I despair often when I consider the challenges we face in attempting not only to hold the line on our ever diminishing American wilderness, but also to restore some of the ghosts that are so critical to the spirit and function of that wildness. The grizzly that feeds upon, and then disperses in its scat, the seed caches of whitebark pine stored in mounds along the windiest, most remote ridgetops by the raucous-shouting Clark’s nutcrackers. The black-backed woodpeckers hammering on the drums of the remaining spars of burned and “unsalvaged” lodgepole in remote forests, swarming the dead and dying wood, feeding upon the insects that helped birth and perpetuate this portion of the forest’s cycle.

Butterflies, blue sulphurs and gingham checkers drift through the firescape, and bluebirds like blazes of neon, or blazes of sky, hurtle through the burned forest, and mushrooms leap from the ash—always, in a rich and diverse landscape, the presence of one thing not only accommodates its opposite, but also relies upon that opposite, in a healthy, vibrant tolerance.

In the valley where I live—the Yaak, on the Kootenai National Forest, in extreme northwestern Montana—nothing has yet gone extinct, not since the Ice Age, at any rate. Many populations are down to single-digit populations, as if in a reverse kind of Noah’s ark, but they’re all still here, hanging on.

Things are still connected in the wild Yaak, and in a few other crumbs of wild places in the lower forty-eight, and I am convinced that when each of a landscape’s time-crafted species is still present in a place, there emanates a vitality, a spirit, that is larger than the sum of even all those amazing parts: a magic, or what seems to us like magic, but is perhaps simply the condition that once existed everywhere.

Magic is not a particularly easy word to use. It can be vague and abstract, soft and nebulous. Generations of suspicious nondialogue between environmentalists and resource extraction representatives have had the terms of this nondialogue defined not by environmentalists nor by any alliance of common ground but, rather, solely by industry.

Chief among the myths that have emerged from such nondialogue is the myth that logging prevents fire, and the myth that we could begin logging at one end of the Yaak and work our way to the other end and by the time we got to the other side, a wild forest would have grown up behind us, more vibrant and diverse than ever.

Worst of all is the myth that an ancient forest is unnatural, in sore need of our manipulation, our fractional knowledge, our cultivation. That it cannot survive in a healthful condition without our monitoring and attendance. That it cannot survive unless we build roads into it and log it, pulp it and peel it and shred it and cube it, and then replant those tractor-crushed hardpan soils with our own fast-growing spindly seedlings from nurseries in orchard-row fashion.

In the Pacific Northwest, and in the corner of northwestern Montana that falls under its shadow, our appetites have indeed been prodigious. The Kootenai National Forest—with the Yaak in its heart—has produced more timber than any other valley in Montana, year after year after year. Some years it produces up to half of that entire state’s volume of federal timber—the bulk of it coming from one tiny island of forest.

In such a culture, where, unless one gets in an airplane, it’s hard to see how few really big trees are left, it’s sometimes hard to speak out on behalf of salamanders or butterflies or ferns or grizzlies. (Elk, sometimes, you can talk about, because they’re “useful”—they’re thrilling to hunt, and delicious, and somehow manly; but conversations regarding the other animals have not found much purchase here.)

But such inaudible conversations have been growing nonetheless, silently, and in depth.

The conversations—all right, I’ll say it, the arguments—when we’ve been fortunate enough to have them—have traditionally focused on volume and fiber and tonnage and economics, on legalities and policy. On howto get more, take more, one last time.

We need desperately, I think, a story—even a myth or a dream or a plan, for the time being—of restoration.

Best of all would be a story that doesn’t waste too much time looking back, casting blame upon the past and its abuses and corruption and plain old-fashioned mistakes and misinformation. Even as we stand waist-deep in that rubble. It would be easy to do nothing but criticize the rogue past of the Kootenai and the selfish interests of the corporations that have passed through these parts, liquidating their own private lands and then liquidating the Kootenai, if they could.

How many second chances will we get? Maybe I’m pessimistic, but all I can see from where I stand is one more. But if we do it right, or as close to right as we can, isn’t that enough?

