Montana Gives Peace a Chance

How a group of longtime, often bitter adversaries came together at last to save a wilderness

One of the people who are going to save the wilderness I love -- the Yaak Valley of extreme northwestern Montana -- is Wayne Hirst, a man who has been proclaiming his hatred of wilderness for as long as I can re­member. From his office on Main Street in Libby, Wayne and his wife, Shirley, run their accounting firm, Hirst & Associates. Rumpled, voluble, and, despite recent heart trouble, coiled with excess energy, Wayne can recall the days when the sawmill in this town of 2,400 employed 1,200 people -- all their clients, all their friends. Nobody knows better the economic collapse of the logging industry at the personal level.

I think it's fair to say that when Wayne looks at a forest, he thinks of how many logs can be taken out of it, how many dollars those logs might yield and how many jobs. Whereas I tend to see something entirely different. I'm content to look at that same forest and celebrate the lady's slippers and kinnikinnick growing there, and admire the seething texture of an intact forest, uncut and unbroken.

Timber is what you call trees you're about to saw down and mill into lumber; most folks have a fair idea of that. But what's wilderness? My own favorite definition is that of the author Doug Peacock, who defines it as a place where big animals that can kill and eat you still live. Such things are certainly on your mind when you thread your way through the brambly war­rens  and gridwork of windswept blowdown in the Yaak, noting the scat of grizzly bears and the paw prints of mountain lions. We in the Yaak find the ancient, time-sculpted world, hard fought in every melting second, inspiring and awesome. I find, too, the scale upon which it has been written, the rubbly tableau of entire mountain ranges, the fringed residue of where the continents themselves were once connected, worthy of celebration.

So why wasn't any country in the Yaak protected by the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964? Back then, we considered wilderness to be more aesthetic -- the dramatic cirques and icy monoliths were what we used to think of as wild and deserving of protection, because they were pretty on our eyes. But the Yaak is not a recreational wilderness. It is instead a grand and unknown biological laboratory, a million acres of soggy lowland funk, important not for its relationship to our current ideas of beauty but rather unto itself, as a gateway into a larger wildness.

You might think, then, that Wayne and I wouldn't have a lot in common, and for the past 40 years you would have been right. His cli­ents had to endure generations of uncertainties about timber sales, layoffs, and market fluctua­tions, while the few environmentalists in Lincoln County had to endure ostracism, threats, and physical and verbal attacks. Cars set on fire, pipe bombs -- all the stuff of mankind.

Beneath that sound and fury, however, a small spark of common belief burned: a desire to live here rather than anywhere else on earth. There was also our shared friendship with a dynamo of a do-gooder named Robyn King, a lover of humanity and community idealism who lives, paradoxically, in a tiny cabin looking out on the Pink Mountain roadless area, one of the most isolated pockets in the lower 48.

Robyn is an atypical environmentalist. She grew up near Selma, Alabama, where she had a front-row view of the civil rights move­ment. As recently as 10 years ago, before she took over as executive director of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, she knew nothing about forestry or timber. Robyn possessed such an earnest innocence that she would raise her hand in a meeting with millowners and the Forest Service and say things like, "Why do they call it a board foot?" She was perceived -- accurately -- as nonthreatening. She was a good listener, and the timber industry sought to educate her. And for 10 years, she pretty much listened.

Robyn and Wayne began to conspire. "Wayne, could you live with wilderness if we could keep our logging jobs?" she asked him. His one word, pragmatic reply: "Absolutely."

In retrospect, it seems so easy. I guess all answers do, once you finally reach them.

Continued...