BWZ Editorial |
by Rick |
The War on the West
From "My Congressman", by Rick Bass in the Fall 1995 issue of Witness, a journal published by Oakland Community College in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Bass is the author, most recently, of "In the Loyal Mountains", a collection of short stories; he lives in Troy, Montana.
Down in Nevada, the county commissioners are driving bulldozers through locked gates on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands-public lands-trying to open those areas to more and more sheep grazing and gold mining, claiming that, despite the environmental trashing that already exists there, their "way of life" is being ruined. President Clinton and his advisers are said to be "monitoring the situation closely." Shots have been fired at federal aircraft. One county commissioner is quoted as boasting to a reporter, "We're just this close to civil war, to bloodshed"-holding up his thumb and forefinger.
Up here in Montana, my pal Tim, a fishing guide on the Yaak and Kootenai rivers, is in it thick, too, but he's attacking the government from the other side. More and more Yaak warriors and woods lovers are springing up, abandoning or setting aside the lazy, rocking flow of their old lives, and rising to stand before the Republican juggernaut.
The Montana state legislature-two thirds Republican-initiated a bill less than a month into office that would lower the state's water quality standards to those required by the state of Louisiana. They are at work on another bill that would strip the state water board's ability to enforce even the Louisiana standards. Another bill would do away with "all environmental regulations." Period.
The feeding frenzy has begun. Big business has grabbed wilderness, the last wilderness, with both hands, and is throttling its last breath while we watch. You'll hear the soothing croons, the Muzak undertone of "moderation" and "middle ground" and "common sense." But in the meantime, this is what's going on backstage. A bloodletting, a frenzy.
Tim has been working to protect a stretch of the Kootenai River-home to sturgeon, bull trout, and trophy rainbow trout-with what are called "slot limits," where you can keep and eat small trout and huge old trout, but where you put back the healthy, still growing middle size trout-those between, say, fourteen and eighteen inches. The reason Tim is working toward this goal is because biologists' studies show this "slot" of fish is declining rapidly. Tim is in no way against meat fishing; he's just trying to protect and preserve the resource-sustainability- just as sportsmen place a limit on, say, deer or elk. You don't hear hunters bitching about this kind of thing. But it's gotten pretty hot over this slot limit deal. Cries are going up (funded by Chevron, Pegasus Gold, and the like) about protecting "our way of life."
One old hippie who's been burnt out, rejuvenated, burnt out, and rejuvenated again- countless times-is Chip Clark. His hair's gone gray now, pony-tailed down his back, and he's been through this meat grinder of Montana despair more than anyone I know. He's a forest ecologist and has been a tree planter for the Forest Service, and for many years he had the especially traumatic job of inventorying timber, measuring a forest by size and species, before it was clearcut-the last man in many instances (other than the sawyers) to see a forest before it vanished totally. In a particularly Orwellian twist, his records would then be routinely destroyed, five years after he'd measured and cataloged what they'd already decided to go in and clearcut, regardless of his findings.
He's written a book about that work, and about his work in the Yaak, entitled My Shame Your Shame. It's a mind-blowing book, detailing the Forest Service's aggression, harassment, and repression of information during his and others' attempts to reveal its unwillingness to cut a volume of timber that is sustainable. Through information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Chip and others discovered that the Forest Service, when reporting to Congress how much mature timber was left on the Kootenai, claimed that 40 percent of the clear-cuts contained mature timber, when the real number was zero. But based on the hyper-inflated figures-the "phantom trees," as they came to be known-Congress, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Forest Service officials allowed a larger cut from the Kootenai.
On his own time and at his own expense during an Environmental Impact Statement review, Chip prepared his own alternative to present to the Forest Service, a plan that would have allowed them to cut even more timber than their own plan but that would have been comprised of mostly dead and dying lodgepole. Chip used his computers and extensive on the ground knowledge to catalogue meticulously, stand by stand, what volumes could have been cut from which area, and when and how. Chip's plan would have provided more wood and, ultimately, more jobs.
No matter. The agencies refused even to consider his work-the citizen's alternative, the conservationist's plan. They went ahead with their plan, which called for more road building into roadless areas, (subsidized by taxpayers, of course), and Chip was made into a villain, a heathen, was reviled at a public hearing to the point that even now, years later, his voice shakes a bit at the memory of being up at the front of the auditorium, trying to help his community and instead being subjected to all that hate, all those jeers and taunts.
"I'll never go through that again," he says. Never mind that now people, including some in the Forest Service, are starting to say that maybe he was right. Of course, a lot of that lodgepole is now rotting. But today, having gone in and built the roads and cut out the big green timber, the Forest Service is looking at Chip's plan. Now they'll take out the lodgepole. Having their cake and eating it too.
Checks and balances exist in all healthy systems. But this war on the West that's been unleashed by the 104th Congress is mind-boggling. It is our shame. We're hurtling down the rapids, with big business at the throttle, grinning a mad grin for history. And there's no sign of a letup. In 1994 the Forest Service lost a billion dollars on timber sales-money that went directly to the profit of the timber companies. By the end of that year, despite a drop in timber prices, Plum Creek posted a record profit of $112 million; Georgia Pacific had a 1,000 percent increase in profit. The assistant secretary of agriculture, Jim Lyons, has called for the logging of over 100,000 acres of the last roadless areas. All we want along the Yaak, in the West, are just a few areas where the hand of man does not grasp. Just a few-the last ones.
The irony of the battle is that people like Tim and Chip are trying to protect a way of life. But some folks keep demanding a larger piece of the pie. And that's the hell of it: any ground you give up as a conservationist, any middle ground, is immediately consumed by some larger pie seeker. There's not yet a grace or dignity to the dialogue over use of the public lands in the West. It's damn near in flames. And caught in the crossfire-as they have been for over a hundred years-will be the grizzly and the trout, the elk and the wolf, the lynx and the wolverine. Waiting to join the ghosts of the American Indian, the buffalo, and the woodland caribou.
Reprinted with permission of Rick Bass.
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