From: jym@mica.berkeley.edu (Multinational Monitor via Jym Dyer)
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.environment
Subject: EDITORIAL: Save the Rockies!
Date: 14 Nov 92 00:57:13 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d,talk.environment
Organization: The Naughty Peahen Party Line
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu

[From EcoNet en.calendar Conference]
[Also Posted to misc.activism.progressive (by Somebody Else)]

Editorial from Multinational Monitor, October 1992

Ninety-five percent of the original forests in the continental
united States have been destroyed since the eighteenth century.
The Northern Rockies now make up the last contiguous ecosystem
in the lower 48 United States.  Timber companies are currently
pushing a bill through Congress to open up vast areas of public
forest in Montana to logging and mining companies, destroying
forever a vital part of this ecosystem.

The purpose of the Montana National Forest Management Act,
sponsored by Senators Max Baucus, D-Montana, and Conrad Burns,
R-Montana, is to designate certain National Forest Service
lands as wilderness areas and release others for "multiple use
management."  The bill, in fact, places only a minor portion
of these lands in the federally protected wilderness system,
and releases millions of acres of pristine Montana forests to
industrial plunder.

The bill proposes opening nearly five million acres of Montana's
National Forest lands to extensive logging, road building,
mining and oil drilling, and makes over 98 percent of the Forest
Service timber base in Montana eligible for clear-cutting.  The
Baucus-Burns bill designates less than 20 percent of Montana's
remaining undeveloped Forest Service lands for inclusion in
the wilderness system, setting aside 1.19 million acres of
high-elevation "ice and rock" areas, which are much lower in
biodiversity than old growth areas.  The bill fails to designate
vast regions of defacto wilderness, including entire mountain
ranges, for inclusion in the wilderness system.  Under the bill,
endangered species such as the grizzly bear, gray wolf, woodland
caribou and bull trout would suffer irreparable losses of
habitat which are already threatened by extensive road building
and logging.

The Baucus-Burns bill passed the Senate in March.  The
opposition of outraged environmentalists, residents and
business people in Montana and nationwide to the legislation
led Representative Bruce Vento, D-Minnesota, to propose an
amendment to the bill.  Vento claims his amendment addresses
the problems of the original bill, but in fact the substitute
bill barely provides any more protection than the original
legislation.  The Vento substitute only increases total
wilderness designations from 1.19 million acres to 1.48 million
acres.  It would still open nearly four million roadless acres
to extensive logging, roadbuilding, mining and other
development.  And like the original bill, Vento's substitute
would isolate pockets of Montana wilderness from the rest of
the Northern Rockies, failing to address the vital issue of
ecosystem preservation.

Congress should reject these destructive proposals and support
another alternative bill.  Representative Peter Kostmayer,
D-Pennsylvania, has recently introduced legislation--produced
in conjunction with the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (AWR),
a coalition of Western activists, residents and business
people--to preserve permanently virtually all remaining roadless
lands in the National Forests of the Rocky Mountains.  The
Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, the first bill in
Congress to deal with forest management with a multi-state,
ecosystem-wide approach, would place more than 14 million
acres of U.S. Forest Service Lands in the federally protected
wilderness system, create more than 1,300 miles of federal
wild and scenic rivers and designate a new national park.

National environmental organizations, with the exception
of Greenpeace, have not rallied around the Kostmayer bill.
The Vento bill has gained the support of the national Sierra
Club.  The Sierra Club's Washington, D.C.-based legislative
office says, the bill, while still inadequate, represents an
improvement over the original legislation and is an important
first step in preserving large tracts of Montana wilderness.
And while the Sierra Club supports the concept of an
ecosystem-wide approach, it lobbied Kostmayer against sponsoring
the Northern Rockies bill last year, claiming that the AWR had
failed to secure grassroots support for the bill.  But in fact,
the bill was endorsed by the nearly 200 grassroots groups
ranging from fishing and hunting clubs to local Audubon chapters
to homeowners organizations to business groups to a host of
wildlife protection groups that make up the AWR.

In supporting the Vento bill, the Sierra Club is mistakenly
seeking compromise with industry as a means of environmental
reform.  An organization dedicated to environmental preservation
cannot legitimately lobby against innovative and far-sighted
legislation that would forever conserve lands that belong to the
U.S. public, even in the hope of preserving a small fraction of
the area.  The "better than nothing" approach will not save the
Northern Rockies ecosystem.

U.S. taxpayers own these lands and have a right to control their
stewardship.  They should not allow the government, with the
complicity of compromising environmentalists, to give them away
to timber compa- nies.  Citizens must demand that the Interior
Committee and the rest of Congress reject the Baucus-Burns bill
and the Vento substitute, in favor of the long-term approach
offered by Kostmayer and the AWR.  Five million acres of
pristine forests are at stake.

------------

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