As a young man I worked as a logger and a sawmill hand, and I still appreciate the wood-products industry.
I’ve also spent years as a wilderness advocate and a member of the Kootenai Forest Stakeholders Collaborative — a group that includes loggers, miners, snowmobilers, hunters, anglers and conservationists. After working through it together, we came down in opposition to rescinding the Roadless Rule.
When a group that diverse reaches agreement, people ought to pay attention.
The Roadless Rule is common sense. Most of these areas are roadless for a reason: their timber value is low and the cost of punching in roads and maintaining them is high. The honest thing is to leave them as they are. What the current administration proposes — stripping protections from most of our roadless country and opening it to motorized use and corporate development — is the exact opposite of what most Montanans want.
I’d urge voters to watch what candidates do, not what they say. Everybody’s for public lands at election time; the mailers all say so. Look at the actual record — did they support reckless cuts to already strapped federal agencies?
Right now, the Forest Service is being deliberately crippled so that someone can stand up later and say, “Well, the agency can’t manage these lands, we’d better privatize them.”
That’s the game.
Really, this comes down to the little guy versus the big guy. The little guys want access, clean water from protected watersheds — and wild country that’s kept wild.
The billionaires and the powerful want it handed over to them.
Instead of bulldozing new private gated roads into roadless areas — an idea supported by Montana’s elected leaders in Washington, D.C. — we need to follow the lead of local voices. They are telling us there’s a place for everyone on the landscape, with necessary logging happening where it makes sense.
And continued protections for roadless areas where logging makes no sense at all.
Doug Ferrell
Trout Creek