Ellen Engstedt - April 09, 2007
Montana Wood Products Association
Climate Change
There have been about a dozen bills in Montana’s 60th Legislature related to global warming, climate change, and building material certification. Most of these attempts have failed to pass legislative muster and will not become the law of the land. And, frankly, that is a very good thing because they would have had detrimental effects on Montana businesses.
Meanwhile, the timber community has moved ahead with its positive message of active forest management as promoted by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 when he established our national forests. The purpose of setting aside these public lands was not to provide more parks or wilderness, but rather “to achieve quality land management under the sustainable multiple-use management concept to meet the diverse needs of people”.
This purpose is becoming increasingly difficult for the Forest Service to accomplish because their personnel are hamstrung by regulations, lawsuits, and court rulings. Court case after court case sit somewhere in the process and judges with little, if any, background in what would be right for the environment decide the fate of the land and rural communities. Millions more acres are hit with insects and disease every year and wildfires increase in intensity and severity. What is wrong with this picture?
The Forest Service spends billions of dollars fighting fires each year – 46 percent of its proposed budget this time around and there is a move underway for the Forest Service to reduce staff by as many as 2,100 jobs across the nation because of diminished revenue. The needs of the forests are at a critical point and yet there will be fewer people to do the work of active management. It is a downward spiral and shows no sign of improving.
Until about ten years ago timber sales on national forest lands supplied revenue to not only the timber program but to recreation and other uses as well. Additionally, counties received reimbursements from timber harvest revenues throughout the Forest Service system - dollars that were used for roads, schools and other public services in mostly rural communities.
Because of the drop in timber harvest due to appeals and litigation and the heavy hit dealt against our counties, Congress in 2000 passed the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act to help ease the financial pain of our residents. A recent reauthorization of this Act will now cost taxpayers more than $9 billion over the next five years instead of local governments being sustained by monies from timber harvests.
Sadly, too, the land and environment continue to suffer under the misguided concept of some individuals that our forests should not be managed and that cutting trees and planting more is unacceptable. In the words of the first Chief of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, “Next to the earth itself the forest is the most useful servant of man. Not only does it sustain and regulate the streams, moderate the winds, and beautify the land, but it also supplies wood, the most widely used of all materials. The object of practical forestry is precisely to make the forest render its best service to man in such a way as to increase rather than diminish its usefulness in the future.”
This brings us back to the role the timber community plays in reforestation, climate change, and the idea of global warming. All of these issues are intertwined and healthy trees are at the very center of the discussions. Trees take in carbon dioxide from the air and release oxygen just the opposite of people, but again, they must be healthy and well spaced or they cannot do the job. Hundreds of trees per acre will not be able to perform to their maximum capacity of sequestering carbon and providing oxygen and in fact eventually become a hazard because of fuel overload.
The message delivered to the Legislature this session on the dozen bills dealing with alleged global warming and climate change is that we in the timber community are positioned to be part of the solution. Sustainable use of Montana’s abundant forests is a positive thing as is planting of seedlings for the use of future generations as envisioned by Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago.
Representing the Montana Wood Products Association based in Helena, I am Ellen Engstedt. Thanks for listening.
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