents have identified that the legislation fails to address grazing leases and livestock impacts in areas deemed to become wilderness. I think all would agree that there is no such thing as a perfect piece of legislation, but former U.S. Representative Pat Williams recently supported Tester's efforts noting that "this bill offered by Mr. Tester is the most openly public and locally oriented of any bill of its type in Montana history."
For decades, politics as usual has negated all efforts to designate additional wilderness in Montana. Years of siloed legislation promoting single-issue objectives such as logging have resulted in endless litigation. Senator Tester recognized that rather than perpetuating divisive politics that pitches one special interest group against another, encouraging collaboration and accepting compromise was paramount. Thus, the rancher from Big Sandy, incorporated three separate community-based forest plans-the Blackfoot-Clearwater Stewardship Project, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership and the Three Rivers Challenge-into one comprehensive piece of legislation.
As Tester's bill works its way through committee after committee, there is still an opportunity to refine the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act into a truly landmark piece of legislation. First, many of the stated objectives rely too heavily on the included maps. While the maps are clearly illustrative on a macro level, specific language should be added to eliminate differing interpretations in the future. The stipulations for congressionally mandated logging should also be clarified with considerable more detail to establish when such provisions would be retired. The bill needs to resolve the issue of perpetuating grazing leases in several of the proposed wilderness areas. The bill should explicitly retire any grazing leases in the proposed wilderness and remaining wilderness study areas. And finally, too many acres of wilderness study area are unnecessarily proposed to be released.
Though still rough around the edges, Senator Tester's Forest Jobs and Recreation Act sets the precedent of establishing constructive legislation based on community-level collaboration and reasonable compromise. In the end his efforts and those of the collective partnerships involved have found common ground for respectful dialogue in the otherwise fractious West and that alone is progress.
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Chris Naumann is co-owner of Barrel Mountaineering in downtown Bozeman.
