There's an exiting new change blowing across the West these days. It bodes well for the future of forestry. "Changing public values" was a phrase the Forest Service often used to justify reducing timber harvests. I've read a version of the phrase in every USFS revised forest plan put out since the 90's. Well, public values are changing back again. Across the West, the public now wants more logging.

The Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic that's sweeping the west and fear of wildfire are driving the change. There's always been considerable rural support for logging, but what's really exiting is this new attitude is coming from people who were traditionally opposed to logging. Many people who consider themselves environmentalists are now seeing logging in a positive light. Forestry is back in vogue.

Another important shift is the public's attitude towards the so called "radical" environmentalist groups who litigate timber sales( I'm not trying to be disparaging here. I only call them "radical" to differentiate them from "moderate" groups who don't litigate). The public doesn't perceive them anymore as being the underdogs taking on the timber baron establishment. To the contrary, radical environmentalists have become the establishment. How could they not be seen in that light? They won the timber wars. For twenty years the papers have been full of stories about timber sale litigation and sawmill closures. Timber harvest on National Forests has dropped by 80%. For all practical purposes, the public now perceives the radicals as controlling USFS timber harvest levels. They're seen as the ones in charge now. The radicals are now in the position of defending the status quo.

This is a very important "role reversal" as every politician knows that policy is really based upon public perception. With every future wildfire, whether justified or not, the public won't be blaming the Forest Service, they won't be blaming the logger, they'll be blaming the radical environmentalists. Being held responsible comes along with being in charge. The recent "Schultz' fire outside Flagstaff Arizona illustrates this point perfectly. The fire burned over an area the USFS and a moderate environmental group collaboratively proposed to thin a couple years ago. The timber sale was held up by an appeal and the possibility of litigation from the Center for Biological Diversity [CBD]. A week after the fire, a thunderstorm dumped over the burn and flooded 80 homes. Do you think the public blames the USFS? The CBD counters that there was no market(sawmills) for the wood anyway. Who do you think the public blames for no sawmills? The CBD loses either way. This is a scene that will inevitably be repeated many times in the future.

I think a lot of radical groups in the West (including the CBD) recognize this role reversal and are responding by halting timber sale litigation. However, there's some groups who persist in litigating even "healthy forest" timber sales.

Another result of these changing public values is the radicals are losing the support of the much more numerous and pragmatic "moderate environmentalists". Those that supported them when the Lolo was clear cutting 15,000 acres/year, will desert them when they litigate a healthy forest timber sale. This isn't lost on western Democrat politicians who have relied on the moderate environmentalist base. They can now safely take on the radicals without offending the moderates, and maybe pick up a few Republican voters as well. The radicals are becoming a political liability.

I'd like to share a few cases from around the West:

Colorado is suffering a massive pine beetle outbreak in the heart of their ski industry from Steamboat Springs to Vail. These are very pro environmentalist counties. They shut down the timber industry in the 90's. A major sawmill closed in 2003 for lack of USFS timber. And now they complain the Forest Service isn't moving fast enough to remove the dead trees. It's amazing to me how people's environmental idealism goes out the window when their property values are threatened by pine beetle and wildfire. Nothing explains a clearcut better than a MPB epidemic or a wildfire. The city of Frisco clearcut 40 acres of park land, and the Mayor told me he had only one complaint. The USFS is now proposing to salvage clearcut 5,000 acres around Breckenridge.

Now every local, state and federal politician is calling for greatly expanding salvage clearcuts. Most timber sale litigation is based on the National Environmental Policy Act. This act created the environmental impact statement. Sen. Mark Udall, who's consistently received a 100% rating from the League of Conservation Voters, has recently sponsored legislation that would create "insect emergency areas" where NEPA revue would be "expedited". Seven years ago he proposed "taking funds from the timber sale program and reallocate it to protect fish and wildlife" in order "to protect rather that destroy our national forests".

A part of me would like to scream hypocrisy, but a larger part admires the man for changing his mind. I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years. I used to think that all MPB killed forests would burn. But researchers in Colorado forced me to acknowledge to myself that many past epidemics I could remember never burned. I didn't like to change my mind, but I would only be lying to myself. Screams of "it's all going to burn" are as ridiculous as screams of "they're going to log it all". I still have no doubt that it raises the fire hazard.

And there's no more litigation from the 27 some Colorado environmental groups that I "googled." A few years ago, before the pine beetle alarm bells went off, they ended two years of litigation on a puny 600 acre salvage sale. I admire them for changing their minds in response to changing public values. Unfortunately, Colorado's last saw mill closed a month ago. I'm sure it didn't help that they were hauling the logs 150 miles one way.

