[MCN] Montana Wilderness Association Goes Off-The-Rails, calls for George Ochenski to be replaced

Matthew Koehler mattykoehler at gmail.com
Mon Nov 16 12:08:42 EST 2015


Good morning,

If anyone opens up the Missoulian opinion page today you’ll be greeted by
an epic, off-the-rails rant from the Montana Wilderness Association’s
‘communications manager’ Ted Brewer (complete with outright lies and
entirely propped up by strawman arguments) against longtime environmental
and public lands champion George Ochenski. (Pasted below)

In the opinion piece, the Montana Wilderness Association compares Ochenski
to “birthers, chemtrail conspiracy mongers, and other ideological zealots
and crackpots.” The Montana Wilderness Association also calls on the
Missoulian to replace George Ochenski (their very popular, weekly
progressive columnist).

Apparently, what caused the Montana Wilderness Association to go completely
off the deep end was the following information Ochenski included in a
recent opinion column, in which he highlighted the comments by Wilderness
Legend Stewart Brandborg (the only living person who was responsible for
passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964). Brandborg recently warned groups
like MWA at a Wilderness Conference to “resist the fuzzy, fuzzy Neverland
of collaboration,” because Brandborg believes that groups like MWA are
giving up huge chunks of America’s public lands legacy in exchange for
basically what amounts to some Wilderness crumbs.

What’s strange is that it’s absolutely no secret to anyone that for the
past 10 years the Montana Wilderness Association has been ‘collaborating’
with the timber industry and others (sometimes in secret meetings, such as
during the formation of the Beaverhead Partnership) to dramatically
increase industrial logging on public National Forests in Montana through
politicians simply mandating higher logging levels.

Not only this, but the Montana Wilderness Association has also gone to
court to support more public lands logging in Montana. For example, just
last month the Montana Wilderness Association took the incredible step of
actually intervening in a timber sale lawsuit on the Kootenaa National
Forest. The logging project MWA is in federal court supporting actually
calls for nearly 9,000 acres of logging, including over 3,000 acres of
clearcuts in critical lynx habitat.

Even more amazing is the fact that the Montana Wilderness Association is
being represented in court supporting this timber sale by timber industry
lawyers from the American Forest Resource Council. That’s right! The very
same timber industry lawyers at the American Forest Resource Council who
sued to stop the Roadless Area Conservation Rule are now representing the
Montana Wilderness Association in court to support 9,000 acres of logging,
including over 3,000 acres of clearcuts in critical lynx habitat on the
Kootenai National Forest.

Here’s the part of George Ochenski’s column (in his own words, not in the
lies and twisted strawman arguments of the Montana Wilderness Association)
that sent the Montana Wilderness Association over the cliff:

“If one wants to see where millions of federal taxpayer dollars have gone
to buy collaborative partners, check out this link from the Southwest Crown
of the Continent laying out the Forest Service’s publicly funded largesse
to groups such as Trout Unlimited, the Montana Wilderness Association, the
Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and many more:
www.swcrown.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/SWCC_Partnership_Agreements_V.06-15.pdf
.

This scheme pays taxpayer funds to private groups that provide ‘in-kind
services’ to collaborate with the federal agency’s goals, many of which are
directly connected to increased logging, grazing and resource extraction
from public lands under the rubric of ‘forest health’ or ‘restoration.’”
(SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1WVXElR)

————————

Yes, the truth is that the Forest Service is actually giving
‘collaborators’ with multi-million non-profit groups like the Montana
Wilderness Association, Trout Unlimited and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
millions of taxpayer dollars to help manage public lands! In the case of
the Montana Wilderness Association, they collected $100,000 in taxpayer
money from the U.S. Forest Service to do trail work on Forest Service
lands. Isn’t that an incredibly slippery slope that threatens to compromise
the “Keep It Public” mantra we so often hear from these groups? Wouldn’t it
be better for taxpayer money to simply fund the U.S. Forest Service to do
its job, rather than having the Forest Service give this taxpayer money to
multi-million non-profit groups who ‘collaborate’ with the Forest Service?

Honestly, given the Montana Wilderness Association very well-documented
love affair with ‘collaboration’ and given the Montana Wilderness
Association’s very well-documented demands for more taxpayer-subsidized
public lands logging on National Forests in Montana (despite terrible
lumber markets, despite global economic realities, etc) it’s just bizarre
why MWA would be so upset with George Ochenski for pointing out the fact
that MWA and other groups have been able to collectively get millions of
dollars to hire their own staff and get paid for their volunteers to manage
our public lands.

