“Smokey the Bear was too good”

Writer’s note: This is the beginning of a very complicated conversation that will almost certainly span the rest of my journalism career. There is no way to cover this topic in one article. This is a starting point to the conversation. 

“Smokey the Bear was too good,” said Darrell Schulte, the Madison County Forester and retired USFS member who even though he retired in 2003 still uses the term we when he refers to the agency. 

Fire is a natural part of a forest ecosystem and according to Schulte the USFS policy of fire suppression has created a very difficult environment for fire management and the foresters at the USFS have been aware of the threat since the 1980s. Former Region 2 (Rocky Mountain Region) USFS forest manager Rich Stem, who also advises the Madison County Board of Commissioners, agrees and points to a specific story from his career to address the problem and how it has been compounded by litigation. 

“I had a ranger district called the Barlow District over on Mount Hood in Oregon,” begins Stem. “It was a 200,000 acre district that I was responsible for, and my staff and I supported all kinds of multiple use programs.  We had a range program, a timber program, Job Corps and more. It was just a well-rounded district.” 

“About three or four years ago, the Ranger District there wanted to complete forest thinnings, and put in fire breaks. They wanted to treat the forests in a professional manner,” he continued. “They don't clear cut hardly at all on that district. It’s all selective cutting and it's just good, sound, basic forest practices to manage the land so that you have diversity and a resilient forest. That's the key thing, you have diversity and a resilient forest, multiple species, which then benefit recreation and they benefit wildlife.”

“They had a proposal to do a lot of that work in a certain area called Grasshopper, and there were a handful of litigants in Oregon that said, ‘no, no, this is really bad. This is bad for old growth, this is bad for wildlife. This is bad, bad, bad.’”

“So they went to court,” he continued. “They had a big fight and the Forest Service backed off. I can't answer the reason why, but they backed off. They only treated a very small amount of acres instead of what they wanted to really do originally. A fire started about three weeks ago. It blew up, exploded in the very area they wanted to do the treatment, and it is now up to over 95,000 acres. It took out a restored lookout that had a long history. It burned that up, burned up fences, burned up range allotments. It has burned up old growth. It has burned up a significant amount of timber. 95,000 acres.” 

“In other words, almost half of the ranger district is now on fire, and it actually has creeped down into ranches. They have had evacuations and all because of these litigants saying we need to protect this from the Forest Service doing any treatment. Now all those acres have gone up in smoke. Now that there is no old growth, no more ranch allotments , all the very things that they said they were protecting have gone up in smoke.”

An initial review of USFS records did not show any litigation postposing projects in the Pioneer Mountains where the Sand Creek Fire is burning, but it did turn up another project South of Virginia City in the Upper Ruby Valley that has faced almost 20 years of delays due to litigation. 

“If you look at the Greenhorn project, it's been 10, 15, years, if not 20,” began Shulte. “They've been trying to get that through, and it keeps running into one roadblock after another, and it's not because the plan is defective or not a good plan, in my opinion. It's just litigation. Do I think that we need to be careful with habitat and endangered species, absolutely. But if it's cleared the hurdles in the NEPA process, and those aren't ignored in any way, shape, or form, or studied hard, it's viable as far as I'm concerned.” 

One of the litigants challenging the Greenhorn Project, and many other projects in the Rocky Mountains, is the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. A non-profit organization who state their mission as “to secure the ecological integrity of the Wild Rockies Bioregion through citizen empowerment and the application of conservation biology, sustainable economic models and environmental law,” according to their website. 

“Yesterday, April 3, 2025, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Council on Wildlife and Fish and Native Ecosystems Council filed a federal lawsuit to protect habitat for three rare wildlife species — grizzly bears, lynx, and sage grouse — in Gravelly Mountains of Montana, which is an area that provides a critical wildlife corridor connecting the Yellowstone area to other mountain ranges in Montana. The challenged government action is called the “Greenhorn” project and it allows destructive logging, road-building, and burning activities across thousands of acres of public lands in this key wildlife corridor zone in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest,” read the first paragraph of a release on their website. It went on to discuss the scope of the project and express disappointment in changes to the designations of lynx habitat that it claims were illegal. Later in the release the following paragraph was included.