In Lake Tahoe, the USFS didn't log for decades in order to protect the lakes famous water clarity. You needed a permit, which was seldom granted, to cut any tree on your own property. After the Angora fire burned up 200 homes, the 20 some agencies regulating the lakes environment declared "wildfires are now the biggest threat to water clarity" and "thinning the forest is now the highest priority". Wow. Sen. Harry Reid recently introduced legislation that would spend $135 million dollars to thin the forest around Lake Tahoe. No more litigation. Changing public values.

In Arizona, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) shut down the timber industry in the 90's with litigation. These guys are the big boys on the radical environmentalist block. They've filed hundreds of lawsuits against the USFS. After the 2000 Rodeo fire burned off a half million acres, a "collaborative" group called the "Greater Flagstaff Forest Partnership(GFFP)" was formed. It bills itself as a group of "environmentalists and business people(they don't even mention loggers)" and its goal is to thin the forests around Flagstaff AZ. This last summer Arizona's Governor published a study calling for the USFS to thin 30,000 acres/year.

Of course, there's no sawmills left to take that wood. As part of a proposal to build a $300 million dollar OSB plant, the CBD recently signed a "memorandum of understanding" not to oppose thinning on 30,000 acres/year. I admire them for changing their minds.

The problem is, and this illustrates a big problem that will emerge down the road, do you think there's a bank in the world that would loan $300 million dollars to a mill dependent on National Forest timber? The CBD's memorandum means nothing. More litigation is only another group away. The recent CBD litigation of the El Paso pipeline, which signed similar memorandums of understanding with two environmental groups, only proves how useless the CBD MOU really is. The only thing that's going to reassure a banker is if either the government "co-signs" the loan, or the USFS timber sales are made exempt from NEPA lawsuits. With every future wildfire in the West, there will only be more demands for that. The fly in the future ointment won't be litigation-it will be infrastructure.

The three cases above have two things in common. The majority of the public consider themselves to be environmentalists and they destroyed their timber industry. So now you have a future cycle of more fires, followed by more public demand to log to mitigate fire hazard, followed by more public frustration because there's no infrastructure to do it, followed by more public anger at radical environmentalists because the public knows they're the reason there is no infrastructure now, and they're the reason there won't be. The only way you're going to get any infrastructure is to guarantee the supply by exempting timber sales from NEPA litigation.

Oh, it might take ten years. It might take another million acres burned in Arizona, another few million burned in California, a million burned in Colorado. But it's inevitable. Congress wrote the law, congress can fix it. I think the reason a lot of radical groups are backing off litigation is they realize that wildfires are the biggest threat to NEPA. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the winds blowing.

And then we come to Montana, which still has a timber industry. The successes in the above cases have not yet occurred in Montana. Even though many radical environmentalists have stopped litigating, a couple groups persist in litigating even "healthy forest" timber sales. The "collaborative" group called the Beaverhead Deerlodge Partnership has been formed but is very polarizing. Sen. Tester has introduced legislation that would mandate the Forest Service to follow the partnerships goals. But there's every indication that radical environmentalists would litigate it continually.

Why hasn't Montana succeeded in ending litigation where the other areas have? The majority of the public in Colorado, Arizona, and Lake Tahoe tend to consider themselves "environmentalists". The majority in Montana wouldn't. Could it be that we have a very ironic anomaly where increased logging can only occur where the majority consider themselves environmentalists? It's a lot easier to sue your adversaries than your friends.

Sometimes in order to better understand a hotly debated issue such as logging we get sucked into the details. This has the unfortunate result of losing sight of the "big picture". We get so lost in the micro, we lose sight of the macro. Big numbers by themselves don't mean anything, only percentages can lead us to perspective.

Perhaps environmentalists would be more open to logging if they knew how much has been logged. The following percentages come from the USFS forest inventory analysis (FIA) reports (link:http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/ogden/) and the USFS "cut and sold" reports which list harvest acreage for every national forest for every year back to 1945 (link:http://www.fs.fed.us/r1/forest_range/timber_reports/silviculture_reports/2009_nharv_rpt.pdf). The following percentages are based on "forested acreage". I could have been intellectually dishonest and used total acres to skew my results. But then I would only be lying to myself. No water, rock, or grass acres were used in my calculations.

The table below lists the amount of "forested acres" that were logged in the past 50 years:

Lolo........................................17% Kootenai...................................25%
Beaverhead-Deerlodge............5% Helena......................................7%
Flathead..................................13% Gallatin.....................................7%

Let's focus on the 5% that was logged on the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest since it's the focus of Testers Beaverhead Partnership collaboration. 5% sounds pretty sustainable to me. Doesn't it make any timber sale litigation now look ridiculous and petty? I mentioned the above numbers to two prominent Montana environmentalists. It was the first they heard of it. In 20 years they never took the time to find out how much was logged. They claim science is on their side. I would think knowing how much was logged would be the first place "science" would start.

