Fighting for the Jewel, in 1970

This week G. George Ostrom has selected a classic column from April, 1970.

Why has Ostrom decided to T-off on the Forest Service?

Here is just one of a hundred reasons. Many of my friends and I spent years, and years, trying to convince the F.S. of what it already knew, the Jewel Basin area is many more times valuable as a watershed and recreation area than it is as a logging area. My friends and I believed and STILL BELIEVE the Jewel Basin should be given the protection offered under the Wilderness Bill passed by the 88th Congress.

Were were told in 1964 (six years ago) that studies of the basin were being completed and would soon be “sent in” for consideration under the Wild Area classification by Congress. A few months later we were told the studies were completed and, “it was now up to the higher ups.” I relaxed…too much.

Last year I had young McArdle, Flathead Forest recreation and lands manager, on my TV program and he beat around the huckleberry bushes about the status of the Jewel Basin until I just about got sick. Then…after that, when he had worked on the Flathead Forest long enough to find the men’s toilet at Lost Johnny Creek Campground, he was shipped out.

On March 13th of this year, I picked up my copy of the Hungry Horse News and read that Joe Pomajevich says a plan for the Jewel Basin area will be done in April. No mention was made of the Wild Area classification by Congress, no forthright personal commitments, no explanation of what the hell he’s been doing for the past six years, nothing that man with an opinion and the authority to back it would say.

The whole thing turned out to be just one more slippery link in a line of baloney that is 15 years long.

God and/or the U.S. Forest Service now may have complete control of Silviculture…but I am fast becoming surprisingly knowledgeable in the newly discovered field of Sliver-culture.

From time to time henceforth, I shall issue statements regarding my research in sliver-culture and its attendant fields of slippery-ology, bungling-ology, and passing-the-buck-ology. Should these reports appear rather frivolous on the surface, please remember that we are now dealing with a vast and complex machine whose utterances can no longer be taken seriously … or seriously enough.