by Paul Edwards, Guest Columnist
Well, finally – Sen. Jon Tester and a few strange bedfellows have floated a logging bill that everyone who works, has worked or hopes to work for one of four struggling lumber mills or one bankrupt cardboard box-maker can wholeheartedly endorse.
Letters to the papers from such folks and their “environmental partners” are elated over this federal welfare proposal to bail them out before they perish by the “invisible hand of the market” that separates businesses that can compete from those that will fail. Private enterprise: some got to win, some got to lose. Tough noogies; the hand has no pity.
But our big-hearted feds do. See, although the Alan Greenspans, Ben Bernankes and Timothy Geithners who manipulate our money are sworn hardcore believers in free-market capitalism, they think some outfits – doggone it – are, well, too big to fail.
Tester feels similarly about these mills. It’s not that they’re too big, though – it’s that they’re too important to Montana, so he wants to bail ’em out with our money, like the feds did AIG and Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Chase, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It’s the new thing in free-market economics: the invisible hand’s been replaced by the visible handout. That’s what Tester’s logging welfare bill is all about.
What makes them so important? Will a bailout create thousands of jobs, pump millions into our economy? Well, no, its effect would be negligible. And lumber demand is down big time, with prices at modern-era lows. So what, then? Why is Tester pushing this deal?
It’s symbolism. There’s this weird perception rooted deep in our mythology that because extractive industries like mining and logging were once drivers of our economy that they still are or ought to be or will be again. The reality is that they can’t hack it in the world market even with the huge subsidies the U.S. industrial welfare program hands them.
But say it was worth giving them a fat pork-barrel deal. What would it look like? At an estimated taxpayer hit of $100 million from Forest Service losses on these below-cost sales, they get a mandated cut of 100,000 acres over 10 years: 30,000 in the brutally overcut Yaak and a staggering 70,000 in the bone-dry Beaverhead/Deer Lodge where the Forest Service never allowed over 2,800 acres a year cut, even in boom lumber times. In addition, over 1 million acres of inventoried roadless wildland, including most of several of Lee Metcalf’s Wilderness Study Areas, will lose protection and be opened to “management.”
And what’s the pay-off for us Americans who own the forests for keeping these icons of yesteryear on life support? About 600,000 acres of rocks and ice wilderness in scattered, widely separated patches with no connectivity, including one tiny island in the hammered Yaak.
For hikers, hunters, anglers, horsemen and lovers of solitude, any wilderness is good wilderness, and after decades without one acre of our primo wild country protected, the yearning we who love and use them without smog-machines feel is tremendous. That said, this bill is a visionless dud that gives away far too much to protect far too little. It shows how little regard Tester has for our priceless wildlands, in spite of his chin music.
Not only is it a terrible wilderness bill – concocted in secret by its “partners” – it’s also a terrible logging bill, and since it only benefits a tiny sliver of Montana’s work force you have to wonder how such a sorry, wasteful hash could ever have been sold to Tester.
It will be interesting to watch it in Congress. Word is the “partners” think they have the skids greased. Maybe so, but they may just find that in the big federal meat grinder this particular batch of raw pork is just too gamy to make acceptable sausage.
Over half a century ago the wise and visionary Aldo Leopold, defining a public land ethic, said, “A thing is right when it preserves the integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise.” No one has ever said it better.
There is just no way to craft a national welfare bill for a few small, private lumber mills at the price of so much grand, irreplaceable wildland, and sell it to Congress as a grand boon to Montana and America. To put it bluntly and country, Tester’s dog won’t hunt.
Paul Edwards is a former board member of the Montana Wilderness Association, now on the board of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. He writes from Helena.
