I have read the Beacon’s story (Oct. 19: “Family Trees”) about the possible collaborations concerning timber harvest and wilderness in the Libby area and I suppose “better late than never” is an appropriate kick start to the same collaborative efforts that were both tried and destroyed in Libby during the years I served as Montana’s U.S. congressman.
Thirty years ago a group of Montanans on both sides of the timber/wilderness issue in Libby designed a compromise agreement and presented it to the Montana congressional delegation for consideration. Both Sen. Max Baucus and I introduced the K/l Accords as legislation. We knew it was most unlikely to pass as was but we introduced it to demonstrate our support for the only locally produced collaborative proposal for those forests at the time.
What happened? The timber industry and their paid spokesman, Bruce Vincent, fully and completely opposed not only the Accords but also any collaboration to assure both harvest and wilderness. Libby would have none of any such agreement whatsoever. The Libby Log Hauls were pointedly directed at me with signs, slurs, and this banner which is still my favorite from those days: “No More Welfare, Wolves, Wilderness, or Williams.” Ya just gotta have a sense of humor to get through the fact that some of the folks in Libby even voted at the polls against collaboration; although unexpectedly voted to support more wilderness at that same election. But in the end, any attempt to collaborate or even accept congressional legislation was opposed in Libby. The eventual result? Look around: no industry left; 30 years of too much joblessness; forest that could have provided appropriate lumber left uncut; a shrinking population; 30 years of lost income for workers and reduced profit for business; little if any local investment; the loss of critical local labor unions; and no new protection of the nearby potential wilderness areas. The result of the industry’s local voices, and Vincent wasn’t the only one, to refuse to accept compromise and, yes, the unwillingness of a minority of environmentalists to accept the necessity of collaborative give and take, have created this difficult economic legacy in the fine town of Libby.
As Montana’s then congressman, I tried every approach I could to help, and I continued doing that throughout my time in Congress … nine terms, eighteen years. My efforts at encouraging compromise consistently received the support of conservationists but what was the response I received from the naysayers? Well, let’s see: I was hung in effigy by these groups that had been created to kill compromise. I was politically ostracized by the same timber industry that had come to my office in Washington, D.C., to ask if I would please find a way to get Montanans to sit down together and agree on a timber/wilderness deal. I was to do just that in place after place in the state and, for the most part, Montanans agreed. In some of those places our delegation found sufficient harmony to make a local agreement and then pass legislation to ratify those local timber harvest and wilderness agreements. Although I always knew it was predictable, it is interesting to note that in those places where agreement was reached, the industry did OK for most or all of the ensuing 30 plus years and the designated wilderness areas, rather than cost jobs, actually has both protected and created them.
So, after all these years it is grand to see the old Libby adversaries finally reach the right conclusion that sitting down and working toward agreement is better than continuing to obstruct for another third of a century.