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having to abide by the troublesome constraints of environmental laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.
All of this in the name of saving the forest from itself.
One of the first assault plans to emerge from this Act is slated to demolish a swath of old-growth forest along the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, close to the pass where the Nez Perce, under the leadership of Chief Joseph and Looking Glass, executed their dramatic escape from the murderous troops of the 7th Infantry into the what they believed to be the sanctuary of the Big Hole valley. The Nez Perce were wrong, of course. The deranged Col. John Gibbon and his soldiers tracked them across the pass and opened fire on their encampment in the predawn hours of August 9, 1877, slaughtering dozens of women and children, as the weary Indians slept in their lodges. Lewis and Clark also poked around in these canyons and forests. The area has a profound historical resonance. No matter.
The Bitterroot logging plan targets an area near the town of Sula. Forest Service officials contend that their timber cutting scheme is designed to serve as a protective buffer for this bucolic hamlet, a kind of levee of stumps against the coming firestorm. Under the Forest Service plan, more than 4,000 acres of prime old-growth forest, posing little or no fire threat, would be opened to industrial logging, while the agency offered to do only a token amount of work that might qualify as fire-protection or ecological restoration.
But many long-time residents and environmentalists didn't immediately swallow the Forest Service's apocalyptic rants.
In the Rockies, the Forest Service's ratings for veracity rank somewhere between Bush's and Plum Creek Timber. Perhaps the old-timers and greens in western Montana understood that clearcutting generally increases the risk of big wildfires, instead of dampening it. Perhaps they feared logging would flush tons of sediment into the fabulous trout streams of the East Fork. Perhaps they suspected that the logging would destroy habitat for the elk, goshawk, bear and wolves that roam these forests. Perhaps they suspected that instead of aiding the economy of the Bitterroot Valley, the money from the timber sales would end up in the coffers a couple politically-wired timber companies.
In a rare coalition, greens, local foresters and firefighters, hunters and fly-fishers came together and drafted their own homegrown plan for protecting the town of Sula from wildfires and restoring parts of the Bitterroot Forest and its streams that had been mangled by past logging and roadbuilding projects. They called this the Community Protection and Local Economy Alternative.
Although some environmentalists believe even this compromise plan is too generous with application of the blade, it enjoyed widespread community support. The Forest Service didn't look so kindly on it. Indeed, the Bitterroot's Forest Supervisor, Dave Bull, arbitrarily yanked out all mention of watershed restoration and road closures from the citizens' alternative, claiming that the Healthy Forests law doesn't allow any kind of restoration work that isn't directly tied to logging. This policy nicely mimics the Bush administration policy on birth control, which prohibits federal-funded programs from mentioning the word "condom"-except to describe the failure rates of the prophylactics. Bull was apparently acting on orders from his boss, timber supremo Mark Rey, who moonlights as Undersecretary of Agriculture.
Sensing rejection in the wind, the Bush administration summoned a PR team, working in tandem with the Montana Logging Association, to help market the clearcutting plan. Still the desperate fear-mongering from the Forest Service and its allies about catastrophic fires sweeping down the valley with genocidal intent didn't sell to the locals. According to internal documents pried out of the Forest Service by the Native Forest Network using the Freedom of Information Act, we know that the public almost unanimously rejected the agency's war plan for the Bitterroot. When the Bitterroot plan was presented for public inspection, it generated an impressive 10,000 individual comments. It turns out that 98 percent of those comments opposed the Forest Service plan and supported the restoration alternative prepared by local citizens. The Forest Service tried to bury these results and scuffed their feet at releasing them under FOIA, an act the Bush gang desperately wants to obliterate in the name of national security. (Read: Covering its ass.)
Here's were the story takes a brutish turn and the Bush administration's pious encomiums to democracy, collaborative experients and local control are once again proved to ring hollow. For, that very same FOIA request also brought with it an unexpected trove of papers proving that the solicitation of public input was nothing more than a choreographed charade. At the precise moment the agency was supposed to be considering the views of locals and deliberating over the ecological merits of the competing plans, the Forest Service had secretly dispatched a kind of special operations force into the Bitterroot Forest, armed with cans of spray paint, which they used to covertly mark stands of old-growth trees targeted for elimination. This operation cost the agency $162,000 of public money.
In other words, the fix was in. The public debate over the impending destruction of the West's premier forests was a theat
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