By Steve Woodruff and Don Schwennesen
Photographs by Carl Davaz
How much wilderness is enough? When is a wilderness not a wilderness? Tough questions such as these frame the debate over Montana’s last wild lands, a public debate that is far from over. It is a battle of acreages and statistics that is often bewildering even to the participants. It is a controversy in which the basic issues easily become confused.
The statistics of the battle shift as skirmishes over individual areas are won and lost. But in broad brush, they sketch a profile of the struggle. A century ago, virtually all of Montana’s 93 million acres were wild. Today, 82 million acres are developed or devoted to resource production- nearly 88 percent of the state. Of the roughly 11.3 million acres that remain wild, only 3.4 million have been set aside by Congress as wilderness. Another 1.1 million are undeveloped lands within national parks and recreation areas. That leaves 6.8 million acres of wild land that is not wilderness and may not remain wild for long. The battle lines that are already drawn make it clear that the greatest share of it is destined to be opened to resource development.
Nearly one-third of Montana, 27.6 million acres, is federal land managed mostly by the Forest Service. In 1978, that agency took an inventory of its remaining wild lands and found that 5.7 of its 16.7 million acres were potentially suitable for wilderness designation. The Bureau of Land Management, in a similar 1979 inventory, found that 2.2 of its 6.3 million acres in Montana were still roadless. Since then, both agencies have recommended that most remaining wild lands be opened to production-oriented resource management. The Forest Service recommended preservation of only one-tenth of what is left, while the BLM has released all but about 400,000 acres from wilderness consideration.
Conservationists have acceded to the development of more than half the roadless acreage, but they are seeking wilderness designation for slightly less than 2 million acres of Forest Service land. Their proposal, dubbed Alternative W, would double the size of the state’s wilderness system. But even if the number of designated wilderness areas increases, the actual amount of wild land in Montana is sure to diminish as new roads are punched into those lands released for development.
On one level, the wilderness debate is a confrontation between different visions of what Montana is today and what it might be in the future. Many in the conservation movement consider the mining and timber industries’ past to be a mixture of good and bad and their future to be an uncertainty. Watching newcomers move to Montana in search of wild lands and a clean environment, they conclude that wilderness will be of great importance as the state ‘s recreation industry develops. Outfitter Smoke Elser of Missoula believes Montana and the Pacific Northwest are poised on the edge of an unprecedented boom in the recreation industry. Others believe recreation could be a long-term growth industry that would help stabilize the economic ups and downs of the timber and mining industries.
Opposing interests view the state’s traditional basic industries — agriculture, timber, livestock, and mineral development — as the best hope for the future. “The idea that we have to lock up our natural resources and not have the opportunity to develop them is really detrimental to our society,” says Mike Micone of the Western Environmental Trade Association, an organization that speaks for a broad cross section of Montana industries on resource issues. Although he acknowledges the need for some wilderness, Micone believes that wilderness blocks the multiple use of public lands by prohibiting most uses.
Laws governing the Forest Service make it clear that wilderness is compatible with the multiple-use philosophy. But to people like Micone, multiple use means more than the passive production of water, wildlife, fish , and forage by natural processes. It implies active use : resource development; control of weeds, forest insects, and disease; and harvesting of timber before it dies and rots. It implies extraction of minerals — commodities that are not renewable — to satisfy the needs and demands of the present age. Wilderness forbids access by roads and mechanized equipment. Resources such as water, wood, livestock forage, fish , and wildlife may be used, but not in a way that conspicuously alters the appearance of the land or the processes of nature. By contrast, outside the wilderness man can manipulate the forests or alter the land with heavy equipment and chemicals to increase production of resources or to favor one resource over another.
The wilderness issue is especially thorny for the timber industry, whose leaders want to know how much forest land will be available for lumber production in the future. Before the Wilderness Act of 1964, it appeared that nearly all would be available. Wilderness preservation has changed the outlook, as has a decade of national forest planning. Forest plans have revealed soil and watershed limits or wildlife needs that spell further reductions in timber yields. At the same time that prospects for logging have dimmed for marginal and road less lands, the costs of road construction and production on such lands have mounted. These changes cloud the future for an industry already battered by recession and beset by competition from more productive forests in the Northwest and Southeast.
Conservationists complain that timber management on roadless lands is becoming a drain on the taxpayer instead of a profitable enterprise returning money to the federal treasury. Ed Madej, president of the Montana Wilderness Association, notes that in fiscal year 1983, Montana’s ten national forests lost $30 million on timber that sold for less than it cost to harvest it. Madej and others question whether it makes economic sense to grow new trees commercially on marginal lands. Instead, they say, the region should concentrate on more intensive timber management on only the most productive lands.
Foresters point out that timber must be harvested when and where it is mature, at least until the virgin forests with their varied-aged timber stands have been converted to an even production schedule. Miners say that minerals must be taken where they are found. The jobs and taxes from the timber and mining industries have, at least so far, meant much more to the state’s economy than those in the recreation industry.
Wilderness critics complain about the waste of raw materials and loss of jobs in basic industry that result when wilderness areas are designated. Conservationists denounce the environmental damage, erosion, reforestation problems, and visual damage that have resulted from poor logging and mining practices of the past.
In the end, conservation leaders like Bill Cunningham of the Montana Wilderness Association return to the theme that wild lands are being lost, not increased. Wilderness is a shrinking pool, and the idea that more wild land can be created by congressional act is ludicrous, he says. Debate about adding new wilderness areas simply muddles the fact that many of Montana’s wild areas are steadily being developed. Since the Forest Service inventory of wild lands in 1979, the agency has built roads and laid out timber sales on nearly 575,000 wildland acres — more land than it recommended for further wilderness study.
The contention over the last remaining wild areas will undoubtedly be but a footnote in history, but it is a benchmark in American progress that should not pass without a long moment of reflection. Wilderness is a link to the past and to the wild species that are our fellow travelers on this planet. It represents knowledge yet untapped, possibilities untried , resources undiscovered. How much should anyone generation consume? How much wilderness is enough for one generation to pass on to its heirs? Should the present generation make the final wilderness allocations? Will they remain final even if they are made? The debate raises questions that can be answered with certainty only by future generations- people who will look back either with wonder and scorn at the profligacy of their forebears or with admiration and gratitude to an age of vision.