Viewpoint: Be leery of ‘multiple use’ talk on wilderness
Bill Schneider
Montana currently has 3.5 million acres of designated Wilderness, 3.75 percent of the state, plus another 6 million acres of roadless land that could someday become Wilderness. Instead of celebrating our good fortune to have a small part of our state still wild and undeveloped, our political leaders want to develop the last of wild Montana when they should be working to protect it, which is what most Montanans favor.
Witness multiple recent attempts by Senator Steve Daines to declassify Montana Wilderness Study Areas and open them to commercial development, the same Steve Daines who features himself on his website backpacking in Wilderness.
With that in mind, have you ever heard somebody say they prefer “multiple use;” instead of Wilderness? In the common vernacular, especially among those who favor commercial uses of public lands, “multiple use” means development instead of protection. What they really mean when then say is “logging use” or “commercial use” or “motorized recreation use” or in some cases, “single use.”
In reality, congressionally mandated Wilderness, as designated under the provisos of the Wilderness Act of 1964, is much closer to being multiple use management than mining, logging, motorized recreation and other commercial uses of public land.
The Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act of 1960 brought the words into common usage. The Act lists the five multiple uses as outdoor recreation, range (i.e. livestock grazing), timber, watershed, and “wildlife and fish purposes.” The five multiple uses are listed alphabetically, but the bill's drafters had to abandon the common usage of “fish and wildlife” and go to “wildlife and fish” so it wouldn't be listed first, which says a lot about whoever drafted this legislation.
Legally, Wilderness designation allows all of these uses except timber. Any grazing allotments in place before designation remain active unless purchased or retired, and as a result, some designated Wilderness areas currently support livestock grazing. Even mining is legally allowed in Wilderness
if the leases were in place before designation, although enviros commonly oppose Wilderness mines and end up defeating or delaying most of them.
The law doesn't list mining as one of the "multiple uses," nor does mining meet the definition because gold, silver, copper, coal, et al are not renewable resources. So, let's be perfectly clear on this point. Mining is single use.
The Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act is a long, complicated piece of legislation open to interpretation, but on the first page, it states: "Multiple use means the management of all the various renewable resources of the national forests so that they are utilized in the combination that will best meet the needs of the American people." You could easily interpret that definition to mean our roadless lands could all be designated as Wilderness to “meet the needs of the American people” and fit into the definition of “multiple use.”
Compare Wilderness, which allows four out of the five defined multiple uses and protects three of them (fish and wildlife, outdoor recreation and watershed) to a large timber-cutting development, often considered “multiple use” But where is the multiple use? Where is the fish and wildlife, outdoor recreation, livestock grazing or watershed protection? All are gone at least during active development if not long into the future.
As for watershed protection, if done correctly, logging can protect waterways, but sadly, that is often not the case. Many streams have been silted up for years in the wake of poorly planned timber cutting. The biggest problem with logging is the roads, once built more or less disqualify the area for future
protection under the Wilderness Act.
The words, “multiple use” have been marginalized into a political catch phrase. Instead of saying they favor “multiple use” instead of Wilderness, politicos should be honest and say they want commercial use of public lands and stop trying to fool us by supporting “multiple use” because it sounds like support for the majority while hiding the true intent. If they really wanted more multiple use, they would support Wilderness designation.
The worshipers of “multiple use” pretend to represent a broad spectrum of stakeholders when they often support special, single use or abuse of public land we all own. Contrarily, even though few politicos admit it, most Montanans support Wilderness and want more of it.
Bill Schneider is a retired publisher and outdoor writer living in Helena.