MT - This Is Embarrassing

Jim Petersen, Co-founder, the non-profit Evergreen Foundation

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This Is Embarrassing

By Jim Petersen, Co-founder, the non-profit Evergreen Foundation

Last night, I talked to my friend, Craig Thomas.

I was on my cell phone seated comfortably in my office in Bigfork, Montana and he was driving down the highway near Sabetha, Kansas, 1,478 miles from home.

Sabetha, population 2,550, is about 60 miles north of Topeka on U.S. 75. Craig tells me he is not quite in the middle of nowhere, but he can see it from Sabetha. I have no doubt, having traveled through Topeka in 1996 enroute to a great forestry story in Tennessee.

Craig is a logger. In a parallel and kinder - universe, he would be back home in Stevensville, about two hours south of Bigfork. He should be logging in the mountains of
western Montana, but there is no work here, despite the fact that our dead and dying national forests could use a whole lot of sprucing up.

And why isnt there any work here? It isnt because of the recession, which may be showing signs of waning. It is because Congress is clueless.

Consider the current debate over whether to include federal biomass thats the dead and dying crap that is littering our bug-infested forests in the renewable energy bill that is winding its way through the House enroute to the Senate. As things now stand, federal biomass wont be included, thanks to the arrogance and ignorance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Democrat, Henry Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

If you want to know more about this sorry mess, read This is just crazy, my May 21 column. And if you want to know just how much biomass energy potential is locked away in western federal forests, go to the biomass section on our website. The federallyfunded Billion Ton Report will get you started, but be sure to also read Todd Morgans state-funded Montana assessment. It will give you a good feel for the scope of the forest crisis that Congress helped create, but now chooses to ignore.

Meanwhile, back in a motel in Sabetha, my friend Craig rose at 4 a.m. this morning to go to work in a cornfield. You dont often see Timbco forwarders working in Midwestern cornfields, but the nearby photographs Craig e-mailed to me tell me that he is a helluva long way from home doing work Timbco forwarders werent designed to do.

Forwarders are normally used to pick up small logs in the woods. They are used in tandem with cut-to-length harvesting machines that can surgically remove a single tree
from a patch of trees without harming other trees. Craig owns a harvester, too, but its back home in Montana. Hes using the forwarder in Kansas to pick up brush along the route for a new pipeline that will bring oil from Canada into the Midwest.

Craig has been in Kansas since mid-May. He has no idea when hell be home again, but hes grateful for work, even if it is half-way across the country in the middle of nowhere.
He works six, 10-hour days a week. Most folks will think that is a long week, but he describes it as a vacation from logging, mainly because its a union job.

I broke a hydraulic hose on the forwarder the other day, he says with characteristic good humor. Normally, Id fix it myself and go on about my business. But in the blink of an eye I had six mechanics and their helpers standing there asking me what I needed. It was great!

Humor aside, the fact that Craig Thomas had to go all the way to Kansas to find work for his state-of-the-art logging equipment isnt a damned bit funny, not with all the work that needs to be done in forests that he can see from the kitchen window at home. Congress ought to be embarrassed, if that is possible.

There is enough cleanup work to be done in western national forests to keep hundreds of Craig Thomass busy for the rest of their working lives. By the U.S. Forest Services own estimate somewhere between 60 and 80 million acres of our national forest system lands are either ready to burn or soon will be unless Congress authorizes the thinning work that is so desperately needed.

For the record, 80 million acres spans 125,000 square miles an area almost as large as Montana, or perhaps more apropos, an area nearly as large as the combined size of South Carolina, West Virginia, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia. For added perspective, the Great Lakes cover 94,000 square miles.

Our national forests are in dreadful shape because we no longer care for them. Congress has bought into the loopy idea that nature can care for forests better than we can. This is nonsense. Nature doesnt give a hoot in hell about our countrys social or economic needs or about clean air, clean water, or abundant fish and wildfire habitat or the wealth of year round recreation opportunity we all seem to think is our birthright.

Ive got news for the Congress. Excluding biomass gathered in federal forests from the new renewable energy standard is a death sentence for forests this nations voters love
very much. I know voters feel strongly about their forests because Ive seen the polling data that was done during the debate that preceded passage of the 2003 Healthy Forests
Restoration Act. More than 80 percent of polling and focus group respondents living in major urban centers favor thinning over wildfire.

If we dont soon start cleaning up the mess in our forests, nature will. In fact, nature is doing it now. Witness the millions of acres we lose annually in fires that burn so hot they melt soil and travel so fast they incinerate birds in flight. We are losing hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat annually including habitat Congress previously set aside to protect threatened and endangered species.

Every fire and forest ecologist I know and I know many of them reassures me that the wildfires we are witnessing are not natural events and that the only way to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire is to remove as many dead and dying trees from our national forests as we possibly can over the next several decades.

The Craig Thomass of the world know how to do this work. It takes skill and a flair for the artistic, but mainly you need to be a careful observer of whats going on in the woods, which Craig is as are most of the loggers I know. You can travel around the West and see the results of their good work in hundreds of experimental thinnings the Forest
Service has designed over the last 20 years. In fact, you can see nearly 100 years worth of work at the Forest Services Fort Valley Experimental Station near Flagstaff, Arizona. So dont let anyone con you into believing that we dont know how to thin forests or what they will look like after the world is done.

Ill wager that neither Congressman Waxman nor Speaker Pelosi have ever been to Fort Valley, much less any forest that has been thinned the way the Craig Thomass of the world do it. If they had, theyd know how much thinning can do to help a forest that is teetering on the brink of ecological collapse.

Waxman and Pelosi take their marching orders from hardcore Beltway environmentalists who oppose cleaning up the mess in our forests because they fear it will undermine their
political powerbase, so they say that removing the dead and dying trees that are choking the life out of our national forests isnt sustainable. And allowing millions of acres of the publics forest to die and burn is sustainable? I dont know a single peer-reviewed report concerning catastrophic wildfire in western forests that supports this idea, not one.

Delusional Beltway environmentalists many of whom believe in re-wilding the Midwest thats code for Get the hell out of here- arent alone in this ridiculous sham. International Paper, one of the worlds largest paper and packaging manufacturers, has an army of lobbyists working House and Senate cloakrooms in hopes of keeping federal biomass out of the legislation. Ill have more to say about IPs inexcusably bad behavior in my next column, but for now what you need to know is that IPs top executives fear
that federal biomass will undermine the profitability of its own operations. This is Wall Street greed writ large.

So I leave my friend Craig in a Kansas cornfield and wish him god-speed on the trip home, whenever that may be. He has written a wonderful little book you might want to read. Its titled Regurgitations of a Montana Woodsman, which you can order on his website http://cyber.com/about.html. Its filled with wit and wisdom that Im sure youll enjoy. He also writes about his heroes his wife and a couple of close friends.

What my friend Craig does not know but will soon learn is that he is one of my heroes. Most in Congress could learn a great deal from this gentle man who has forgotten more about the Wests great forests than most of them will ever know.

Additional Information

Category: Forestry>Policies and Politics

Region: Montana

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