12/4/2000

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

 

Roadless Area Economic and Political Hyperbole

 

            The Forest Service’s tentative decision to limit most road building and logging in National Forest roadless areas brought predictable responses from the forest products industry.  The Montana Wood Products Association labeled the decision a “federal crime” and claimed that all Montanans were “victims” of that “crime.”[1] 

This hysterical and exaggerated language is what, with some embarrassment, we have come to expect.  It was these thoughtful folks who have been telling us for several years that the federal government was trying to “take our communities” by choking off our rural economies.  In the planned tax day rally in Libby last spring, they were going to burn the UN flag and condemn the federal conspiracy to turn our rural areas over to those blue helmeted foreign thugs who, no doubt, were going to descend on us like killer bees in black helicopters. 

This insidious conspiracy involves the federal government, controlled by the United Nations, purposely sabotaging our rural economies so as to drive us all into large urban areas where governments controlled by totalitarian liberals can take our guns and condemn us to permanent servitude.

This is what passes for reasoned public policy dialogue in Montana.  Is it any wonder that the rest of the nation, with furrowed brows, doubtful looks, and half smiles, assumes that we and north Idaho are populated primarily by various shades of Ted Kaczynski and right wing militia groups.

This alleged federal “crime” and “conspiracy” has to be one of the most unsuccessful ever carried out by an all-powerful world government.  There is a simple test of whether the federal government has been “taking our communities,” simply look at those communities and see if they have been withering away, sending a continuous stream of penniless Montanans to the ghettos of Chicago and Los Angeles.

If we look at the twelve communities that have had lumber mills close during the 1990s for which we have population data, the federal government’s conspiracy to drive us out appears to have been a spectacular failure.  Eight of the twelve communities had population growth during the 1990s that was above the state average.  Of the 128 communities in the state for which population data is officially gathered, communities that had mills close ranked 5th, 6th, and 8th in terms of rapid population growth.  One of those distressed communities, Darby in the southern end of the Bitterroot Valley, saw its population increase by over 50 percent.  Others, like Columbia Falls were not far behind with population growth of 48 percent while Kalispell, Bozeman, and Polson saw their populations explode by 35 to 40 percent despite the closing of lumber mills.  Over half of the towns with mill closures were in the top quarter of the state’s towns ranked by population growth.  All of the towns with mill closures were in the top half of Montana towns in terms of population growth.[2]  It is not clear that we have much to fear from a federal conspiracy that is this incompetent at emptying our towns.

That is not to say that all of our communities will grow rapidly indefinitely.  We just have to look at agricultural Eastern Montana to see the constraints that international market forces can place on local economies.  The one town that lost significant population in the late 1990s after a mill closure, Judith Gap, is located in that larger declining  agricultural area where all but one of the 50 Montana towns with declining population were also located.  As the national economy slows and possibly heads into a recession, we, like the rest of the nation, may be in for some belt tightening.  These national and international cyclical fluctuations, however, should not be blamed on efforts to protect our natural landscapes.

If we set the hysterical claims of fatal damage to our communities aside for the political hyperbole that they are, we can at least begin discussing the facts.  After over a century and a half of logging in Western Montana, there may be a reason that we have not already roaded and logged these remaining roadless areas.  We Montanans are not entirely stupid; when we saw valuable natural resources in the past, we eagerly (not to say greedily) pursued them.  Until the early 1990s, the federal government did not stand much in our way.  It was only in 1988-1989 that our timber harvests peaked.  So why did we not grab the gift of nature in these roadless areas and make off with it the way we did with most other natural resources?

The answer is pretty straightforward: In most of these roadless areas, over 80 percent of them, the cost of getting into the trees and harvesting them was greater than the value of the trees that were found there.  Being the practical people that we were, we were not willing to lose money just for the pleasure of trashing a forest.  So those areas have remained roadless to this very day. 

Some folks, however, strongly believe that taxpayer money should be used to subsidize the uneconomic logging of these areas.  They apparently think that the pleasures of clearcutting exceeds the value of the lost money, especially if that lost money can be billed to someone else like the US taxpayer.

It is one thing to argue over whether a productive timber site should be logged despite its other non-commercial forest values.  It is quite another thing to insist that areas that no one believes can be economically managed for timber be roaded and logged anyway.  The former represents a reasonable disagreement over the relative importance of commercial versus non-commercial forest values.  The latter represents pure, unadulterated, economic waste. 

We have already passed beyond the economic limit in the extent of our road building and logging.  It is time to focus our timber harvests on the lands best suited for that and stop squandering our resources in trying to bring all forest lands under commercial timber management no matter what the economic and environmental cost.  The Forest Service’s proposed roadless area policy seeks to impose exactly that sort of economic rationality and focus on the management of our public lands.  That is a “crime” only to those who want no limits placed on their own privileged access to public resources.

 


[1] Missoulian, 11/14/00, p. A12.

[2] All data is for the 1990-1999 time period. Population Estimates Program, Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC 20233. http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/metro-city/placebyst/SC99T7_MT.txt