Wilderness plans may not be what they seem
The recent article regarding the Friends of Scotchman wilderness EcoFlights around the Scotchman Peak area included several familiar incorrect and misleading statements regarding the area and the failed campaign for wilderness.
Despite the contrary claim, a designated wilderness would indeed prohibit motorized (and any wheeled) use. The argument that a wilderness would be no change in current management is specious at best, because those restrictions were first put into place in 2015 (despite repeated false FSPW claims that it was earlier), possibly timed with the upcoming wilderness bill of 2016. The local U.S. Forest Service (USFS) administrative restrictions (which do not follow national policy and conveniently skip Congress) created legally questionable de facto wilderness, so this lawful use should be restored in the future.
Rose Olson stated there is not a lot of logging opportunity in the area. Actually, a large portion of the Clark Fork front is heavily forested and is critical big game habitat. This habitat has been degraded by over-thickened, dead and dying timber and could be substantially improved by a helicopter-supported forest health project and prescribed burning, neither of which would be permitted in a wilderness. The USFS planned to carry out similar work in the same area, for the same reasons, in the early 2000’s, but the project was scrapped in part due to pressure from environmentalists.
It’s also interesting that Rose Olson stated that logging could “permanently negatively affect the area,” yet curiously left out any description of the old clearcuts and roads within the failed “wilderness” proposal. Why sweat logging, when 35 years after the units were cut, these logged areas have magically transformed into “untouched pristine” land suitable for wilderness?
FSPW describes “multitudes of support," which we heard multitudes of times before 2018, when the group suffered the embarrassing county-wide defeat in the May 2018 advisory vote, after 12 years of campaigning for this wilderness. In that election, all Bonner County voting precincts outside of Sandpoint (23), except three, voted against the wilderness and those three barely voted in-favor. Most importantly, the two precincts closest to the area and most potentially affected by a wilderness, including Clark Fork, voted 74% against the proposal. The “multitude of support” is mostly from downtown Sandpoint and out of the county.
Mark Cochran writes of “love for our wild backyard," yet their backyard-love never included a single meeting in Clark Fork to ask residents how they felt about their backyard becoming a possible wilderness (Scotchman Peak is five miles from Clark Fork), until frustrated residents asked for a meeting in 2017, which was after Senator Jim Risch floated a wilderness bill to the public. Residents at that meeting were overwhelmingly against the wilderness. The same out-of-the-backyard support strategy continues, as the article gushed in two paragraphs about an endorsement by Kuhl Clothing, which is based in Utah (who cares?).
FSPW goes on about working “tirelessly with State government leaders” and continuing to “educate” locals about the wonders of wilderness, which is just more old rhetoric. FSPW ignored the closest local governments, except for the county commissioners at the time, who, unfortunately, followed the lead of FSPW, ignored their constituents and never held a single hearing before endorsing the wilderness (those commissioners never made it past 2018). Idaho’s U.S. delegation has made it clear, that there will not be another wilderness bill unless residents and communities are completely on board with it. Good luck with that. As far as any education goes, who really needs it, locals or FSPW?
STAN MYERS
Hope