Put up or shut up. That is what I told Undersecretary of the Interior Mike Dunn and his entourage from back East at the April 2000 noxious weed meeting the U.S. Forest Service sponsored on the Salmon River in Idaho. Either come up with the funding to put together a program to fight the spread of invasive plants or stop this silly waste of taxpayer money, treating functionless dignitaries to expensive vacations to resort lodges in the wilderness.

To my surprise, the Department of Agriculture invited me to Washington, D.C., to bring those exact sentiments to the table for their National Invasive Species Council meeting three weeks later. I was scheduled to speak after the governor of Idaho, Dirk Kempthorne, and Bruce Anderson, then leader of Idaho’s Frank Church Wilderness weed program. Not being politically minded or concerned with a career in government, I accepted and let them know I would hold nothing back.

Nonnative plants are putting a stranglehold on some of North America’s finest wild areas, displacing native vegetation wildlife depend on for survival. Each spring, invasives emerge early, producing attractive flowers and covering barren hillsides with greenery. These aggressive weeds outcompete native plants to get a head start on ground coverage and moisture intake.

Many weeds that have taken over large areas of the West, such as Russian thistle, leafy spurge and yellow starthistle, are imports from Europe and Asia. Here they spread rapidly without the normal checks and balance of bugs and animals to control their advance. The three main weed species the Forest Service is dealing with in the Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness are spotted knapweed, sulfur cinquefoil and rush skeletonweed. The sulfur cinquefoil is so widespread in the lower section of the canyon and along the South Fork of the Salmon that it is largely ignored, except in small pockets. In Montana, elk habitat has been reduced by 40 percent from spotted knapweed infestations.

Since 1991, when the Forest Service decided to address the threat of weeds to the Frank Church Wilderness ecosystem, it has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring out a parade of forest supervisors, government officials, scientists, congressional delegates, landowners and recreationists to see weed infestation sites firsthand.

Yet little money has been spent treating weeds. In twelve years, weed populations have flourished. The Forest Service estimates that spotted knapweed is spreading at a rate of 25 percent a year over central Idaho’s wilderness landscape.

In the four years I lived in the Frank Church Wilderness, operating a guest lodge, I could not understand how so many people within the Forest Service could recognize the dangers of invasive plants but fail to act on them, other than to schedule more meetings. Since I had never worked in government, I did not know that the snail’s pace of mediocrity was acceptable for bureaucracy.

Building a weed program took years and involved hundreds of people with good salaries, intelligence and insight, yet it seemed nothing was happening but paperwork and fine speechmaking. To the people living in the backcountry, people who are used to hard work with their hands, rhetoric accomplishes nothing. They were getting tired of hearing about what the Forest Service was intending to do.

Without funding for a weed program, however, the Forest Service’s hands were tied. It had pulled together enough money to produce an extensive environmental impact statement by 1999, but could not implement the plan to reduce weed populations without more funding. Dedicated people in the program were beating their heads against the wall of a government boondoggle and empty promises.

The weed program had broad support from the more than twenty partners and coalitions the Forest Service had put together over the intervening eight years of study. The environmental impact statement had survived a lengthy public comment period, as well as a legal challenge posed by a Montana environmental group to disallow herbicide use in the wilderness area. All four of the forest supervisors with controlling interests in the Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness had signed off on the environmental impact statement. Their biologists had done the necessary research to get federal approval for a first-of-its-kind treatment of wilderness weeds. The rehearsal dinner was over and the members of the wedding party were waiting for the important relations from Washington, the ones with the money, to show up and pay for the ceremony. They’re still waiting, and mutiny from the guest list is certain.

I worked for several seasons as a licensed herbicide contractor for the Forest Service. My primary task was to organize the private inholders on the river to give their support to spraying weeds on private and adjacent public lands, regardless of ownership boundaries. After all, weeds ignore property lines.

My contract for the spring of 2000, the first year of organized spraying on multiple private lands was for $2,500 and would pay for the labor to treat more than 100 acres of known weed infestations at ten ranches. Team leader Bruce Anderson told me there was no additional money in the budget that year to hire extra workers.

