Forest, Wildlife, and Climate News

Tester Tests the Waters and Forests of Montana for Sustainable Development with his Destruction of Forest Jobs and Recreation Act

Written by Dan Happel and Kathleen Marquardt, Freedom Advocates, 30 December 2009 [here]

Senator Jon Tester of Montana introduced S. 1470 in July, known as the “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act of 2009.” Regretfully the first two words of the title of the Bill, “Destruction of”, were left off.

The Bill was written with “collaborative groups”[1] excluding the general public and resource development groups from input during the writing of the bill and then afterward during public meetings. (As is the case with most partisan[2] legislation, this bill is but a small part of a much larger goal.)

When citizen and local government groups asked to hold an open and public debate on the proposed bill in Missoula, neither Senator Tester nor any other group supporting the legislation sent a representative. In fact, any supposedly “public forum” that he would be willing to attend would be orchestrated by him or his cohorts and would be made up of mostly or wholly supportive audiences.

Let’s look at the Bill itself now that we have reviewed how it was put together, by whom it was written, and how it is being fed to the general public. The jobs in Tester’s bill are limited to a few exclusive “green” jobs plus destruction of access roads and logging of dead standing timber in very limited areas for a maximum of 10 to 15 years.

One of the things to take into consideration when reading this bill is that Montana’s forests are being decimated by pine beetle infestation. Conservative estimates of the forest area that is already infested or dead range from one-third to one-half. It is impossible to have a hard estimate because a heavily infested tree can take up to a year to turn red; so many trees appear healthy when in fact they are infested and dying.

The only real jobs in Tester’s bill will be a few government “green” jobs studying wilderness (or what is left of it when the beetles are finished in Montana).

Removal of the access roads (one of the above listed jobs) will make firefighting in these areas impossible and, with millions of acres of diseased timber surrounding these wilderness designations, catastrophic wildfires will be almost guaranteed. But we must remember that the true goal of this bill and other governmental actions is to remove humans from the designated wilderness areas of the U.S., and the wildfires would be the perfect mechanism to achieve the objective – an Act of God. So we can understand that firefighting is not an activity that is desired with the Bill; that is why any reasonable firefighting efforts are being discouraged.

As this is being written the Copenhagen Summit is going on and the world leaders are trying to find ways to reduce CO2. Fires produce enormous amounts of CO2, thus one would think that they would desire to keep forest fires to a minimum, but we already know of the hypocrisy behind this bill so this is just another reminder for us to look at what is meant, not what is said.

As to watersheds, they will not be protected under this Bill. In fact it is quite the contrary: hundreds of thousands of acres of dead standing timber make for very poor watersheds and will result in a significant degradation of water quality. And after wildfires storm through, the areas will increase water pollution and soil erosion hazards as well. One naturally wonders why any human being would want this to happen. I propose that it is to chase out the strong and defiant humans who wish to remain in their homes that have been in their families often for four or five generations. It would be difficult for the burned out families to get clean water for some time, thus they would have to carry it in; and being in a designated wilderness area they would be prevented from using any motorized vehicle to do this – an onerous task with motive power; a herculean one without.

To top everything else off, all mineral resource development in this area will be completely prohibited. To understand why this is so outrageous, you need to understand that the original motto of Montana was “Oro y Plata,” gold and silver. Montana has an abundance of minerals from coal and oil to gold and sapphires.

Montana’s coal money goes to supporting Montana’s Native American tribes. But, let us ignore the great coal reserves in Montana and focus on oil. According to John C. Street,

The United States of America has more ‘recoverable’ oil reserves within its contiguous border (i.e., not counting known off-shore reserves) than all the other proven reserves worldwide. In just one of these known and recoverable reserves, the Bakken, that stretches from Montana to North Dakota and on up into Canada, there are an estimated 500+ billion barrels, enough crude oil, according to both government and industry estimates, to meet this nation’s fuel requirements for over 2,000 years.[3]

In the 1960s, Montanans were at the top of the per capita income scale because back then they were allowed to use their own natural resources from the timber to the mining to the wheat fields. Now they are near the very bottom of the income scale. The mines and lumber yards are shut down. Eco-tourism (a so-called “Green” industry that is very destructive to the ecology) was going to be the replacement industry but it produces only minimum wage service jobs – bed-making and food-serving to the tourists.

We must keep in mind that Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act of 2009 is not about jobs or recreation; it is about removing Montanans from Montana. Then the globalists can get on with the business of bringing to fruition the Wilderness Plan. Knowing that Montanans are self-reliant, the globalists smartly figure that if they deal with Montana the rest of the West will follow. In other words, take down the strong and defiant and the weak and meek will fall in line, simpering while caving.

Note: Among other tactics, i.e. using legislation to take land out of public use, condemning private citizens’ land, or getting unknowing citizens to donate their lands to land trusts who then commit the land to Wildland designation which means no resource extraction and no tax base, there is a far more egregious tactic that NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) have used for decades – what we call “Stealth Lawsuits.” These are suits cooked up between government officials (often Fish and Wildlife or EPA) and NGOs of the Green persuasion. How it works is together they decide what they want to accomplish (say, for example, ban roads in a certain area) then the NGO sues the government under some pretext, perhaps claiming the area is habitat for some endangered species. But before the case gets to a court, the government “caves” to the charges, changes the law to what the NGO had asked for, and then, to add insult to injury, the government pays the NGO’s legal fees. Besides all this, there is no paper trail to expose any of this because it NEVER GETS TO COURT.

Footnotes

[1] The collaborative groups consist of major environmental organizations and globalists who have a special interest in moving forward the Wildlands Project.* (see Note above)

[2] Inferring to special interest groups rather than Republicans or Democrats.

[3] Street, John C., Angling for the future — Hunting for the truth: Understanding Sustainable Development - Agenda 21.