10/11/99

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

The Clinton administration is poised to announce a new management policy for the National Forests that will halt roading and logging on much of the remaining roadless areas. The details of the proposed policy and its application to Montana are not yet clear, but timber interests are already resurrecting the earlier charges against the Clinton administration that is conducting a "war on the West."

Those charges that the federal government was crippling the economies of the western states may originally have had some political punch within the West, but as the Western states that the federal government was supposed to have economically crippled continued to lead the nation in the expansion of economic activity, jobs, and population, those charges of intentional economic damage to the region by the federal government became less and less plausible. Even in the nonmetro and rural areas of the West, almost every single county showed signs of above average population growth during the 90s, the very period during which National Forest timber harvests plummeted almost 80 percent. Instead of creating a "new Appalachia" of economic depression in the inland west, an economic boom rolled along, focusing attention not on coping with the predicted economic collapse but on managing the costs of rapid, sustained, growth.

After a decade of successfully adjusting to a much lower level of timber harvest off of National Forest lands, Montana can certainly digest the economic impact of a halt to new roaded development of the remaining relatively pristine areas of the National Forest that lie outside of wilderness areas and parks. The actual impact is likely to be very small for several reasons.

First, much of the roadless areas have been off limits to timber harvest for some time. In Idaho and Montana, for which statewide wilderness bills have failed to be passed, many wilderness study areas have been managed as wilderness for a decade or more. Other roadless areas were put off limits to commercial timber harvest by the forest plans because of low timber values, high costs of access, and sensitive environmental values. Still other areas have not been roaded and harvested because a variety of environmental constraints associated with damaged and endangered fisheries and endangered species such as the grizzly bear. Those environmental constraints would have continued to block roaded development. The increasing pressure on the Forest Service to avoid below-cost timber sales has also limited new entry into high, remote areas. Such roaded entry involves very high costs while the trees are small and slow growing. Because of the steepness of the terrain and erosion problems special, costly measures must be adopted to avoid serious environmental damage. It was these economic considerations that blocked entry into these areas in the past. Now that congress and the public are even less willing to have the Forest Service incur a financial loss while doing serious environmental damage, it is unlikely that the Forest Service would have entered many of these areas in the future even if there was not a national policy blocking commercial logging in roadless areas. Finally, for a year or more, there has been a moratorium in place limiting the construction new roads in National Forest roadless areas.

The point is that most of these lands have not been providing a flow of logs to local mills for many years now and it was unlikely that that would have changed with or without a new federal policy.

The question still remains, what will this restriction on the harvest of trees from federal land do to the local economy. We have had a full decade of experience to help answer that question.

Since the peak National Forest harvests in 1987, two-thirds of that federal log flow in Montana has disappeared. On the Flathead, harvests in 1997 were only a fifth of what they were in 1987. On the Bitterroot, the 1997 harvest was only a quarter of the harvest in the late 1980s. On the timber-basket forest of the state, the Kootenai, only a third of the wood harvested in 1987 was harvested in the 1997. Clearly Western Montana has experienced a massive decline in the availability of federal timber.

How did the Western Montana economy respond to this loss of two-thirds of the federal timber supply? As we all know, it boomed. The areas hit the hardest by loss of federal timber, the Bitterroot and Flathead Valleys were among the fastest growing counties in the nation. The Bitterroot saw population increase by over 40 percent and jobs by 66 percent, 3 to 4 times the national increase. In the Flathead economic growth was two to three times the national average. Even Lincoln County in the northwest corner of the state, the most timber dependent of our counties, saw jobs and population growth by about 7 percent during the 1990s despite the loss of not only two-thirds of the federal log flow but also the shutdown of a major mine.

Whatever the impact will be of the new federal policy on timber harvests in the remaining roadless areas, it will be very small compared to what we have already been through. Given our success in adjusting to much larger previous declines in the federal timber supply, there is no reason to panic as the federal government simply confirms with its new policy that harvests will never rise back to where they were in the late 1980s. Western Montana will simply continue its systematic evolution into a more diversified economy that increasingly resembles the rest of the nation rather than the frontier outpost we once were. That ain’t all bad!