Because spring is the ideal time to spray, when the emerging plants are small and weak, I had the month of May to complete the project using a four-gallon backpack sprayer and as much help as I could get from the ranches. It takes thirty-two gallons of chemical solution to cover an acre of solid infestation, and most of the terrain is on steep hillsides. Extreme care is necessary in handling the toxic chemicals. With the assistance of the ranch owners and caretakers, we treated 250 acres that month, and that included taking a week off for me to go to the Washington, D.C., conference.

Standing before 250 attendees at the invasive species council meeting, I lambasted the government for having the gall to treat me (and others) to an all-expense-paid trip to the nation’s capital—yet they were not be able to find an extra $2,000 to hire another contractor to work with me for one month. I asked them how they could expect to see any results if one of the only people the government had contracted to treat weeds was away in D.C. at another meeting. Officials from the Department of Commerce, the Pentagon, NASA, the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and many other federal agencies and lauded academic institutions clapped as the Department of the Interior ceremoniously and sanctimoniously handed over a three-foot-long cardboard check made out to the Frank Church Wilderness weed program for $150,000. My attendance was simply part of a preplanned dog and pony show.

In all, the federal government spent more on our travel expenses than on herbicides for our program that year. I have argued at every Forest Service meeting since then that more money is wasted on hotel rooms for the working parties to attend meetings to talk about what they are going to do than ever gets spent treating weeds.

With a five-year plan outlined in the environmental impact statement, the federal government has yet to consistently fund the program. Fighting wildfires takes precedence over the war on weeds, and weed program managers face a yo-yo budget where every big fire year they see funding slashed in half. This year will likely turn out the same, despite Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s personal declaration of war on weeds.

Weeds continue to grow at exponential rates regardless of the rhetoric coming out of Washington. More infestations are found every year on the Frank Church Wilderness and elsewhere in the West. Some of them are being treated; most are not. Untreated, the weeds continue to spread at an accelerated pace.

Forty years ago, the state of Idaho had fewer than fifty acres of rush skeletonweed, an invasive plant of Eurasian origin. Today that figure is more than 4 million acres. Skeletonweed is the fastest-growing weed species in the Frank Church Wilderness, due in large partto the massive fires of 2000 in Idaho’s central wilderness. The plants grow together so thickly that they outcompete native grasses that wildlife depend on for forage. At the end of their growth cycle, stiff skeletons of the plant remain to choke drainages and blanket hillsides. At present, there is no effective way to control large infestations.

Skeletonweed’s seed head forms a tiny parachute that is easily blown great distances in the wind. Thousands of contiguous acres would require aerial spraying. This is not a feasible or publicly popular option, nor is aerial spraying allowed in wilderness settings. The key is prevention—spot-spraying small concentrations before they spread like wildfire.

Fire, ironically, is helpful for the spread of invasive plants. It sweeps the landscape clean of competition and offers an open canvas for weeds to move in rapidly, much like a bacterial infection on freshly scraped skin.

Wildfires are a sexy topic. Weeds are not. Wildfires burned more than 7 million acres in 2002, according to the National Fire Information Center. Last year, invasive plants took over roughly the same amount of topography, according to government estimates, but garnered little attention.

Weeds permanently alter the landscape, and animals are forced to move on to forage in other areas or starve. For them, the land is dead, covered by brown tangles of invasive plants.

Sometimes, however, the effects can be quite beautiful, like the time ten years ago a hiking companion and I walked into a 200-acre former meadow in Idaho’s Selway Wilderness that was completely covered with purple flowering spotted knapweed. The meadow was actually the remote Shearer landing strip next to the Selway River where the Forest Service has watched knapweed spread for more than sixty years.

There were no distinguishable features under the blanket of weeds to mark the runway, but the pilot came in anyway to pick us up. Before we took off, he ran the four-seater airplane up and down the airstrip, using the propeller to mow the stiff, three-foot-tall knapweed.

Backcountry planes have helped to spread weeds to other parts of the wilderness landscape as well, when plants and seed heads get stuck in the landing gear. Forest Service airstrips are often high-mountain meadows, the perfect repository for invaders. The Idaho Backcountry Pilots Association is one of the partners in the Frank Church Wilderness weed program.

