I was in Missoula recently attending the annual meeting/workshop of the Montana Forest Collaborative Network (MFCN). This is a group made up of 20 collaboration groups from across western Montana.
There were probably somewhere around 100 people who attended the meeting in Missoula. I would guess that over 60 percent represented various environmental groups. Of those who spoke and those that I talked to personally, to a person, they all agreed that we need to have better management of our forests and that includes increasing the amount of timber harvested.
Many of these groups represented at the meeting have, at one time or another, sued the Forest Service over projects. Many of them used to be of the mindset that there shouldn’t be any logging whatsoever. Many of those lawsuits were necessary years ago and helped the Forest Service do a better job of designing projects. Lawsuits by these mainstream environmental organizations these days are pretty few and far between. All of them that I spoke with agreed that the serial litigants like Mike Garrity and Sara Johnson are a determent to the true environmental agenda. Some of them actually talk about intervening on behalf of the Forest Service on some of those frivolous lawsuits.
FYI: The Annual Report for the Montana Forest Collaboration Network quoted John Kountz from one of our B-D Working Group meetings during a discussion about conifer encroachment: “There have been a lot more aspen killed by conifer than by cattle.”
