Montana Gives Peace a Chance

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So Robyn had a timber guy talking to her, and that timber guy began talk­ing to other timber guys, of whom there are no longer so many, but who represent still the heart and soul of the region's identity. In the meantime, ecological gears were spinning. Pushed by the breath of global warming, wildfires began sweeping across the West. In areas already disrupted by logging or by repeated cycles of fire suppres­sion, forests were and are dying quickly. The trees just flat don't have enough water. Each summer you can see their tops dying, then their needles, and finally their whole selves.

These tangled forests -- overstocked, the foresters call them -- are often right next to the human communities stretched so thin and far apart up here: Eureka, Yaak, Troy, Libby, the same towns and hamlets that Robyn kept circuit riding, year after year, trying to assemble some kind of peace. Towns which, when built, had not considered a warmer world. Frightened towns, now, each summer. Looking back at it, I have to laugh at the sauciness, or courage, or maybe even hidden combativeness, that al­lowed Robyn to walk into one mill after another, asking to meet with the owner and telling him (and it was always a him), I want wilderness.

When we started making progress, how­ever, was when she had the real courage to stop saying what we wanted and began asking our opponents what they wanted.

Truth be told, it didn't take two days to as­semble a rough plan for a piece of federal legis­lation, the Three Rivers Challenge Cooperative Stewardship, Restoration, and Conservation Act of 2008, that would at last protect this wilderness, help the dying mills, and allow legal, legitimate motorized use in certain areas. Working with the Forest Service, we mapped 125,000 acres of highest-priority forest in need of thinning, next to towns, and, working with the com­munity, mapped another 90,000 acres for special protection. We also identified three small areas that snowmobiles currently use and agreed to support their use as long as the needs of wildlife are met.

There aren't a lot of snowmobilers in the Yaak, because there's not a lot of the classic high-alpine country in which many of them prefer to ride. But Robyn went around and around the vastness of Lincoln County until she found Jerry Wandler, president of the Troy Snow­mobile Club. Among our little coalition, Jerry is probably the most sanguine of the "non-environmentalists" with regard to maintaining wilderness. He understands the value of our partnership in support­ing his -- and future generations' -- use of one small part of the valley during one small window of time each year.

Along the way, the hunting and outfitting lobby also checked in, represented by Tim Linehan, the co-owner, with his wife, Joanne, of Linehan Outfitting, in Troy. Tim is one of the group's peacemakers. He's happiest when he's sitting quietly in the Yaak's dense forests late in the autumn, in falling snow or steady drizzle, waiting for a big deer to wander through the fog; or in the summer, when he's out on the sprawl­ing Kootenai River, rowing his driftboat from one eddy to the next.

Perhaps the most impatient member of our group is, understand­ably, Doug Chapel, the co-owner, with his father, of Chapel Cedar, the last independent sawmill in the county. The company does custom milling for homes and gardens and employs about 30 people. It's on the outskirts of Troy, out toward the Idaho line. Doug is an enthusi­astic supporter of the Three Rivers Challenge, since it will add value to his products at no extra cost to him.

Continued...