The story has so far almost always been the same, and with the same results, ever diminishing to our power and dignity and self-respect; and still, like moths to a flame, we rise again and again to industry’s saber rattling and join in with industry’s cries for fewer government regulations on these poor hard-working corporations. In Montana, our governor has said that she intends to be “the lap dog of industry” for these corporations: Boise Cascade, Champion International, Sterling Mining, Plum Creek Timber, Asarco and W. R. Grace, to name only a few.

And from these rural pockets, decade after decade, even after industry has plunged its dagger into their heart, the saber rattlers bleat about the perceived rights and privileges that industry has convinced them are their due, even as on the matters of responsibility and accountability, they are silent.

And even as they—the one-horse company towns, and the polarized, frightened communities these companies have agitated time and time again—poison the air or pollute the water or replace our old forests with fields of weeds, and our bugling elk with silence, and our grizzlies with nothing, we fight among ourselves, like scarab beetles in a jar.

Always, the story is the same. If it is a mining company, they post a tiny cleanup bond, generally one-tenth of what ends up being required to do a full cleanup after they’re gone. They claw the ore from beneath the mountains, leaching the gold with cyanide, or blasting the copper out with dynamite, hauling the silver away and leaving in the creeks and rivers poisonous levels of lead and mercury. And when the state or federal government asks them to clean up the mess—always, with mining, there is poison—the mining company instead files for bankruptcy, disassembles its board of directors, moves to another state, reassembles the same board of directors, who have been chosen for their political connections, and with a new parent company begin the same process all over again, while in their wake, the taxpayers are stuck with the multimillion-dollar reclamation bills, as well as the enduring legacy of toxins.

With the timber companies, the story is always the same. They take the biggest and best trees from the public lands and leave behind the ones that truly do need thinning, either by fire or by saw. They bilk the taxpayers into building expensive logging roads far into the national forests, and they clear-cut any private land they might own in the area, too. They put their profits into labor-saving technology rather than paying higher wages to the workers, and they lay off more workers even as they run more and more timber through the mill.

They blame the environmentalists, even during a glut of cheap or even unsalable timber, and when transport costs or electrical costs or insurance premiums or foreign competition or a construction industry downturn puts them out of business, they move to the Southeast, where trees grow twice as fast, and where their product is closer to a more vibrant construction industry and various seaports.

But before they leave town, they convert their good old-fashioned sawmill/timber company into a limited partnership real estate investment trust, so that they don’t have to pay taxes beyond a certain minimal cap; and of those taxes, they pay them on a much lower agricultural land classification rather than on the prime real estate investment their land has suddenly become. They divide a wild landscape into five-acre tracts and leave.

And still we ask for more local control and for ever lessening restrictions on the way these companies do business on our nation’s public lands and in our local communities.

With the hydroelectricity projects, the story is also always the same. They tell us we can have it all—cheap power, clean power and salmon, sturgeon, wild trout, flood control and irrigation—all of it, if only we’ll build one more dam on one last wild river. Pacific Power and Light told us this, most recently, asking only that we deregulate electricity, which our state’s Republican supermajority was only too glad to do. (Last quarter’s earnings for the company went up 900 percent, power prices are expected to escalate 400 percent this autumn, and with stream flows in the northwest at 23 percent of average, if you think the needs of wild salmon are going to be given any consideration think again.)

All of these stories were begun well over a hundred years ago, and they just keep playing themselves out, over and over again. Right or wrong, a story can last almost forever.

Isn't this all really just a bunch of tattling? Placater and peacemaker that I am, all I really want to do is just walk off into the wilderness and find a place of quiet peace. Isn’t this all just a bunch of tiresome tattling, without a solution, a plan? Do we really need any narrative to tell us, for example, that W. R. Grace mined asbestos right outside of the town of Libby, releasing deadly tremolite fibers into the air by the ton for years after company and perhaps state officials knew these fibers caused an incurable kind of lung cancer? Do we really need the statistics, the preliminary screenings, that show up to a third of the population of that town have evidence of some degree of pleural thickening, perhaps indicative of the beginning stages of the disease?

