Lowbagger--Fear and Loathing In Future Montana Wilderness

Fear and Loathing In Future Montana Wilderness

Will there be any suitable wilderness left for designation, if study areas face ATV assaults?

By Howie Wolke

The last true statesman to represent Montana in Congress was the late Senator Lee Metcalf. In 1976, Metcalf ushered into law S-393, the Montana Wilderness Study Areas Act. This law instructed the Forest Service to preserve the existing wilderness character of 10 new national forest Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs), so that the option of future Wilderness designation would remain viable. The bill was written primarily by Clif Merritt, then the Western Regional Field Director for the Wilderness Society. One of the original WSAs was subsequently released to development and has since been logged and roaded, one became a Wildlife Management Area, and one became the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. The rest of this realm remains largely wild and roadless.

These magnificent wildlands range from high open partially wooded mountains rising above the prairie to the densely-timbered Blue Joint area on the Idaho border, a proposed addition to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest Wilderness area in the lower 48 states. Perhaps the quintessential WSA is the Gallatin Range (officially known as “Porcupine-Hyalite-Buffalo Horn”), 150,000 acres that is contiguous with over 300,000 roadless acres in Yellowstone National Park. The largest unprotected chunk of country adjacent to Yellowstone, the Gallatins are abused and scarred in places by increasing numbers of ATV’s. Yet this rugged mountain wildland supports grizzlies and wolves, and includes some of the best wildlife habitat in the

U.S.

In fact, all of these threatened bastions of primeval magic are characterized by great habitat, places where both two- and four-legged beings can find peace and security in an increasingly tumultuous and insecure world. Montana conservationists view these wildland gems as obvious future additions of the National Wilderness Preservation system.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Forest Service has, at best, been oblivious to the obvious; at worst they’ve been overtly hostile. Remember, this is the agency that, until Clinton’s Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck applied the brakes, was roading and logging about a million acres of wild country each year. WSA mismanagement has included a broad and imaginative array of tactics that have degraded the land and encouraged the development of vocal anti-wilderness constituencies, particularly among snowmachiners and four-wheel ATVers. Obviously oblivious to the desires of most Montanans to keep wild land wild, the Forest Service has repeatedly violated both the spirit and the intent of S-393. Unfortunately, WSAs in other states suffer, too. For example, in the Palisades WSA – a large roadless area just south of Jackson Hole, Wyo. – the Forest Service has recently approved the expansion of a helicopter skiing special use permit.

Throughout these threatened wildlands, the agency has encouraged increasing numbers of snowmachines, dirt bikes, and four-wheeled ATVs. This has created erosion, stream siltation, weed invasion, air and noise pollution, and the disruption and displacement of various wildlife populations, including probable disruption of lynx and wolverine high-altitude winter denning. In the Sapphires WSA on the Bitterroot and Deer Lodge National Forests, the Forest Service even bulldozed ATV routes through the fragile high country, pathetically claiming that this was necessary to localize and control ongoing resource damage created by the ATVs they allowed in the first place. That’s like trying to cure lung cancer with more cigarettes!

Virtually all of the S-393 lands are suffering abuse; virtually all of us who love these places also suffer with the knowledge that this abuse should have been squelched back in ’76. Remember, in 1976 snowmachines dared not tread the steep deep remote folds of high mountain powder that their newer, more powerful counterparts now routinely track, and semi-routinely become buried under, when unstable avalanche-prone snow takes up wildland defense. And four-wheelers didn’t even exist. These are key points, because S-393 clearly instructs the Forest Service to maintain at a minimum, the level of wilderness character that existed in 1976.

Obviously, gaining Wilderness status for these lands will now be especially tough, given the growing anti-Wilderness motorized constituencies that the Forest Service has encouraged. In addition, when we do succeed in getting at least some of these lands designated Wilderness, managing them as real Wilderness -- that is, fixing the physical damage and preventing motorized trespass – will be a nightmarish challenge. Moreover, this mismanagement also increases the likelihood that future Wilderness boundaries will exclude popular motor playgrounds, creating small amoeba-shaped Wilderness areas subject to various ecological problems associated with a high edge to interior ratio. Weed infestations, vehicle trespass, poaching, and disturbance of sensitive wildlife populations are among those problems. The disturbance of sensitive humans shouldn’t be overlooked, either.

