Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Four years ago, I gave Sen. John Tester’s wilderness and logging bill a conditional endorsement: amend it, pass it, but don’t brag about it. My endorsement was contingent upon removing the logging mandates from the bill.
That almost happened, but as the Missoulian’s Rob Chaney reported yesterday, Sen. Tester’ price for supporting his own bill is keeping the logging mandates intact:
The bill’s combination of land protection and logging mandates has been its most controversial aspect. Tester derailed a 2010 committee review after Senate staffers released a draft of his bill that removed the logging commitment while keeping the wilderness designations. But many members of Montana’s environmental community have opposed the bill because of that same compromise.
This week, Tester got his way. His bill, S.37, was approved by the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee on an essentially partyline voice vote, with two (Jim Risch, ID, and Lamar Alexander, TN) of the committee’s ten Republicans joining at least seven of the committee’s 11 Democrats in voting Aye. S.37 now goes to the Senate floor, where passage is far from assured.
I give Tester an A-plus for tenacity — and an F-minus for policy. His bill undermines the National Forest Management Act by telling the Forest Service how many acres of timber it must log each year. Tester’s quotas are based not on science and professional expertise, but on how much national forest timber local lumber mills say they need to stay in business. It blesses timber mining. It’s the anthesis of sustained yield and nondeclining even flow, and the apotheosis of sacrificing the future for the present.
So my position on Tester’s wilderness and logging bill remains unchanged: amend it, pass it, but don’t brag about it.