“We are not afraid to take federal agencies to court to make them follow the law because the Constitution is on our side,” the release read. “Our government does not exist to serve the for-profit interests of the billionaires. Our government exists to protect our land, water, air, and wildlife for current and future generations. Public lands are for the public — not private profit — and we will continue to stand up for this principle despite the name-calling and threats we are always subjected to by politicians and special interests. This is our home and we will protect it. Their money and scare tactics will not stop us.”

The language of the release contrasts sharply with the experience had at the Ruby Valley Strategic Alliance’s June field day event that Schulte and Stem both attended. At that event, foresters, forest service personnel, conservation district employees, members of the Wilderness Society and Greater Yellowstone Coalition, farmers, ranchers and outfitters who live and work in the Ruby Valley viewed the initial burns of the project and agreed in principle that it was necessary and long overdue. 

“In this region, it's a very small group of folks that are litigating and it's not local people,” said Stem. “The local folks are not against this. A lot of the environmental groups and the conservation organizations, do not litigate these projects because they, along with the agencies, believe this work needs to be done. It's a very small group of constant litigators that have almost built a cottage industry around it because they get paid if they win on any point or win against an injunction.”

Both Stem and Schulte point towards changes that have happened over time to the processes involved in the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) processes as reasons that litigation is successful and processes that they say make good sense scientifically are being challenged in court. 

“I think that as the agency started to have more lawsuits and more litigation to slow down the logging, they tried to build the perfect plan, and you can't do it,” said Shulte. “Somebody always finds a hole, and if they're rigorous in their research, they being whoever the litigants are, yeah, you won't be able to stop it.”

Stem was more blunt with his assessment of the situation. 

“A lot of the litigation that goes forward lacks professional forest practices,” he began. “It lacks bringing diversity to the forest, which helps wildlife as well as recreation, as well as strong forest management, and it just lacks common sense because if you do the fire breaks and you do the thinnings and you try to professionally manage these forests,  you get stopped or delayed for a significant amount of time, which has happened here locally a lot on the Beaverhead Deer Lodge.”  

“When that happens, and then an extensive fire comes in, it destroys the very thing the agency was trying to protect. They destroy the old growth. They destroy the wildlife areas, and that moves all the elk and the deer and the ungulates as they have to move and leave, which then affects the predators like the endangered grizzly bears and so on,” The litigation lacks any form of proven science, lacks professional judgement, and lacks common sense,” Stem continued. 

“And so, the very thing that the litigants are claiming that logging is a problem, the fires come in and do much, much, much worse damage because of the delays. It lacks any kind of support from a lot of people that believe that there needs to be projects on the ground, and it also lacks just basic professional forest practices.”

Stem also points out that there is a large cost to the tax-payer caused by the litigation processes. 

“When I was a director for a short time back east, I oversaw the NEPA litigation,” said Stem, who retired from the USFS in the late  2000s. “I can tell you that the amount of energy and time, which equates to taxpayer money, that goes into dealing with litigation is enormous. The amount of energy that the agency has to put into dealing with the injunctions, dealing with the lawsuits, dealing with the extensive analysis is huge. Back in my day, the amount of personnel time was almost 30% of the people that are involved in that. Time allotted for timber, fire and wildlife biology, of that 30 to 40% goes into these NEPA documents, and that was back in my time.”

While the Alliance for the Wild Rockies is advocating for the passage of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, which will “designate millions of acres of unlogged forest as wilderness, prohibit logging, and maximize carbon sequestration in the protected areas,” Schulte and Stem are more interested in a community driven approach to forest management that will mitigate fire risks. 

“Logging mimics fire to a point because it's stand conversion,” said Schulte explaining how forest management can decrease the risk of losing control of forest fires and the intensity at which they burn. “The combination would have to be fuels management, logging, and prescribed fire, and suppression in its many forms. I mean, there's full suppression, and there's modified, and there's indirect. There's all kinds of terms for it and we'd have to be able to get timber sales and vegetation management through the courts.”  

Regardless of how we approach the solutions to these problems, there are no quick fixes in sight.

“The Forest Service was established, I think, in 1906 or 1907, and they began to extinguish fires then as quickly as they could,” Schulte said.  “It took us 100 years to get here. Quite honestly, it probably takes 100 years to get out if we were to be able to selectively manage these fires.”