Voices: Environmental activism has trumped science-based forest management

The Governor’s Forest Action Advisory Council, according to DNRC forest plan manager Wyatt Frampton, aims to produce an assessment of Montana’s forested lands that is “robust, wide-ranging, accurate, and holistic.”

As DNRC spokesperson Paige Cohn also noted, the council’s proven collaborators are “developing an implementation strategy to make on-the-ground progress to improve forest health and wildlife resilience, and the next step will be to identify priority areas for treatment.”

All are important goals; however, for over a decade, prescribed silvicultural treatments (involving timber cutting or fire) have too often been held up in the courts and blocked by environmental activists.

Unfortunately, science-based forest management has been dismissed in the name of environmental activism.

-Walter Buck is a retired forester