Always, the story is the same, yet we return to these pleas and promises; we implore these companies to come into our forest, to come into our town, and we lobby on their behalf. They say the words that we want them to say, and they tell us, again and again, that they will take care of us and that the government is our enemy, that boundaries and guidelines and rules and protections are our enemy. They praise our native spunk and grit and then they take everything we have and pour poison into us and upon our land, and then they leave. And they leave in their wake perhaps the worst thing of all: an embittered and polarized populace hardened by generations of fierce intolerance that has resulted in a culture in which imagination is no longer always seen as the form of boldness and empowerment that it can be, but instead as a weakness and a danger—a fey and useless thing, to be ridiculed, criticized, degraded. Stop dreaming those dreams. There’s one more cache of ore to cut, one more roadless area to enter. Get out of the way.

Surely the beginning of any new dream or plan must have as its foundation the security of of our last roadless areas: the last crumbs, the tattered archipelago of baseline health, the little cells that hold the essence of wilderness that future generations risk forgetting or, worse, never knowing.

I hate using numbers to describe this roadless base—I want to use words, images and senses—but the numbers tell a story, too. The roadless areas of our national forests contain only .2 percent of our nation’s timber supply, and the market is glutted, and still industry clamors for these last sacred lands. How can a solution be found, with such a partner, such a combatant? Why must we always fight, and over such crumbs?

All right then: enough caterwauling. In crisis there is opportunity. Our grizzlies are vanishing, our clear-cuts are filling in with knapweed, dandelions, rush skeletonweed, toadflax and, worst of all, the hideously unstoppable orange hawkweed; our native trout are hanging on, but under siege, as is almost every other rare and delicate species, be it owl or mammal or tender orchid. The Yaak, with its back up against the wall of Canada survives—just barely—the onslaught of the last century, but can it survive the next? Or rather, can its wildness survive?

Because the Kootenai—particularly the upper reaches, which include the Yaak—has been degraded more than any other valley in Montana, it is here where we should first focus our efforts on restoration, as well as conservation. For decades, the Yaak has given, and given, and given; if there is to be any grace and balance to the story, any valid recovery, it should begin with this acknowledgment: it is time to report the excesses of the past.

The forest in the Yaak has been turned upside down; could not have become more inverted than had the hand of a troublesome giant lifted it from these mountains and flipped it over. In a landscape that once might have been as much as 50 percent old growth, more than two-thirds of our forest is now comprised of trees that measure seventeen inches or less in diameter at breast height, which is a very small tree indeed. This “overstock” is the result of two main factors—the clear-cuts, in whose scabrous wakes have rushed a tangle of young trees all of the same age—and from the totalitarian fire suppression of the past.

By now we realize and understand the basics of fire ecology: that if more fires had been allowed to burn, they would have helped clean out the historic buildup of twigs and leaves and needles that carry the fires so rapidly and would have thinned out a lot of those overstocked seedlings and saplings and stimulated growth.

You’ll be hearing from the timber industry that logging can simulate the low-intensity wildfires we’ve been lacking. And like most such claims by either industry or environmentalists, in some places, under some circumstances, they’re right—hypothetically, at least. What industry’s not telling you, though, is that it costs money to do that kind of logging—taking the fine fuels and poles and saplings while leaving the larger trees, which would have historically been spared anyway by the more frequent, low-intensity fires that we used to have commonly.

Instead, with many of the current prescriptions, industry goes into a forest and whacks about half of the mature green trees, leaving half, so that the result is more aesthetic than the clear-cuts of the past. But they still haven’t addressed those twigs and branches, the ignition sources—the choking detritus that is the true fuel hazard, far more so than the mature green trees themselves.

It’s extremely expensive to slash and pile all those overstocked saplings by hand, in what’s called a mechanical treatment, and that’s all right, I suppose. It’s job-creating, though, and fulfills a need and provides a service of value, so I have no qualms about paying for that service, as long as it takes place out of those last fourteen roadless areas—that baseline reference of forest health and diversity and wildness. And there are places—particularly along the interfaces between private and public land, in the West—where the higher-priced mechanical treatment is probably wisest and safest.

With prescribed burns, you can treat seven times as much landscape for the same amount of money, and in a far more beneficial manner, leaving the forest’s nutrients on-site.

And on the Kootenai, particularly—Montana’s wettest forest, the closest thing our state has to a rain forest, particularly in these days of global warming—we can burn better, which is to say at a lower, steadier intensity, and with more predictability of direction, than anywhere else in the state.

