30 November 2013

The WRP agreement — grand bargain or deal with the Devil?

Thanks to David Hadden of Headwaters Montana, I have a copy of the Whitefish Range Partnership’s forest plan alternative for the North Fork of the Flathead National Forest. It’s a scanned copy, so the maps are Rorschach images, but Hadden is assembling a small enough to email version that should be available soon, so get in touch with him if you’d like a copy. The agreement’s rollout was infelicitous, but the infelicities are being addressed, and Hadden, et al, should be cut a lot of slack. They’re trying to do the right thing.

One thing that struck me right away as I began reading the agreement was that I knew many of the WRP’s members. Some are close friends and colleagues of decades. There’s a lot of local expertise and brainpower in the partnership, and I didn’t see the name of anyone I would expect to be acting in bad faith. Of course, I did see the names of people I thought would be wrong in a good faith way.

The agreement is best viewed as a grand bargain, or perhaps a deal with the Devil. Support for wilderness in the upper North Fork comes at the cost of supporting a ramp-up of logging and mechanized recreation (motorcycles, 4-wheelers, mountain bicycles) in the southern Whitefish range, with possible adverse impacts on wildlife. Were the WRP a legislative body, we’d call the agreement a good example of logrolling.

The WRP’s members took a written pledge of all for one, and one for all. Since this obligates them to defend every word of the agreement, it also prevents them as individuals from reaching agreements with non-WRP entities in the greater collaborative process the Forest Service is conducting.

That places the WRP in an asymmetrical relationship with other groups and individuals, who remain free to endorse the parts of the agreement they like and oppose the parts they don’t like. My advice: study the agreement, and focus on the content, not the process.

That’s my approach. At first glance, the WRP’s proposal on oil and gas leasing and mineral entry appears very close to my belief that the entire Whitefish Range should be permanently withdrawn from mineral entry by an act of Congress. Some years ago, I sent a letter to Sen. Max Baucus recommending just that.

Until I obtain useful maps, I won’t know whether I can support the WRP’s wilderness recommendations. I’ve spent a lot of time up there, know the area pretty well, and helped draft wilderness recommendations a couple of decades ago. I’m not, for example, inclined to sacrifice Link Lake on the altar of comity with the mechanized mob.

As I become more familiar with the agreement, and with the direction of the planning process, and the apparent direction of revisions to the plan, I’ll comment in detail on various aspects of it.

I urge everyone to remember that neither the WRP nor any other private entity involved in forest planning represents the public. To varying extents they are representative of certain segments of the public, but they are authorized only to speak for themselves. All participants in the planning process, and the Forest Service, must remember that the power to adopt a forest plan rests only with the Forest Service, which must adopt a plan that passes legal muster. Collaborationists will do neither themselves nor their community a favor if they strike an agreement that flies in the face of good science and the laws governing forest management.

Notes