Post-fire management and public lands conflict: The Bitterroot National Forest and beyond (Idaho)

Montana's Bitterroot Valley is rich in nature, history, complexity, and cultural diversity. The wildfires of 2000 burned significant portions of public forest land in the Bitterroot Valley and in the Northern Rockies. These fires comprised disturbances to both forest ecosystems and human communities. Different stakeholders, entities, and agencies viewed the burned landscapes through different lenses. Some saw "catastrophe," others saw natural processes, others saw threats to personal property, others saw ecological processes in action, others saw an opportunity to extract a vast volume of burned timber for commercial purposes, and others believed active salvage and mitigation efforts at large spatial scales would generate unnecessary ecological harm. The Bitterroot National Forest (BNF) proposed post-fire management on a significant scale, promulgating what the BNF believed to be a balanced plan addressing both commodity-related and ecological values. The BNF's plan met both support and opposition, but ultimately resulted in stalemate. The conflict resulted in a court-mandated settlement---which all involved stakeholders and managers deemed unsuccessful. Tensions spilled over into subsequent management actions, including 2005's Middle East Fork sale. The story of the aftermath of 2000's wildfires includes powerful political figures, broken promises, diverted restoration funds, and appearances of impropriety. Politicians belittled the BNF, citing the Montana Department of Natural Resources (DNRC)'s speedy and voluminous salvage as a success. If the criteria of timber volume extracted and that of successful interactions with stakeholder groups are those used to define "success," then the DNRC was, in fact, successful. While the contrast in outcomes between the two agencies relates in part to the clarity of the DNRC's trust mandate/agency mission, it also relates to the attitudes and management culture manifest in the DNRC's leadership. Further, BNF/USFS managers were hindered by complex barriers to efficiency and propensities for conflict relating to Congress and USFS central office-influenced budgets, bureaucratic inertia, and the traditional culture of public lands "forestry"---which resists sharing management discretion with non-agency citizens. The dialogue over national forest management following 2000's wildfires was (and largely remains) ambiguous, confusing, and replete with undefined terms and imprecise, polarizing use of natural resource-related rhetoric.