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Preservation vs. timbering key issues in Missoula area By SHERRY DEVLIN Of The Missoulian Thousands of western Montanans, many of whose families came here generations ago, pleaded with the U.S. Forest Service Wednesday to preserve for their grandchildren what they have known. Big, wild, undeveloped country. Grizzly bears and wolves and bald eagles. An honest day’s work in the woods. And they worried that everyone cannot have everything they want from the national forests, where the Forest Service wants to prohibit road construction on 43 million acres, including about 6 million acres in Montana. An evening public hearing on the agency’s roadless area conservation proposal drew more than 600 people to Missoula’s Doubletree Hotel and – briefly – another 300 to the driveway outside. Hundreds more people gathered across the Clark Fork River, in UM’s Adams Center parking lot, for a timber industry-sponsored protest rally. “There are so very few wild areas left,” said Andrea Olsen, who told Forest Service officials that a seventh generation of her family has just been born in Montana. “To take the last wild places is irresponsible. We need no new road construction, but also no logging and no mining. Enough is enough. We have enough stuff.” Pam Pittman provided the counterpoint. She is a fourth-generation Montanan, raising a fifth, she said. She works at Pyramid Mountain Lumber Co. in Seeley Lake. “I want to be able to show my grandchildren what the rest of my family has known,” Pittman said. “I am challenging your roadless proposal. I think we can do better. I want you to take no action.” As the women spoke inside the hotel, hundreds of timber workers and motorized recreationists chanted outside, and logging trucks honked their support from the street. A bagpipe player led a mock funeral procession to the door, with loggers carrying a made-in-Montana pine coffin inscribed “R.I.P. Clinton-Gore Roadless Initiative.” Dale Brandeberry met them with his Forest Service badge and a shake of his head. “The meeting room is full,” he said. “You cannot come in.” (The Forest Service did provide a second room – in the University of Montana’s Urey Underground Lecture Hall – for the overflow crowd.) Briefly, the protesters threatened to come inside, chanting “We want in,” “We want in.” Brandeberry smiled and showed all his badge. The coffin could be carried inside, he said, as it carried the written comments collected at the timber industry rally. But the hard-hat-clad pallbearers could not stay, and their comrades could not join them in the procession. The plan appeased the crowd, and the coffin was delivered – all the while, the public hearing continuing inside. Many of those who accepted the agency’s offer of a three-minute oral comment used the time to support not only the proposed roadbuilding ban, but to ask as well for a prohibition on logging, mining and off-road vehicle use in the national forests. “I never thought in my lifetime we would have a chance to address our roadless lands,” said environmental activist C.B. Pearson. “It is a very simple fact. These places are our savings account, and if we continue to use them and use them and use them, they will be gone.” Environmentalists are not – as one timber industry spokesman suggested – “extremists,” said Bob Clark, who told the hearing he is an environmentalist, a person of faith, a veteran and the father of three. The Forest Service’s proposal, which would affect unroaded areas of 5,000 acres or larger, “does not yield my hoped-for goal,” Clark said. “I support a ban on all road construction in all roadless areas, regardless of size.” And stop the logging and mining, he said. Cary Hegreberg, executive director of the Montana Wood Products Association and an organizer of the anti-roadless rally, said loggers and sawmill workers are worried that the Forest Service won’t stop with protection of roadless areas. They are afraid, he said, that the agency will shut workers out of the national forests altogether. Standing at the back of the public hearing, Hegreberg said the protest rally – and four large convoys of trucks and cars that brought workers to Missoula – exceeded his expectations and convinced him that his industry has “plenty of friends and supporters” in Montana. “Sometimes, it feels a little lonely,” he said, “but not today. We do speak for a lot of individual people who are worried about their families and their future.”
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