Tester forest bill heard on Capitol Hill

A plan to require 7,000 acres to be logged annually in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest for the next 10 years met some skepticism on Capitol Hill Thursday. Tester and supporters of his bill say the requirement would provide struggling lumber mills with logs and reduce the number of beetle-killed trees in the forest, which includes the Madison Mountain Range southwest of Bozeman. However, members of the Obama administration and environmentalists told a Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee that the provision could set a dangerous precedent for forest management and prove difficult to implement. But Tester and a coalition of loggers and conservationists who support the legislation defended the mandates. Tester said pine-beetles had turned the Beaverhead-Deerlodge forest into a “sea of red,” and said more forest needs to be opened up to logging if Montana’s lumber mills are expected to stay open. Along with the logging requirements, the bill would create 677,000 acres of wilderness, most of it in Southwest Montana, garnering the support of many major environmental groups...read more