Statement:
Mr. Baird. Senator McClure, besides the normal multiple-use benefits of wilderness, there are other good things that come from it. Outfitter jobs and recreation jobs are the fastest growing segment of industry in Idaho. Wilderness offers some sense of permanence, some feelings you can come back to the same place you've been visiting for years and still find it the same. It permits endless waste of taxpayer money on single-use timberhaul roads, roads like those in Toboggan Creek, planned for Minnesaka Creek, plan in the head of Fish and Hungry Creeks on the Lochsa, and in the Lochsa breaks of Elk Summit. Those kinds of roads are bad business. The road industry would never build if they had to spend their own money doing so. Wilderness designation recognizes the low level of current knowledge about our public lands and leaves most of all possible options open. It can be reversed whereas roadbuilding cannot. Wilderness also accomodates most fully one of the finest of all of American dreams. And that is that our children might be smarter and even wiser than we are and leaves for them some of the pleasures of decisionmaking. Wilderness is a good and beneficial thing in Idaho and so is the timber industry. And there's no doubt that we need to sustain that industry in our State. For our part as far as Idaho Environmental Council, I certainly can place our fullest cooperation of the Clearwater National Forest to maintaining historical timber-harvest levels. That means making whatever compromises are needed to do that. That's 170 or 431 180 million board feet. Doing so won't be easy. If your goal is to— and I think it ought to be—to maximize these wilderness decisions on the Clearwater and still keep timber-harvest levels up, we'll need to do it very carefully and take some time to do so. The only numbers in timber supply that are worth much to the Clearwater come from the for plan run for the Clearwater forest plan. There is virtually no specific day of that forest. And it's not possible very easily to say that Mallard-Larkins' designation as wilderness means this many jobs for this industry and that many fewer for another. The for plan numbers for the Clearwater Forest purports to show that historical timber levels—timber-harvest levels could be exceeded oh the existing roaded land base. No one believes that. Industry does not. And certainly the conservation groups don't. There are some possible solutions. One of them is to access and try to find perhaps the best 200,000 roadless acres on that forest looking for the best timber sites, use the $40 million which the Clearwater National Forest had planned on for building roads everywhere in the forest to reach those 200,000 acres and perhaps as Senator Dobler suggested, use some of that vast sea of Federal money that seems to be around to better manage the existing high-quality sites on the Clearwater National Forest. That would be fewer road engineers and fewer roads. It would be many jobs of a labor-intensive sort. This kind of approach to management of the Clearwater Forest is not currently being studied by the forest and will not be unless you make it do so. They don't think that way. They plan the extensive development of the forest rather than intensive. It would also mean that places like Kelly and Cayuse Creeks could be left as they are now and no road be built to the high areas of Elk Summit. I urge that thinking and compromise on you.
"Baird, Dennis", Idaho Wilderness Hearings, Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL), University of Idaho Library, https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/wilderness-hearings/items/aug-17-1983-baird-dennis.html