12/8/97

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Timber Industry Hysteria over Ecosystem Management

The Montana Forest Products Association is beating the bush, pounding the pavement, trying to get Montanans upset over the Interior Columbia Ecosystem Management Plan. That landscape-scale federal planning document seeks to establish region-wide management criteria for federal lands in Eastern Washington and Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana. The Forest Products Association sees it as a federal plot to snatch peoples’ and communities’ livelihoods from them. Those infamous jack-booted, federal thugs want to "take your village," the Forest Products Association trumpets.

The "evidence" for this attack on our lives and livelihoods is the way the federal analysis has characterized our region and communities. Using objective economic data, independent researchers were asked to look at how it is that we in the inland northwest actually earn our living. That is, these researchers were charged with looking at who actually butters our bread, not who we think or suppose or were taught butters our bread. It is the scientific answers to that question that frighten and outrage the Forest Products Association.

What those independent researchers discovered is what anyone with their eyes open in Western Montana or Idaho or eastern Washington already knew: Our economies have become significantly diversified and the forest products industry’s relative importance, although certainly still significant, has declined considerably. So has the role for federal timber in fueling our economy.

For instance, using ten percent of income or employment as a cut off for labeling a community "timber dependent," these scientists found that Flathead County was not timber dependent. "Baloney!" the Forest Products Association barks, "Flathead County has more timber workers than any other county in the state." That may be true, but only about seven percent of all of the income received by residents in the Flathead Valley comes directly from wood products employment. It used to be closer to 14 percent, but rapid growth in the non-timber sectors of the economy have cut wood products’ role as a source of income almost in half over the last twenty-five years. Apparently the Forest Products Association thinks that mentioning this factual situation amounts to a vicious attack on families who make their living in wood products. Statements of economic fact, when they conflict with self-interested economic fiction, amount to stealing that part of people’s livelihoods that some people imagined wood products still provides. A fascinating concept! Objective facts are subversive and dangerous while economic make-believe is the firm foundation upon which public economic policy should be based.

Dependence upon federal timber is even harder to demonstrate in Flathead County. In 1996 federal harvests were only about 11 percent of what they had been back in 1969. 89 percent of the federal harvest had been lost. During that time period, rather than the Flathead Valley being pitched into full scale depression, the Flathead economy boomed. Its population has expanded by 80 percent; total real income is up 150 percent. A similar story can be told about Western Montana in general. While timber from federal lands has fallen off dramatically, almost all areas of Western Montana have seen economic growth, not economic decline. Even in Lincoln County, in the extreme northwestern corner of the state, the state’s most timber reliant county, population, housing values, and real income have been rising even though earnings in wood products and harvest from the Kootenai National Forest have declined dramatically.

It is not a sign of insensitivity to wood product workers and their families to point out this impressive economic resiliency in Lincoln County. The fundamental point is that even in this, our most timber reliant county, there is much more to the local economy than timber. There is an increasingly diversified and vital economy that has been growing in the shadow of the timber industry and which is now carrying the local economy through difficult times. At earlier times this also happened in the Missoula, Bitterroot, and Flathead Valleys. The Forest Products Association may think that collectively chanting the mantra that "only timber matters" will do magic things for our local economies. I doubt it. That as "no-nothing" mentality. The magic of economic diversification and amenity-driven economic vitality has been working wonders in Western Montana for a decade now. Mindless mantras cannot contribute much to this vitality.