What makes spotted knapweed such a successful invader is its tolerance of drought. It produces more than 20,000 seeds per plant that stay viable for up to ten years in the soil before germinating, and it releases a toxin that kills adjacent plants. When deer and elk try to forage on knapweed, which has little digestible protein, they package the seeds in fertilized pellet form and take them into the high country to bedding areas, dispersing them along the way.

Knapweed now covers more than 5 million acres of land in Montana and is found in every county in that state, and all but two counties in Idaho. It replaces once healthy grasslands and pastures with stout thickets of dead, unpalatable stalks.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has worked closely with the Forest Service to study and pay to treat areas in several western states. In one program on the Lolo National Forest in Montana in the late 1990s, the Forest Service sprayed 500 acres with herbicides over a three-year period. Weed production declined by 98 percent, and herbicides reduced the weed biomass from 56 percent to 3 percent. In the same period, grass production grew by more than 700 percent, from 350 pounds per acre to 2,850 pounds per acre.

Herbicides, when applied properly, work great to knock down an infestation, but treating an area works only that year or maybe the next. Before long, dormant seeds germinate and the population gets right back to prior levels, especially if native plants don’t regenerate fast enough to minimize the spread of the invasive plants.

The Frank Church Wilderness is the largest wilderness in the United States, outside of Alaska, and it retains most of its original pristine character. Weeds are poised to change its natural landscape. Even so, every year, weed program managers have had to go begging for funding. The federal government is set to rain down billions of dollars to fund the National Fire Plan next year, but only a small portion is slated for habitat restoration.

Every year, flames win out over weeds as a budget priority, and the cycle repeats itself. Fire, for its part, works to restore natural processes to the environment. Nonnative plants only make more of a mess, and many weeds exacerbate the nation’s already dangerous fire situation by providing quick-burning fuels in the forest and desert landscapes and causing erosion. I stopped working for the Forest Service because I got tired of fighting the bureaucratic shell game that the government uses to fund its programs.

The public has a right to be concerned about herbicides. The very word conjures images of human disease and biological moonscapes. I admit that it is a little disconcerting to visitors floating down the Salmon River to look up on a hillside and see figures dressed in white hazardous materials suits with respirators on, spraying the ground blue. A month later, that same ground looks dead and brown and won’t return to green until the next year’s rains. Many nontarget species of wildflowers and small trees and shrubs die along with the weeds. Native grass does return, however, and eventually the wildflowers do, too. The idea of suppression is to knock down the bulk of invaders and then come back to take care of stragglers. With no money to chase down the stragglers the next year, they become the source point for further infestation.

So the key to minimizing the spread of invasive plants is prevention. This requires education on the part of state and federal governments and the national media. Few people would argue that herbicide use is the best long-range solution. Large-scale spraying is an impractical option, especially in forested lands where twenty-foot-tall trees can succumb to even mild chemical mixes. There is the danger of plants becoming resistant to certain herbicides, as well, so herbicides should be used only on small infestations of weed populations where adverse impacts—and there are many—are outweighed by benefits. Spraying tens of thousands of acres or releasing exotic bugs as a form of biological control are frightening and unsafe measures.

Allowing millions of acres of land to change to ecological deserts will be the result, however, of inaction and continued academic hypothesizing. Ninety percent of public lands are not yet infested by weeds. Every year, though, we lose more ground. This is why state and federal governments need to fund viable programs to fight the spread of invasive plants. It is not a matter of throwing money into the coffers of rich chemical companies or of adding layers to an already bloated bureaucracy, but of expecting quantifiable results of containment—and not just locating, documenting and monitoring expanding weed populations. It includes the unpopular use of herbicides.

In most areas of the country, weed populations are in isolated pockets that could and should be contained before they explode into unalterably transformed wastelands of monocultural plant life, or require the use of bizarre science experiments to contain, like genetically modified organisms, fungi and exotic insects. So far, invasive plants have already proven they are more determined than our government, despite the promising talk coming out of Washington, D.C., again this year. FM