It’s things like these that make me think the Kootenai, more than any other national forest, is the most ideal and obvious candidate to be treated as a conservation and restoration national forest, a national forest which, in that naming, would receive acknowledgment that it is a unique and valuable landscape and one for which restoration is long overdue. Not a charter or community forest siphoned out of the public treasury but, on the contrary, cherished, retained in the public safekeeping and restored in partnership between expert U.S. Forest Service personnel and communities.

Clever as our engineers are, not in a million years could we go out and fashion such a landscape as this one.

The advantages for such a designation and management are immediately obvious. It’s important to remember that each year as a nation we spend millions on the protection of endangered species, as required by the Endangered Species Act, a giant piece of conservation legislation signed by the Nixon administration in 1974.

On the Kootenai, in addition to possessing an ever increasing list of threatened and endangered species—our small clan of supersurvivor grizzlies, our occasional woodland caribou, our wolves and eagles and bull trout and sturgeon, our falcons and water howellia—we have an even longer list of sensitive species that have been pushed to the brink: great gray owls, Coeur d’Alene salamanders, westslope cutthroat trout, pure inland redband trout, shorthead sculpin, to name only a few. There are easily a hundred more—lynx, wolverine, northern bog lemming, and on and on.

How much more efficient, how much more fiscally conservative, to lay down a long-term plan designed for the benefit of this vast matrix, this underpinning biotic structure that helps comprise the spirit of this place.

The Kootenai didn't earn a profit even in the heyday of high-volume high-grade clear-cutting. Why not turn toward restoration? Why not nurture a local wood-processing facility that takes what the Kootenai has to give, for once, rather than dictating (in terms of big, green, mature fire-resistant timber) what we want the answer to be, regardless of sustainability?

Make no mistake: such a program would create more and newer jobs. Heavy equipment operators would be needed, more than ever, to repair or obliterate the damaged roads that are pouring sediment into our fisheries, and the sawyers would need to thin the unnatural and unhealthy buildup of fine fuels. Field workers need to monitor stream flows and temperatures, and plant and animal populations.

The nature of all these jobs, unlike those of the past, is sustainable.

In the wake of the excesses of the past, there are so many opportunities for this kind of work, and this kind of forestry, on the Kootenai. We need to begin aggressively reconnecting our last little pockets of ancient forests, too, particularly the old mature larch, which is the rarest form of old growth in the West, and yet the most common in the Yaak. I’d like to envision a Big Larch Reserve, stunning gold in the autumn, with mammoth trees such as the ones that used to stud almost half of the entire valley, widely spaced and—I’ll use that word again, unapologetically—magical. With only a hundred years of recovery, it might be possible one day for a traveler to walk through a band of such a forest stretching miles wide, all the way into Canada, where such a reserve is already protected. (By reserve, I do not necessarily mean no cutting—on the contrary, in places, burning and mechanical treatment might be needed to enhance the release of the desired condition of big larch, and lots of them.)

More than 70 percent of the U.S. public wants our public wildlands, our last roadless lands, protected from any kind of logging. A handful of people under the current Congress and administration do not want these lands protected, but if 70 percent of a nation is to be bullied by a handful of the special-interest suck-egg corporations, then shame on us, and on all our hollow talk of freedom and democracy and rights and responsibilities.

I’m convinced that in this day and age, an environmentalist’s dreams and plans are nearly as vital an underpinning and latticework of wild habitat as are the mountains and rivers and forests themselves. Once upon a time, it used not to be this way, but now, paradoxically, in these desperate days, dreams and big ideas are absolutely critical. Politics, activism anddesire have become their own kind of habitat for a region in these last days.

And yet it’s true, too, that dreams are only half of what’s required. The muscle of activism, the grunt work, is the other half, and as important.

Still, in an age in which the wilderness is becoming less and less visible, it seems odd that one of the things most required to keep it alive, or to bring it back, is also the unseen—the passion of the people to whom the wilderness is beloved: loggers, hunters, anglers, hikers, environmentalists, schoolteachers, schoolchildren, businesspeople—almost everyone.

Unseen, then, those dreams, but not unspoken. Not on the Kootenai, at least. There is still barely time to protect and retain that which is rare. There is still barely time to dream a new story. And to then act.FM