The Partnership plan proposes to log 70,000 acres in ten years. Sounds like a lot-until you find out it's only 2.5% of the "forested acreage". If you projected that out 50 years, that would mean that 18% would be logged in 100 years. By that time the sapling that grew up in a clearcut done in 1960 would be ready for harvest. Wouldn't you think that knowing "natural processes" will occur on 80% of the forest would satisfy them?

I'm not going to take sides on the Partnership Plan, but considering it's the epicenter of the current mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic, I do believe that the BDNF could tolerate a lot more logging. I'd like to refute a few of the common arguments the radicals use to oppose it.

They claim increased logging isn't sustainable. In the five years ending in 2008, the BDNF logged an average of 500 acres/year. That's .02% of the forested acreage. At that rate it'll take 50 years to log 1%! In the last five years the Lolo harvested 2500 acres/year. At that rate it'll take 50 years to log 7%. A lot of these groups advocate a "zero cut" on national forests. I'd call that zero cut. No wonder they consider the current harvest sustainable. No pragmatic moderate environmentalist would think that 2.5% in ten years is "unsustainable". Frankly, your National Forests are being managed as National Parks.

They claim "below cost timber sales" are a subsidy for the timber industry. To answer that, Montanans only have to ask "why do Montana state DNRC timber sales make $2.00 in revenue for every $1.00 in cost while USFS timber sales loose money? Every state forest in the West makes money. Where is the research on this! I think the University of Montana Bureau of Economics should do a study on the impact. Don't you think the public deserves to know how many millions of tax dollars in Montana goes to excessive analysis. Couldn't the USFS treat twice the acreage if it cost half as much?

Why does the USFS cost so much? Here's a great quote I found from the BDNF when explaining why timber harvest levels were so low: "controversy, appeals, and litigation have greatly increased the cost of preparing timber sales" and " timber sale costs in 1991 were $65/thousand board foot(MBF),in 2002 it had doubled to $120/MBF". The Missoulian had a good quote a few years ago "...in 1990 an environmental assessment(EA) might be 30 pages long, the EA for the Middle East Fork project was 500 pages..."

On forests that aren't litigated, the NEPA-mandated Environmental Assessments get pretty small. I compared one in Montana to one in Colorado. They were both MPB salvage timber sales. The one in Montana treated 1300 acres and ran to 200 pages, the one in Colorado treated 4,000 acres and ran to 57 pages! Who's subsidizing whom.

They claim that fuels treatment does little to mitigate the fire hazard and even makes it worse. Suffice it to say that Sen. Udall, the GFFP, and the public at large believe it does. One of my favorite subjects is photographing the dirty little secret that regenerated lodgepole MPB salvage clearcuts don't burn. The "green islands" in a sea of black are regenerated clearcuts. You can see the photos at the following link: http://westinstenv.org/sosf/2010/05/14/clearcuts-dont-burn/

To the radical environmentalist, keep in mind the following. Most of the logging the USFS does now is "thinning" in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). It is very visible to the public now. It used to be they hid the logging up in the back country out of sight. I like to think it took em a hundred years to log from the valley floor to the ridge tops, and now they're starting over on the valley. All the land that Anaconda Copper cut a hundred years ago is now mature forest again. Mechanical logging means this small diameter wood is economical. The fact that the timber industry signed on to Testers bill is proof enough that it's economical. They're the real economic experts.

This means that when the fires burn, there are going be a lot of "green islands" from WUI treatments that are going to be very visible to the public. Beware a fickle public. 20 years ago they saw a raw clearcut in a sea of green and they decried the USFS and supported you. When they see these "green islands" in a sea of black they're going wonder why the USFS didn't do more of them and condemn you. Your legacy of protecting old growth will be forgotten. The next generation( who always loves to prove the old one wrong) will write books saying you went to far. Or you could be known for protecting old growth and people.

I also know that the pendulum of public policy in this country swings to the extremes. I'm sure the CBD never dreamed they would have stopped all logging so easily. The USFS responded to "changing public values" in the 90's by scaling back timber harvest. I'm sure they never dreamed it would go too far (I've always wanted to ask Jack Ward Thomas where he wanted it to be). In response to changing public values, in 5 years I wouldn't be surprised if the CBD will be lobbying Congress to exempt timber sales from litigation to attract the timber industry back to Arizona. Let's hope the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle.