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White Porcupine Timber Sale
State Land Board Approves Extensive Old Growth Harvest
The Swan River State Forest (south of Bigfork and Swan Lake) has some of the best remaining old-growth habitat in Montana. It is home to a number of endangered and threatened species. In 2007, the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation proposed harvesting a near-record amount of old growth in the Forest in a multi-phase sale called the White Porcupine timber sale. After several years of controversy, and a number of broken promises from the State, in March 2009 the State Land Board voted to delay its approval of the first phase. However, only one month later the Board approved the sale by a 4-1 vote.
Swan Forest photo by Edith Oberley, Bitterroot & Bergamot
The White Porcupine sale, combined with the recent Three Creeks timber sale, will result in the cutting of about 2,500 acres of old-growth forest in the Swan River State Forest. The Forest has only about 11,000 acres of old growth remaining. That means that these two sales will result in the loss of nearly one-quarter of the old growth. DNRC has claimed that about 50 acres of the Forest becomes old growth each year. At the pace that DNRC is harvesting, there will be no old growth left in about 40 years.
This fact puts a premium on developing and implementing a plan to guarantee that species dependent on old growth are not lost over the years. Currently DNRC does not have such a plan, nor does it even have a post-harvest monitoring and verification program to help avoid this outcome.
MEIC believes that all further old-growth harvests in the Swan River State Forest should be postponed until the Land Board has approved a management plan to ensure the protection of critical wildlife habitat in the area. Such a plan, often called a habitat conservation plan (HCP), is intended to guide management decisions to ensure the protection of endangered and threatened species including the Canadian Lynx, grizzly bear, bull trout, and others. Without a plan to maintain biodiversity, wildlife habitat, and old growth, there is no guarantee that these important habitat and wildlife resources will exist in the future.
DNRC recently said that a draft HCP would be released this summer but would not be finalized until 2011, even though it is already almost two years overdue. DNRC argues that this timber sale must proceed as planned because the trees are “in a state of decay” and may lose their value as timber due to insect infestations. The obvious responses are, first, that old growth is always “in a state of decay.” And second, that DNRC seems to ignore the thousands of acres of beetle-infested trees on State lands all across Montana that are not old growth and could be harvested instead. It seems more likely that DNRC is proceeding with this sale in order to meet its self-increased statewide timber harvest quota, and to prop up the depressed forest products industry with choice old-growth timber.
Currently, the market for timber is very weak. The timber industry admits that the housing finance crisis has significantly reduced demand. Now is not the time to be harvesting timber, particularly old growth. It would be better for the State to use this opportunity to step back and plan for how it will maintain critical habitat for endangered and threatened species, their needed old-growth habitat, and their connecting migration corridors, for the generations to come.
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