6/18/2000

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

“Shutting Down Our Communities”?

Roadless Area Protection and the Vitality of Montana’s Small Towns

The wood products industry has changed its tune on why it opposes any limitation on road building and timber harvest in the remaining National Forest roadless areas. The industry line now is that this is not about road building or about timber harvest. Instead it is about keeping the federal government and environmentalists from “shutting down” Montana’s smaller cities and towns.

This shift is not surprising. The facts on the commercial timber harvest potential and economic impacts are so clear and straightforward that the timber industry could not plausibly make the claim that protecting these roadless areas would lead to mill closures and job losses. To understand why an economic argument cannot be made against setting roadless areas off limits to roading and logging, all one needs is three readily available pieces of information and the ability to multiply fractions.

The information needed is the following:

1^st: What part of the overall economy is directly dependent upon logging and wood products? For all of Montana’s National Forest counties the answer is 3.4 percent. For the Flathead it is about 6 percent and in Lincoln County, 13 percent.

2^nd: What part of the timber supply supporting Montana logging and wood processing comes from National Forest lands? For Montana as a whole it is 22 percent; about one in five of the logs cut in Montana come from the National Forests.

3^rd: What part of the National Forest timber supply is likely to come from the roadless areas? Using the last seven and next five years of National Forest harvests, the answer is one to two percent.

All one has to do is multiply these three percentages together to get a statement of the likely direct economic impact of not roading and logging these areas. Of course, multiplying three small fractions together gives you a truly small fraction; in this case between one and two hundredths of one percent of total income in Montana’s National Forest counties is associated with roading and logging these areas. That’s about one out of every 7,000 dollars.

You can use any plausible multiplier you want, focus on the areas most dependent on National Forest timber, or on areas with the most roadless acres, but the result will always be the same: The potential for these roadless areas to support communities through logging is trivially small. That should not be surprising. We have been logging Montana’s forests for over a century and these areas have not yet been entered for logs. That is not an accident or oversight. These areas never were seen as valuable for commercial logging; they aren’t now either.

To divert peoples’ attention from these facts, the timber industry has focused instead on the much fuzzier and more emotionally charged issue of community survival: Evil forces are “taking our communities” or “shutting down our communities,” we are told.

There is no support for that argument either. Consider the towns that the timber industry uses as symbols of timber dependent communities. Darby at the south end of the Bitterroot Valley has seen timber harvests on the Bitterroot National Forest plummet almost 90 percent since 1987. Has Darby been “shut down”? Hardly, during the 1990s its population rose 51%, five times the state average rate of growth. Or consider Columbia Falls in the Flathead. Harvest from that National Forest also plunged almost 90 percent while Columbia Falls boomed with a 44 percent increase in population. Or consider Thompson Falls and Plains in Sanders County. The Lolo havest fell 70 percent, but Thompson Falls and Plains did not wither and die; instead they gained 18 and 23 percent in population, respectively. Alberton in Mineral County, also dependent on the Lolo, grew at as fast a rate as Missoula County, 13 percent. In Missoula County itself, the relatively isolated town of Seeley Lake also saw ongoing growth and vitality despite the collapse of timber harvests on both the Lolo and Flathead National Forests. The story is the same in the small towns adjacent to the Helena, Gallatin, and Lewis and Clark National Forests. Growth and vitality, not shutdown and depression. Even in the isolated towns in extreme northwestern Montana, Libby, Troy, and Eureka, there has been modest growth, 5 to 7 percent, between 1990 and 1998 despite the loss of 70 percent of the 1987 National Forest timber harvest and the shutdown of two large mining operations.

Our small communities adjacent to National Forest lands are not being “shut down” by the dramatic declines in National Forest timber harvest, quite the contrary. How can one explain this economic vitality despite the loss of access to these raw materials? The answer is straightforward. Just ask those who continue to live there and those who are moving in. Protecting our forests does not lock up resources and restrict residents’ access to the benefits of the forests. Protecting our forests protects clean water and fisheries; it protects habitat and wildlife; it protects recreational opportunities; it protects open space and scenic beauty. All of these are continuously available to residents of our small towns and rural areas when our natural forests are protected. Restricting the clearcutting and commercial removal of the trees is simply a sign that we all have increasingly begun to see more clearly the whole of the forest and not just the commercially valuable trees. This does not damage our communities; it protects their future by protecting an important part of their economic base: the forested mountains and all of the benefits that those forests can provide to us and future generations. Other areas of the nation, in other periods of our history, have been stripped of their forests and abandoned to out-migration and the poverty that a degraded natural environment assures. The effort to protect Montana’s roadless areas seeks to assure that that never happens here.