KALISPELL - There was a time, not so very long ago, when environmentalists living in the shadow of big timber, in the logging lands of the Yaak, didn't sleep in the same bed two nights in a row.
Cabins burned mysteriously in the dark. Cars were vandalized. People were attacked, literally beaten for beliefs.
Out in the forests, logging equipment was sabotaged. Woods work was monkey-wrenched.
In town, the Forest Service was crushed between opposing forces, retreating always.
"The Timber Wars," said Robyn King, "were absolutely fierce. We've had a long history of extreme polarization and violence up here."
And for a quarter-century, she said, "the fighting got us nowhere."
No new wilderness lands. No logs for the mill.
"Everyone lost, and no one gained," said King, who heads the Yaak Valley Forest Council, a conservation group.
"We all knew, deep down, that we couldn't afford to continue to be adversaries. It was tearing our communities apart."
And so King came down out of the Yaak, again and again and again, to meet with tree-huggers and tree-cutters, motorheads and wildernuts, everyone with a stake. She told them what was on her mind and, more importantly, asked what was on theirs. And slowly, carefully, steadily King replaced fixed philosophies with familiar faces, brought forest management down to the neighborhood level, built bridges and created coalitions and surveyed the common ground.
It was, she said, "often painful."
But then, just last month, these unlikely bedfellows built themselves a float, and together won first prize in Troy's Fourth of July Parade.
A couple weeks later, their cooperative land-use plan was included in a timber-and-wilderness bill proposed by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. A complicated bit of compromise legislation, it designates some lands wilderness, opens some for logging, sets some aside for motorized recreation, keeps some quiet.
Tester's bill cobbles together three bottom-up efforts - in the Seeley Lake area, in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge, and up the Yaak. Since its unveiling, the "Forest Jobs and Recreation Act of 2009" has come under close scrutiny, with advocates and critics trading daily barbs.
None of which matters one bit to Robyn King. Because what really matters in all this, she said, happened long before Jon Tester arrived on the scene to codify the particulars.
- Michael Jamison of the Missoulian