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  "description": "When Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz was in Coeur d’Alene on April 7 for a public lands collaborative conference, he emphasized the importance of active forest management — timber harvesting and prescribed burning — in western National Forests.\n\nIn tandem, he emphasized the importance of recruiting new capital investments in logging and wood processing.\n\nIt may be too late for Montana’s seven National Forests and what is left of the state’s slowly collapsing forest products industry.\n\n\nMortalit",
  "path": "/read-em-and-weep/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-07T17:40:27.000Z",
  "site": "https://evergreenmagazine.com",
  "tags": [
    "Manufacturing and Forestry Update2026 Economic Outlook Seminar - PowerPointEOS_26_Scott_V2.pptx580 KBdownload-circle",
    "Manufacturing and Forestry Update2026 Economic Outlook Seminar - ReportMT2022 Tables.pdf2 MBdownload-circle",
    "Which Montana do you want?EG-Mont-9-26.web (2).pdf19 MBdownload-circle",
    "Donate"
  ],
  "textContent": "When Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz was in Coeur d’Alene on April 7 for a public lands collaborative conference, he emphasized the importance of active forest management — timber harvesting and prescribed burning — in western National Forests.\n\nIn tandem, he emphasized the importance of recruiting new capital investments in logging and wood processing.\n\nIt may be too late for Montana’s seven National Forests and what is left of the state’s slowly collapsing forest products industry.\n\n## Mortality Is Outrunning Growth\n\nMortality exceeds growth on six of seven National Forests in the state. More than 4.8 billion board feet die annually on about 15 million National Forest acres. This is according to on-the-ground survey data developed by the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis team in Ogden, Utah.\n\nAnnual gross growth on the 2.2-million-acre Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana is about 363 million board feet. Subtract removals and mortality, and net growth is about 500 million board feet.\n\nNot much compared to the 4.8 billion board feet that die annually on the other six National Forests in Montana.\n\nMeantime, what is left of Montana’s timber industry is on the verge of collapse.\n\nHow can this be? Shouldn’t they be harvesting at least some of the 4.8 billion feet that die annually? Maybe even investing their profits in sawmill modernization or more advanced logging systems?\n\nNot a chance.\n\n## Timber in Limbo\n\nAbout 237 million board feet of Forest Service timber are tied up in lawsuits filed by anti-forestry activists. That is enough timber to build about 17,000 average-sized, three-bedroom homes.\n\nAdd in 6.4 million acres of National Forest timber in Montana set aside in no-harvest/no-road-building reserves under the 2001 Roadless Rule, and Treasure State mills and loggers are in limbo on between 300 and 370 million board feet of timber.\n\nBut who’s counting? Samuel Scott is — and so is his colleague, Lauren Sampson.\n\nIt is their job. Scott is a forest economist within the Forest Industry Research program at the University of Montana’s widely respected Bureau of Business and Economic Research. Sampson is a research associate.\n\nScott focuses on forest industry employment, economic impacts, and statistical timber appraisals. He recently traveled to nine Montana communities with a PowerPoint presentation he developed that quantifies the near collapse of what is left of the state’s logging and wood products manufacturing sectors.\n\nSampson does similar work, but exclusively for Montana. Scott’s work takes him to several states for which BBER does research and consulting work.\n\n**Read Scott’s PowerPoint and Sampson’s latest report:**\n\nManufacturing and Forestry Update2026 Economic Outlook Seminar - PowerPointEOS_26_Scott_V2.pptx580 KBdownload-circle\n\nManufacturing and Forestry Update2026 Economic Outlook Seminar - ReportMT2022 Tables.pdf2 MBdownload-circle\n\n## Read ’em and Weep\n\nDespite Forest Service efforts to breathe new life into the 80-year-old Federal Sustained Yield Act, there will be no new capital investments in Montana’s forest products sector until Congress musters the political courage to deep-six the much-abused Equal Access to Justice Act [EAJA].\n\nEAJA has become a very lucrative feeding ground for litigious lawyers representing anti-forestry activists. An Oregon judge recently handed them $265,000 in taxpayer money in a case involving a proposed BLM timber sale.\n\nCongress needs to replace EAJA with baseball-style binding arbitration:\nYou bring your best forest management idea, and we’ll bring ours. Three arbitration judges will decide which idea best complies with the current forest plan for the impacted National Forest.\n\n## Sue and Settle\n\nSue and settle is an insult to stakeholder collaborative groups that voluntarily contribute hundreds of hours of their personal time to helping the Forest Service develop project plans that solve environmental problems.\n\nAnti-forestry activists refuse to collaborate because collaboration blows up their sue-and-settle business model.\n\nUntil Congress fixes this mess, publicly owned forests will continue to die and burn. The environmental damage to forests, fish and wildlife habitat, and recreation opportunity gets worse every year.\n\nMeantime, the Grim Reaper is fast approaching what is left of Montana’s once-robust forest products industry.\n\nWe document this tragedy in **Which Montana do you want?** - an Evergreen Magazine report we completed last summer.\n\nWhich Montana do you want?EG-Mont-9-26.web (2).pdf19 MBdownload-circle\n\n## Survival Mode Is Not a Strategy\n\nThe **Which Montana?** report was intended to be funded by what remains of Montana’s forest products industry.\n\nIt was not. Evergreen became the largest funder.\n\nThat fact should trouble every mill owner, logger, forester, county commissioner, and community leader who understands what is at stake.\n\nNo one needs to lecture people who are already fighting to keep mills running, loggers working, and payrolls met.