|
ranches on 12,000 acres near Choteau, favors energy development and said as much to Flora in public meetings.
"She's a typical bureaucrat," Guthrie said. "She's getting paid and going on her merry way, getting accolades from the enviros, talking about being brave and all that. What has saved the Rocky Mountain Front are the natives that have lived here for the last 100 years and kept it as pristine as it is, not the Gloria Floras of the world."
But a newspaper in Missoula, Mont., suggested that a monument be erected in Flora's honor and gushed: "Montana's incomparable Rocky Mountain Front will endure as a monument to this Forest Service official's strength and vision."
Public comment solicited by the Forest Service in advance of Flora's decision ran 80% in favor of the moratorium.
Her ban on new energy leases withstood numerous court challenges -- including an appeal by oil and gas interests to the U.S. Supreme Court, which the court declined to hear. Nevertheless, the protections Flora put in place six years ago are vulnerable now.
In August, the Bush administration told federal land managers to remove bureaucratic and environmental restrictions to drilling in seven Western areas, including the Rocky Mountain Front.
Public opinion along the front is mixed. In a recent Teton County survey, 50% of respondents said drilling would be an economic blessing while 50% opposed it.
Mary Sexton, chairwoman of the Teton County Commission, said she has crunched every available number, seeking to parse the benefit to her rural, financially ailing county. She's come up with a best-case scenario of $20,000 in annual revenues to the county.
For all of her Indian jewelry and dusty boots, Flora began as an Easterner. Raised in Pennsylvania, she got her first look at the Rockies as a teenager on a family vacation.
The summer after graduating from Penn State with a degree in landscape architecture, Flora took her first job in the Forest Service, in 1977 in California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest, where she found herself at odds with the common logging practice of clear-cutting: chain-sawing every tree in huge swaths of the forest.
Her objection evolved into policy. "On my forest," she said, "the rule was, if the tree is older than you are, you have to come see me if you want to cut it."
As supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest, Flora at first was inclined to go along with her predecessor's pro-drilling policies. But after months of public meetings revealed the impassioned anti-drilling sentiment of many residents, Flora changed her mind.
She insists that none of her superiors in Washington, D.C., advised against imposing the moratorium, but when her tenure in Montana ended, she was passed over for the plum job she sought in Wyoming's nearby Bridger-Teton National Forest.
Her career ended abruptly in 1999 after she was assigned to a forest in northern Nevada and saddled with enforcing an unpopular road closing. The controversy led to threats against her and her staff. Flora resigned, angry at what she argued was a lack of official support and protection from her own agency.
Flora left the Forest Service in 1999, and with her husband, Marc, returned to Montana, settling on 25 acres outside Helena.
Two years ago, a car accident nearly made her an invalid. A man rammed her car head-on after losing control of his van on a mountain road.
As she lay crushed in her car, Flora, who had emergency medical training, reacted with typical sang froid, telling her rescuers how best to divert traffic and giving paramedics a clinical assessment of her pulverized right leg.
At first in a wheelchair, then hobbling with a cane that she shed this fall, Flora traveled around the country trying to rouse nationwide support for the front, still extolling its sense of place but also talking about the residents, whose vision of the front she had come to share.
|
|
