Enemies Find Common Ground on Forest Use : Timber: A compromise struck in Libby, Mont., may offer a lesson for the Northwest. It provides for both conservation and for logging and mining.

The spotted owl’s no hero up here. Not when the wilderness provides a man his livelihood and jobs are scarce even in the best of times. Not when city folks start telling Montana loggers how to manage their woods and their resources and their lives.

“You’re going to have to explain to me why one owl or one woodpecker is more important than a family,” Ed Baker, a local merchant, told a stranger in town recently. “You know something? There used to be dinosaurs through here. And you know what else? They’re gone and I don’t miss them.”

For more than a decade, the fate of Kootenai National Forest, the state’s largest timber-producing area and one of the West’s last great expanses of roadless wilderness, has divided and polarized Montanans as surely as did the range wars of the 1800s between cattlemen and sheep men.

At the core of the conflict is a question that cuts to the spiritual heart of the Western mystique: To whom does the frontier belong and for what should it be used?

It’s a wonder that anyone can agree on land use, but, here in Libby, at least, the townspeople were able to turn the trick. That just might offer a lesson for others in the Northwest.

“Do people think we’re going to destroy our only business?” Baker asked. “Destroy our fishing and hunting? Destroy the most beautiful place in the world? Come on. Give us some credit.”

Dave Erickson, a seventh-grade school counselor, was one of those on the other side of the issue. Erickson turned up a Forest Service road, shifted into second and headed toward the snow-capped Cabinet Mountains, where he hikes alone every weekend. The pines bordering the dirt track are not as grand or as thick as they were when he moved to Montana from Chicago 30 years ago; but, despite harvesting, the forest is still a splendid refuge of pristine isolation.

“When I first came up into the mountains, the feeling of being so alone in such beauty would almost make me cry,” Erickson said.

But 2 million acres are being lost annually in the nation to commercial development, he warned. And he worries that even as big and under-populated as Montana is, the wilderness around him will not last forever if man’s exploitation of his natural resources is not restrained.

Nearly 100 million acres, largely in the West, have been designated as wilderness--areas where man is only a visitor and logging and vehicles are not allowed--since the Wilderness Act was passed in 1964.

Additional federal lands are under study for inclusion, and next year President Bush is expected to send Congress his recommendations on how much of it should remain in a primitive state. Soon after that, perhaps in 10 years or so, there will be nothing left to debate: All the land in the 11 Western states will have been assigned its designated use.

For 11 years, Montanans have debated the future of their forests and not found room to compromise. In its simplest terms here in the timber heartland of northwest Montana, if you favored wilderness, you were against jobs, and on many homes in Libby yellow signs declare: “This Family Supported by Timber Dollars.” Another adds: “Just Say No To Wilderness.”

Unable to pass a wilderness bill as required by federal law, Montana has found itself at an impasse that has blocked timber cutting and mining on millions of acres of land and denied conservationists any guarantee that they will get the permanent wilderness they want.

One night last March, this small logging town started looking for a community solution to a national problem.

In the former church that serves as a union hall, natural enemies sat down to seek common ground. On one side of the table were Dave Erickson and Jerry Brown of the newly formed Kootenai Wildlands Alliance; on the other, Don Wilkins, business agent for the Lumber, Production and Industrial Workers local and his executive board. Both sides brought their own maps, and mutual distrust was heavy.

“Now, let’s not start by throwing coffee at each other,” someone said.

Over the next three months, each side came to appreciate the other’s concerns. “We were talking to people who’d lived in the community as long as we had,” Wilkins said. “If they’d been from out of state, I think we’d have been less receptive.”

The union agreed that 28,000 acres of prime timberland--considerably more than the Forest Service had recommended--could be set aside for wilderness without costing the town a job. The conservationists agreed that 1.2 million acres of the Kootenai Forest could be released for “multiuse,” including logging and mining, without jeopardizing the outdoors’ shrine that almost all Montanans cherish with religious fervor.

On June 7, mill workers, sportsmen and conservationists from Lincoln and Sanders counties signed the Kootenai Accord, which the largest timber company in the region, Champion International, has supported.

The accord could be the model for Montana’s first statewide wilderness bill, although it has not made everyone happy. Groups such as snowmobilers who showed no willingness to bend were simply left out of the negotiating process, and some timber people contended that forests are a renewable resource, well-managed by those who live in or near them.

“Someone from Southern California or the Midwest sees the land after logging, and sure, it doesn’t look pretty, “ said Terry Holthaus, head forester for Louisiana Pacific Corp. in Libby. “But look at it in five years, and it’s regenerating. We’ve made mistakes in the timber industry and we’ve learned from them. Overall, I think the industry’s been damn responsible.”

Libby’s lesson to the nation, both sides here say, is twofold: First, that there is room for compromise on the national environmental debate, especially when politicians and Washington lobbyists do not interfere; and second, that the radical fringe’s role in shaping an environmental agenda may lessen in the years ahead.

“These people wanting wilderness were people I know on the street--doctors, school teachers, blue-collar workers,” said Holthaus. “They’re not radical and they believe in what they’re doing. They weren’t the enemy at all.”