\n\nBut there is no way around the larger truth: survival mode has narrowed the industry’s field of vision at the very moment it needs to widen.\n\n**Survival mode is understandable, but it is not a strategy.**\n\nIf Montana’s forest products sector cannot help tell the story of its own collapse — and the path out of it — others will tell that story for them. And they will not tell it accurately.\n\nPublic education is not a luxury. Policy communication is not a side project. Telling the truth before the last mill goes quiet is part of the work.\n\nBecause if the industry does not invest in its own future, it should not be surprised when that future is decided by people who have never set foot in a mill, walked a sale unit, or signed the front of a payroll check.\n\nMontana’s forest products industry is teetering on the brink of total collapse.\n\n* * *\n\n💡\n\n****A quick reminder before you continue reading...****\n\n### If you have been meaning to subscribe, now is the time.\n\nEvergreen cannot run on good intentions alone.\n\nIndependent forestry journalism takes time, travel, research, interviews, editing, photography, web publishing, and decades of earned trust.\n\nIt is work — and like the work you do, it has to be supported.\n\nIf Evergreen helps you understand the decisions shaping our forests, communities, and future, please subscribe or contribute today.\n\n**Subscribe. Contribute. Help keep Evergreen independent.**\n\n* * *\n\n> **Subscribers receive access to many of Evergreen’s back issues in our Archives.**\n>  Our archives hold a deep record of forestry reporting, history, policy, people, and practice.\n> Looking for a specific issue or topic?\n> Let us know, and we will help you find the Evergreen\n> coverage you need.\n\nSubscribe\n\n> **Prefer PayPal?**\n>  You can set up an ongoing donation, and we will honor it as a subscription with the same benefits.\n\nDonate\n\n**Support forest-to-community health. Support Evergreen.\nTHANK YOU!**\n\n* * *\n\n## Montana and the Senate Power Base\n\nMontana has never had a U.S. senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee.\n\nCurrently, 25 Republicans and 19 Democrats serve on the committee. They are the ones who interview presidential judicial nominees — including Supreme Court nominees — and advance approved nominees to the full U.S. Senate.\n\nFloor debate follows and ends via cloture, which requires a simple 51-vote majority and a final confirmation vote. If there is a tie, it is broken by the Vice President, who is constitutionally empowered to preside over the 100-member Senate.\n\nThe nation’s balance of power resides in the Senate and Article II, Section I of the Constitution. Article II was modified in 1804 to require members of the Electoral College to cast separate votes for President and Vice President.\n\nThe College thus became Ground Zero in the political battle less populous states have long waged against more populous states. It is why Democrats want to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote that would guarantee less populous states lose their means of defending House spending bills that are key to active management of federally owned forests.\n\n## James E. Murray and Sustained Yield\n\nThe closest Montana has ever come to the 100-vote Senate power base came when the late Senator James E. Murray, a Butte Democrat and staunch labor supporter, chaired the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee from 1951 until 1961.\n\nThe former Butte lawyer served in the U.S. Senate from 1934 to 1961.\n\nIt was Murray who killed the Cooperative Sustained Yield Act because it would have killed the opportunity for small, family-owned sawmills to bid on National Forest timber. One such cooperative unit would have made it impossible for small mills in Libby and Troy to bid on Kootenai National Forest timber sales.\n\nDon’t confuse the Cooperative proposal with the Federal Sustained Yield Act the Forest Service is currently attempting to revive in several Montana counties.\n\nThe cooperative version would have legalized a federal timber monopoly controlled by the largest postwar industrial timberland owners in the West. Had Senator Murray not intervened, the West’s family-owned sawmills could not have gained a foothold in federal timber sold following World War II.\n\nSenator Murray died in 1961, three months after his final term ended. It is safe to say he would not recognize the political upheaval that divides our nation today.\n\n## What Happens Next?\n\nSteve Daines, Montana’s senior senator, has represented Montanans well during his 11-plus years in the Senate. But I suspect the chasm that now separates Republicans from Democrats is one reason he announced his retirement in March.\n\nThat leaves Tim Sheehy, whose current U.S. Senate term does not expire until January 2031. He certainly understands why Montana’s National Forests and the state’s forest products industry are collapsing in unison.\n\nWould the Republican Conference Committee advance his name to the Senate Judiciary Committee?\n\nI don’t know.\n\nBut Montana needs someone on that committee who understands that federal judges are no longer distant figures in black robes. They are often the final decision-makers in disputes that determine whether timber is harvested, mills stay open, forests are restored, or communities are left to wait for the next fire.\n\nThe Judiciary Committee matters because judges matter. And judges matter because litigation has become one of the most powerful forces shaping the future of federally owned forests in the West.\n\nFirst, Republicans need to strengthen their razor-thin voting margins in the House and Senate in November.\n\nThen they need to ask a harder question: if Montana’s forests, mills, loggers, and rural communities are paying the price for decades of litigation, why shouldn’t Montana have a seat at the table where the next generation of federal judges is vetted?\n\nThat would not fix everything.\n\nBut it would be a start.",
  "title": "Read 'em and Weep",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-07T17:40:27.634Z"
}