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By Root 1906 0

through what had been the Blodgett forest, we found ourselves in a landscape of fire-charred dead trees killed in one of the big forest fires whose smoke had filled the valley during our summer 2000 visit. Blodgett-area residents who had previously blocked Forest Service proposals to thin the forest demanded then that the Service hire 12 big firefighting helicopters at a cost of $2,000 per hour to save their homes by dropping water on them, while the Forest Service, obeying a government-imposed mandate to protect lives, people’s property, and then the forest in that order, was simultaneously allowing expanses of public timberlands far more valuable than those homes to burn. The Forest Service subsequently announced that it will no longer spend so much money and endanger firefighters’ lives just to protect private property. Many homeowners sue the Forest Service if their house burns in a forest fire, or if it burns in a backfire lit by the Forest Service to control a much bigger fire, or if it doesn’t burn but if a forest providing a pretty view from the deck of their house does burn. Yet some Montana homeowners are afflicted with such a rabidly anti-government attitude that they don’t want to pay taxes towards the costs of firefighting, nor to allow government employees onto their land to carry out fire prevention measures.

The next set of environmental problems in Montana involves its soils. One “minor” and specific soil problem is that the Bitterroot Valley’s boom in commercial apple orchards, which were initially very profitable, collapsed, due in part to apple trees exhausting the soil’s nitrogen. A more widespread soil problem is erosion, resulting from any of several changes that remove the plant cover normally protecting the soil: overgrazing, noxious weed infestation, logging, or excessively hot forest fires that sterilize the topsoil. Long-timer ranching families know better than to overgraze their pastures: as Dick and Jack Hirschy expressed it to me, “We must take good care of our land, or we will be ruined.” However, one of the Hirschys’ neighbors is an outsider who paid more for his property than it could sustainably support by ranching, and who is now overstocking his pastures in the short-sighted hope of recouping his investment. Other neighbors made the mistake of renting grazing rights on their land to tenants, who overgrazed for a quick profit during their three-year lease and didn’t care about the resulting long-term damage. The net result of these various causes of soil erosion is that about one-third of the Bitterroot’s watersheds are considered to be in good shape and not eroded, one-third are at risk of erosion, and one-third are already eroded and in need of restoration.

The remaining soil problem in Montana, besides nitrogen exhaustion and erosion, is salinization, a process involving salt accumulation in soil and groundwater. While such accumulation has always occurred naturally in some areas, a more recent concern is the ruining of large areas of farmland by salinization resulting from some human agricultural practices that I’ll explain in the next few paragraphs and in Chapter 13—particularly from clearing of natural vegetation, and from irrigation. In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water have reached levels double those of seawater.

Besides certain salts having specific toxic effects on crops, high salt concentrations exert a general harmful effect on crops similar to the effect of a drought, by raising the osmotic pressure of soil water and thereby making it harder for roots to absorb water by osmosis. The salty groundwater may also end up in wells and streams and may evaporate on the surface to leave a caked layer of salt. If you imagine yourself drinking a glass of “water” more concentrated than the ocean, you will appreciate that not only does it taste horrible and prevent farmers from growing crops, but that its dissolved boron, selenium, and other toxic ingredients may be bad for your health (and for that of wildlife and your livestock). Salinization is a problem today