3/13/2000

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Roadless Area Protection and the Bitterroot and Western Montana Economies

For several decades now, we Montanans have debated the appropriate future management of our remaining un-roaded but unprotected forested mountains. A good deal of that debate has focused on the impact that protecting these wildlands would have on timber harvests and the employment and income associated with that industry. Those who argued for the preservation of these wildlands were accused of undermining Western Montana’s economic base.

The current version of that debate, triggered by the Clinton Administration’s roadless area initiative, ought to focus on all together different issues because the timber economic issue is now largely irrelevant. I say that for several reasons.

First, most of the roadless areas do not contain commercially viable timber stands. In the forest plans developed 15 years ago, about the time of peak timber harvests in the state, about 80 percent of the roadless areas were not included in the commercial timber base upon which the Forest Service based its timber sale program. Over the last decade and a half, the economic accountability forced on the Forest Service by Congress makes these distant, high, cold, slow growing sites that could be managed for timber only at a loss, even less viable in straightforward business terms. The Forest Service is currenly in the process of estimating exactly what timber harvests were planned in these roadless areas. Although the numbers have not been finalized yet, they are going to show that limiting timber harvests in the remaining roadless areas will have only very small impacts on expected timber harvests for most Western Montana forests.

The second reason the impact on the economy through reduced timber harvests will be small if these roadless areas are set off limits for logging is that the Forest Service has already reduced the harvests off of its lands to very low levels. During the 1990s Western Montana successfully digested a 60 to 80 percent reduction in federal harvests. Our local economies absorbed those huge fall downs in federal harvests while continuing to experience considerable economic vitality. Any further reductions in federal timber harvests that flow from the roadless area initiative will be very small compared to what we have already successfully coped with.

Let me use the Bitterroot Valley as an example. If one stretches all the way back to the year of peak timber harvest off of the Bitterroot National Forest, 1969, timber harvests have plunged fully 87 percent. That is, only about a tenth of the past harvest is now taking place. If we only go back ten years, federal timber harvests are still down 63 percent compared to 1988. Even if all of the remaining harvest on the Bitterroot were eliminated, the impact would be only about a sixth of what has already been experienced. The roadless area initiative, however, will barely touch the ongoing harvest.

One can ask what the economic impact of this drastically reduced federal timber harvest has been on the Bitterroot economy. Has it generated growing joblessness and plunging incomes? As everyone knows from recent newspaper headlines, the Bitterroot, and another “timber-dependent” county, the Flathead, have led the state and nation in ongoing economic expansion despite the drastic fall down in federal timber harvests. Over the last ten years, total jobs are up almost 60 percent in the Bitterroot and manufacturing jobs, of which wood products is an important part, are also up almost 50 percent. The total wood products industry payroll is up over forty percent after adjusting for inflation, not drastically down. Average real income is also up, not down. More spectacular is the change in the Bitterroot’s economic status relative to Montana’s other counties. In the peak timber harvest years of 1969 and 1978, the Bitterroot was in the bottom ten of Montana’s counties in terms of average income. As federal harvests plunged, average incomes in the Bitterroot rose relative to other Montana counties from the bottom ten to among the top twenty of Montana’s 56 counties. Over the last ten years, average real pay per job also rose despite the declining timber harvests.

This is not to suggest that there was no impact on the Bitterroot economy. There was. The last of the Valley’s lumber mills closed, laying off hundreds of workers in the southern end of the Valley. The ongoing economic vitality of the Bitterroot economy, however, allowed these workers to be absorbed into other relatively high paid jobs, especially the construction industry that was expanding as a result of the ongoing building boom. Wood products activity, of course, did not disappear. Despite the closing of the mills, there are now more workers, not less, in the industry largely due to the explosive growth in log home manufacturing, a labor intensive, value-added activity.

As all of us who have had to cope with losing a job know, transitions between jobs are rarely pleasant and are often painful and disruptive. In a dynamic economy, however, they are an unavoidable feature of ongoing economic development. Few of us will remain in the same job or the same industry for most of our adult lives. What is important is not that jobs are lost, but whether new jobs with decent pay are also created. Although we all would like to make more money than what we are currently pulling in, the ongoing growth in the Bitterroot Valley and elsewhere in Western Montana provides evidence that the pay associated with the economic opportunities here is sufficient to make life here a bargain compared to the alternatives elsewhere in the nation. Ongoing efforts to protect the spectacular landscapes and world-class recreation opportunities that are central to the Montana we love can only improve that bargain.