So far, two lawsuits have been filed, but before you breath a sigh of relief that the conservation movement is on top of the problem, consider the disturbing tendency we’ve seen in recent years for major state and national groups to squelch the efforts of grassroots activists who are less prone to compromise.

A few years ago, the Montana Wilderness Association (MWA) and Friends of the Bitterroot sued the Feds over generalized WSA mismanagement. Much of the focus was on the Sapphires WSA, but they were going after the problem statewide. The courts ruled in their favor, but so far nothing has been done to reduce ATV and snowmachine use or to reclaim recent damage. More recently, a small citizens group in Lewistown, Montana – the Central Montana Wildlands Association (CMWA) – filed suit against the Lewis and Clark National Forests’s proposed winter use plan for the Big Snowies WSA. The Snowy Mountains are a lovely escarpment of forest, meadow and profuse wildlife rising majestically above the shortgrass prairies, wheat fields and piney breaks of central Montana.

It is important to understand that so far, the courts have held that the level of a WSA’s wilderness character must be maintained as it was in 1976, when S-393 was enacted. This would argue that increased use levels and the resulting physical damage are illegal. It would also seem to argue that new uses, such as four-wheelers and snowmachines in areas that were inaccessible in 1976, are illegal, as well.

Unfortunately, the conservation community has failed to present a united front for maintaining the integrity of these wildlands. For example, while CMWA (represented by The Ecology Center) went to court over the Snowies, MWA entered into negotiations with a snowmachine group and the Forest Service. They reached an agreement in which about 15,000 acres of the 98,000 acre Snowy Mountains WSA would be open to unlimited snowmobile use, thus effectively reducing the size of the WSA. Although MWA believes that reaching this agreement will benefit Wilderness in the long run by limiting snowmachines to one 15,000 acre area, the locals disagree, arguing that once there, the rest of the Snowies will be impossible to defend.

Their outrage was understandably boosted when on Dec. 2, 2004, MWA and the snowmachiners intervened together in the locals’ lawsuit, on behalf of the Forest Service. In other words, they were opposing the efforts of Central Montana Wildlands Association to keep the entire WSA intact and motor free. Many conservationists in Montana have noted a disturbing trend of MWA belatedly entering a controversy and negotiating a compromise with opponents of local activists who have put their heart and soul into various issues for many years. To undercut such efforts in the misguided quest of compromise (or in the ego-driven quest to an important “player”), is unconscionable. Such scenarios have previously occurred in Montana’s Lolo and Flathead forests, and with grassroots Wilderness efforts for the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.

It should be noted that despite their follies of the last decade or so, in older happier times MWA was a solid voice for Montana Wilderness. Its last solid executive director, Williams Cunningham, was rumored to have been fired by its board of directors under pressure from then U.S. Congressman Pat Williams (liberal donkey, but no friend of Wilderness).

This infighting fails to gain the confidence of conservation-minded citizens that their WSAs are being adequately defended. Most conservationists in Montana believe that when strategic conflicts arise, large groups should usually defer to local grassroots activists who know the area and the issues best.

At least in one sense, Montana conservationists are united in the belief that our portion of the National Wilderness Preservation System is grossly incomplete. The vast majority of our remaining wildlands can best be protected as Wilderness Areas, and they should be managed to stay wild, under the provisions of the Wilderness Act of 1964.

When agency malfeasance and activist compromises set in motion events that result in watered down wilderness, from the standpoint of poor boundaries and built in seething anti-wilderness constituencies that will violate the Wilderness, everyone loses. From the standpoint of wild Wilderness that really protects native biodiversity and natural processes, it would behoove our movement to eschew strategies that might result in truncated, amoeba-shaped, edge-dominated, undefendable Wilderness boundaries. That’s a scenario that ultimately threatens to make good Wilderness stewardship impossible and mock the very idea of Wilderness.

Howie Wolke is the president of Wilderness Watch and a professional wilderness guide.