As Keith Hammer with the Swan View Coalition recently pointed out (Source:
http://forestpolicypub.com/2015/09/22/the-forest-service-is-paying-collaborative-partners/
):

“While these funds on the one hand enable partners to do some monitoring
and watershed restoration work by repairing or decommissioning roads, it
also appears to silence public criticisms by partners of the more
controversial timber sales being conducted under the guise of “forest
restoration.” Moreover, some SWCC partners have collectively promoted
“restoration” logging and asked Congress to work with collaborators and not
with “organizations and individuals who oppose collaborative approaches to
forest management.” (Source:
http://www.swanview.org/reports/FinalPartnersLetter_1_14_15_Final.pdf)

If you love America’s National Forests and our tremendous public lands
legacy please don’t be lulled to sleep by groups like the Montana
Wilderness Association.

The bottom line is that some of these very well-funded, multi-million
groups are using ‘collaboration’ in an attempt to greatly increase public
lands logging (including MWA’s well-documented calls for politicians to
simply mandate huge increases in National Forest logging levels), while at
the same time they are using ‘collaboration’ to secure huge chunks of
taxpayer funds (via the Forest Service) in order to increase their staff
size and essential embark down that slippery slope where the management of
America’s National Forests is essentially ‘out-sourced’ and ‘privatized.’

——————————————————


Where chemtrails and George Ochenski converge
By TED BREWER, Montana Wilderness Association
http://missoulian.com/news/opinion/columnists/where-chemtrails-and-george-ochenski-converge/article_83324367-43da-59fc-bb36-1e4a0fedb098.html

Recently the Missoulian published two columns on its Opinion page that
were, topically speaking, quite different. Psychologically speaking,
however, they were quite similar.

One column claimed the U.S. government is controlling the weather through
commercial airliner exhaust, known as “chemtrails.” The other was George
Ochenski’s column claiming the Forest Service is using tax dollars to “buy”
the support of conservation groups for logging, grazing and other resource
extraction projects.

A friend of mine who used to work at a daily newspaper calls the Opinion
page a “fact-free zone,” but these two conspiracy theories, printed on the
same day, turned the Missoulian’s Opinion page into a paranoia playground,
where President Obama makes it rain and an extravagantly funded Forest
Service slips bags of cash to conservation groups while dining on filet of
bull trout and leg of Canada lynx.

I’m the communications manager at Montana Wilderness Association, certainly
one of the top entries on Ochenski’s list of enemies and a longtime,
routine target of his column. (If Ochenski goes a few months without
blasting MWA, I start to wonder if his mind might be slipping.) I’ve also
been a writer for the past 20-odd years. I’ve written a fair number of
magazine stories that have required me to dig for the sources that back my
claims. It’s part of the job and the fun of doing credible journalism.

But once you start making outrageous claims without providing proof, then
you’ve joined the ranks of birthers, chemtrail conspiracy mongers, and
other ideological zealots and crackpots with personal and political axes to
grind. That’s where we find Ochenski these days, so desperate to smear his
enemies that he compares them to Nazis (yes, he did that) or tries to
embroil them in controversies of his own paranoid concoction.


His Nov. 2 column was especially fanciful. In it he referenced a
spreadsheet showing a list of several organizations, institutions and
agencies the Forest Service has contracted to complete projects on forest
lands, including fish habitat restoration, bear conflict prevention and, in
MWA’s case, trail building. Ochenski selected a handful of conservation
organizations on the list and accused them, essentially, of taking bribes.

Also on the list, but escaping the bribery charge, were the University of
Montana, Defenders of Wildlife, the National Forest Foundation, Powell and
Missoula counties, and others that aren’t also on Ochenski’s list of
enemies (not yet, at least).

Far from establishing anything malfeasant, this spreadsheet showed the
range of public services MWA and others provide on forest lands – a banal
document that is about as controversial as a parking ticket.

Every newspaper should have a great provocateur. Ochenski tries, but the
obsessive contempt he has for certain public figures and conservation
groups, which keeps bubbling up in his writing, are apparently having a
deleterious effect on his judgment and turning his column into a venue for
his paranoid fantasies.

Montana is full of hungry, talented writers who haven’t traded their common
sense for conspiracy and who are more than happy to do the work that comes
with being a provocative yet credible writer. Perhaps it’s time for the
Missoulian to consider replacing Ochenski with one of them.

Ted Brewer is the communications manager at the Montana Wilderness
Association. Two of his magazine articles appear in "Montana, Warts and
All," the best from Montana Quarterly’s first decade.
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