Williams recalls past wilderness proposal battles

Former Montana Rep. Pat Williams unsuccessfully tried to pass wilderness legislation 16 times during his 18 years in Congress, but he says things have changed since then and Sen. Jon Tester's proposal stands a better chance.

"It's a different day, that's for sure," Williams said in an interview from his Missoula home. "Senator Tester is operating in a very different economic and political environment. It's great that he's moving forward with this, and we should be grateful that he is."

Williams, a Democrat, said his wilderness proposals triggered polarized responses within the state, with environmental activists facing off against timber-industry and multiple-use advocates.

"I was either a very good guy or a very bad guy, depending on who you talked to," Williams said with a chuckle.

Things have changed substantially since then, with Tester's legislative proposal being built on collaborative negotiations that have included timber-industry support that once did not exist.

Williams recalls holding Montana's first wilderness hearing in Dillon in 1979, and encountering a timber industry that was "wildly and absolutely opposed" to the legislation on the table.

He said he talked with dozens of workers at the local sawmill, along with loggers, warning them that without wilderness legislation, the mill would be gone in 15 years.

"And sure enough we didn't get a stick of wilderness and now the mill is gone," he said.

Williams explained how a lack of wilderness ironically harmed the timber industry, going back to the RARE II roadless forest inventory in the late 1970s. RARE II identified about 6 million acres of roadless national lands in Montana that potentially could be considered for wilderness.

In all of the subsequent wilderness bills proposed by Williams, the most acreage ever proposed for wilderness designation was about 1.5 million acres.

What his opposition did not acknowledge was that all of the bills also included language that would 'release" the balance of roadless lands from potential wilderness consideration, and that tied those lands in "legal limbo" for years, Williams said. The Forest Service was restrained, by the threat of litigation or actual lawsuits, from opening roadless lands to roads and timber management.

"That's the point that the timber industry kept missing," he said.

The various wilderness proposals for Montana "actually released a ton of land for harvest and because we didn't get it, is part of the reason the timber industry went down the drain in Montana," he added.

For years, some in the timber industry maintained that the decline was due to the wilderness bills, but to Williams those claims don't hold water because there was never any actual designations.

And the support of a variety of forest-products operations in developing Tester's proposal represents "a sea change" in the industry's view of wilderness designations, Williams said.

But Williams concedes now that his wilderness proposals may have been too "wide and sweeping" to be politically palatable. The reason for that, he explained, was that when RARE II came before Congress, there was agreement that designations would be done statewide, and most other states did just that.

"What Tester is doing is probably what has to be done, and that's take these areas one, two or three at a time," Williams said. "He's attempting to get something done for the first time in 15 years. The Montana delegation is finally moving on wilderness."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com