Fresh Tracks Weekly - Wildlife, Timber & Healthy Forests

[Big Fin]

With a lot of confusion about what the Roadless Rule rescission will/won't do, Marcus and I decided to film this week's FTW out in the field by climbing up to a forest treatment that occurred on USFS land within view of my front porch. A great example of what can be done if we get on with the business of managing forests and reject the BS fringe elements that benefit from the last 40 years of gridlock in forest management.

We have the talent to do it. We have the need to do it. We just lack a Congress that has the spine to make it possible. The Mike Lee contingent wants to use frustration to blame it all on his pet projects like rescinding the Roadless Rule. The other side wants to continue enabling the drive-by-litigation. In the mean time, forest, wildlife, and communities pay the price.

 

[TreeDog]

Randy, great video and glad to hear positive feedback on timber harvest. If you want to take a deeper dive into timber harvest, the milling infrastructure, and challenges to managing public and private lands in Montana I would love to chat. If you want to make a trip to NW Montana we can even make a sawmill tour, field trips to see active harvest and past management, or anything else you want to see or discuss happen.

 

[Big Fin]

Thanks for that offer. I'll shoot a PM.

We do have been able to capture a lot of footage up there, thanks to my good friend, Chuck Roady. He gave us the tours of much of Stoltze's operation, both in the woods and at their mills. Some of that footage in that video was thanks to Stoltze.

It was my hope that the changes being discussed to the ESA would be directed to improving habitat in places like NW Montana. Improve elk, deer, and small game habitat via active forest management, along with hammering the burns getting taken over by invasive plant species, and it would benefit the species the drive-by-litigators use for their lawsuits. Unfortunately, the tweaks to the ESA turned into a political game of DC and not the things that would help make our lands more productive for all species, whether T&E species or commonly abundant species.