In the farthest corner of Montana in the Kootenai National Forest, straddling the Canadian border, are most of what's left of the Yaak Valley's oldest, most diverse forests. The Forest Service has bulldozed thousands of miles of roads and logged a vast patchwork of clear-cuts surrounding these islands of giant old trees. Ancient larch, among the oldest in the world -- 600 to 800 years and still going strong -- preside over a rich diversity of old-growth spruce as well as enormous centuries-old cedar, hemlock and subalpine fir. Nearly every tree species in northwest Montana is found in the Black Ram region of the Yaak Valley, under the shelter of these larch "mother trees."
The proposed Black Ram project would commercially log nearly 4,000 acres, including clear-cutting nearly 1,800 acres and logging over 400 acres of mature and old-growth forest.
This area is home to an isolated population of about 25 grizzly bears, North America's most imperiled subspecies of bear. The remaining old forests here are refuge for 190 other animal species, including 25% of Montana's species of concern. These include lynx, wolverines, native trout and extremely vulnerable reptiles and amphibians, some of whom live only in the Kootenai National Forest. The carbon loss from cutting these stands is irrecoverable in the short window left to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Older forests such as these make up 36% of all forests in the continental United States and stretch across 167 million acres. Some trees are 80 to 100 years old, while others have stood for millennia.
Mature forests in our country's national parks are largely protected from logging. But more than three-quarters of forests managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management -- which make up the majority of federally managed forests -- don't have strong protections from logging.
We can't afford to chop down our forests. They shelter wildlife and they shelter us from the worst impacts of climate change by absorbing carbon from our atmosphere.
