Leading the way... Jay Brooker meets with students from Powell County High School during their excursion to the Clark Fork Superfund site on the edge of Galen last Wednesday morning. To find out more turn to pages 12 and 13.
Forest management plan soughtPolitics makes for strange bedfellows on occasion. But, all Montanans are affected by the declining health of our national forests. To that end, representatives from very diverse groups have been meeting for the last couple of years to set priorities and address some serious problems. Governor Steve Bullock was in town last week to unveil the beginning of a forest management plan put together by leaders in the logging and wood products industry, the public, government officials, and several conservation groups. The result concerns the nomination of nearly five million acres of forest in nine counties for priority attention from the federal government. Under this year’s federal farm bill, the Agriculture Act of 2014, the forests most impacted by insects and disease could finally begin receiving the benefits of a variety of restoration projects. Governor Bullock and many of the participants of the working group met with members of the press and the public at Sun Mountain Lumber to discuss the process. Drawing from a letter from the Governor’s office to the US Department of Agriculture, Bullock told the group, “There is a lot of work to be done in the woods: to reduce fire risk, protect communities and municipal water supplies, and preserve and repair key streams and fisheries. In addition, our national forests, if sustainably managed, can be valuable carbon stores and play an important role in combating climate change. The health of our integrated wood products industry is critical as we look toward the future – the forest industry workforce is a vital tool to implement forest restoration projects that address these issues.” Sun Mountain owner Sherm Anderson said he applauds the governor’s efforts. “We employ more than 300 people here and we’re in survival mode. I call it that because of the lack of timber supply in Montana,” he said, “Because we can’t get timber from national forest lands here, we’ve had to go to Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, even Colorado. Seventy percent of Montana’s forest land is federal land, but it provides less than 10 percent of harvested timber. I applaud the governor for the quick response in designating these priority landscapes.” Many of the nominated landscapes were chosen by the diverse groups who have been working together for some time to build forest management projects that meet a variety of needs, not only providing logs on trucks and reduced wildfire risk, but also restored trout streams and elk habitat, among other community objectives. Madison County Commissioner Dave Schulz chaired the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest collaboration for the past two years. “Right now, more than 50 percent of the Forest Service’s budget goes to fighting fire,” he said, “For the last few years it seems as though we’ve been going backwards on how we use our resources. I think this farm bill will provide the energy to start going forward.” continued on page five. |
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