It's been about three weeks since I wrote "This is Embarrassing," my missive about the fact that my friend Craig Thomas is in Kansas with his logging equipment, helping to clear right-of-way for an oil and gas pipeline that will carry the stuff from Canada to Oklahoma. God only knows how much domestic oil and gas environmental lunacy has overlooked enroute from the Far North, but that is a story for another time.

Apart from the fact that Craig and his logging equipment are in Kansas working on a pipeline clearing project [actually they are now in Missouri, more on this in a moment] and not back home clearing the deadwood from our dying forests is more than ample evidence of the fact that our national forests ought to be transferred to the states in which they are located or, better yet, given back to the Indians from whom our federal government stole them more than 100 years ago.

Western federal forests are dying, not by the acre, but by the hundreds of thousands of acres. The reasons are well known. Our forests have grown much too dense to sustain themselves so nature is thinning them out using her three most efficient tools: insects, disease and inevitable wildfire. Craig could be doing this work a lot more safely and efficiency if it weren't for, well, environmental lunacy.

This story has been in the news for so long - 15 years at least - that it no longer grabs headlines until the flame lengths can be seen at night from outer space. To quote Dave Berry, "I am not making this up."

The latest flap here in western Montana emanates from reports that the forest carnage is now so visible around Helena - our state capital - that it can actually be seen from our governor's office which, so far as I know, is not yet in outer space.

I have no idea if this is true because I have only been in the governor's office once and I have no recollection of looking out the windows. But the mere possibility that you can see jillions of dead trees from his windows makes for great grist for the mills.

Brian Schweitzer understands why the West's federal forests are dying as well as any governor in the nation, which probably isn't saying much, so let's put it this way: Two years ago he made some impromptu remarks at the spring meeting of the Montana  Logging Association that had me wishing he was the Chief of the Forest Service. I have this image of his sloshing his way [triumphantly of course] through the Beltway fever swamps, but then I had the same image of my friend, Jack Ward Thomas, just before he disappeared into the abyss.

Schweitzer has been fairly quiet lately, which is not his natural state. I had hoped to watch him rocket into space under his own power after Henry Waxman's House Energy and Commerce Committee inexplicably voted to exclude federal woody biomass from the Obama Administration's new renewable energy standard. But Schweitzer, who now chairs the Western Governor's Association, didn't say a word, at least publicly.

Maybe he is keeping his powder dry for the upcoming Senate energy debate. He prides himself on his populist leanings but he's never been easy to predict. One minute he's in Virginia campaigning for Terry McAuliffe in the state's Democratic gubernatorial primary [he lost], a minute later he's back in Helena jawboning General Motors for canceling its platinum contract with Montana's Stillwater Mining Company, and the next minute he's down in Louisiana joking with the press about putting Montana's budget surplus on that pass line at the craps table. Hey, he's a fun guy!

Both of Montana's U.S. senators are Democrats, as is Governor Schweitzer, but only one of them - Jon Tester - has said much about the plight of federal forests in our state. Tester, whose roots are in farming, appears to "get it." No word from Max Baucus, our senior senator, who is up to his armpits in the nation's health care debate. It may be that he's plopped our forest health crisis in Tester's lap. We know he knows that what's left of our lumber industry is a house of cards, but we don't know if he's willing to support a renewable energy standard that would include the dead and dying trees that are now choking the life out of our national forests.

What brought all of this to mind again was another e-mail note from Craig advising me that he is now in Missouri, another midwestern expanse where Timbco forwarders will never be mistaken for combines or corn processors. His note reads, "We are now is Missouri clearing the pipeline right-of-way. We cleared 107 miles in Kansas, 110 feet wide, and have 30 miles to go in Missouri."

This is a god-awful time of the year to be anywhere in the Midwest. The humidity is terrible, so bad that when Craig crossed the Platte River last week, enroute to work, his wipers could not keep the moisture off his windshield. No wonder corn - among other breadbasket items - grows so well there

I marvel at Craig's courage and good humor. He and Vanessa - that's the name he's given his Timbco forwarder - seem to be taking their Great

"Vanessa"

Midwestern Adventure in stride. I wish I could say the same about what is left of Montana's lumber industry. Four mills have closed since the first of the year - two permanently. The others may reopen when lumber markets improve, or they may not. No one knows, least of all the Plum Creek Timber Company, which owns all four mills.

Most Montana loggers are sitting out the summer logging season, despite the fact that there is enough thinning work to do in our dead and dying national forests to keep them, their children and their grandchildren working for the next 100 years. About the best they can hope for is a "good" fire season, which would mean that at least some of them will get to help fight big forest fires that could be avoided if the Congress could ever get it through its thick skull that it is a helluva lot easier to "restore" forests before they burn to the ground than it is after the smoke clears.

Craig has no idea when he'll be home again in Stevensville, which probably isn't very comforting for his wife and kids. No doubt he'd like to be here, where the nights are cool and 85 is considered stifling. But there no is work, so it's Kansas or Missouri or where the hell he is today, or nothing at all. Chalk it up to the joy of living in a state where the federal government is the largest landowner - and pays not one dime of property tax on the land it owns and abuses, a fact that adds another dimension to the firefighter's lament: "Dead loss."

Meanwhile, the Society of American Foresters - to which I proudly belong - is beating its brains out trying to convince the Congress to include our dead and dying federal forests in the Obama Administration's new renewable energy standard. A lot of weasel words are being tossed around by House and Senate negotiators who, for the most part, have never even laid eyes on one of our forests, alive or dead.

At this point, it seems likely that some federal biomass will be included in the standard, but whether it is sufficient to actually allow science to intervene on the side of good forestry remains to be seen. Many fear that Oregon Senator Ron Wyden's attempt to "save" old growth [actually is a death sentence for big old trees] will carry the day.

Click here to read Erica Rhoad's assessment of where we are today with the Obama Administration's energy bill. She is SAF's forest policy director, and a Montana girl to boot. We like her out here in fly-over country because she's smart, passionate and tough. So is my pal, Craig, who with his lady-friend, Vanessa, is roaming the Missouri countryside this afternoon looking for piles of brush - and hope.

For more on this story, click here to return to "Editor's Column" and scroll to "This is Embarrassing".