Keep It Wild

I see Jon Tester is making a couple of stops here in Montana on the promotional tour for his land use bill. And it's apparently working. A lot of folks are willing to support this thing for a lot of reasons. It's being said that if it fails, it will signal that Montana doesn't want any more wilderness, and that it could be a long time, if ever, before we get any more designated wilderness in this state. Well, that could be, but what of it?

What we do have is a sizeable piece of public land, National Forest land, designated now as inventoried roadless land. Several million acres of it. With the recent reinstatement of the 2001 Roadless Rule -- two-thirds of it anyway -- that's probably the best place to keep those lands right now. They are de facto wilderness, undesignated but still wild, and will remain so unless this bill passes.

Tester's bill, with it's mandated timber provisions, would release the vast majority of those roadless areas for commercial exploitation. Should that happen, there goes the neighborhood. To leave them protected though undesignated makes a lot more sense. Then, if and when we realize the wisdom and the need of passing a real wilderness bill like NREPA, those lands will be available. To release them now to disappear into the hungry maw of greedy corporate interests would gut them and eliminate that possibility. That's not cool. That's not cool at all.