When forester Scott Kuehn walks into the woods to do some
"mechanical treatment," he expects to cut some trees.

"It's something a man does to alter the woods," said Kuehn, who
works for Tricon Lumber in St. Regis. "It can be a guy with a chain
saw hand-cutting and piling. Or larger-equipment style, like
feller-bunchers. It can go all the way down to hand clippers. It's
mechanical logging versus old-style hand-falling."

Sen. Jon Tester mandates 10,000 acres of mechanical treatment a
year in his Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. That's the heart of the
"Forest Jobs" part of the title, and perhaps the most talked-about
two words in the 84-page bill.

A driving principle for the groups of environmentalists and
loggers who proposed the bill to Tester was to kick-start forest
projects they all agreed should get done. One agreement was the
designation of almost 1 million acres of new wilderness and recreation areas. Another
was that big chunks of national forest need people like Kuehn
mechanically treating trees.

"The work they're doing will be performed by loggers using
logging company equipment," Tester spokesman Aaron Murphy said.
"That's always the definition the folks who brought this proposal
to Jon had in mind. But it became clear as we heard testimony, that
this definition wasn't clear to everybody else."

***

In one meeting last October, Tester said
flat-out that mechanical treatment meant logging. At a public
meeting two weeks ago, Tester staff member Tracy Stone-Manning
defined mechanical treatment as "a person in the woods with a tool
that's not a match."

The proposal's supporters say that gives the bill flexibility to
do a wide range of work waiting to be done in Montana's forests.
Opponents say the term is so flexible, it's meaningless.

Last week, Tester staff members met with U.S. Forest Service
Region 1 Forester Leslie Weldon to work out a shared definition of
those two words. Weldon declined to comment on what her suggestions
or concerns were. Forest Service spokeswoman Rose Davis provided
the agency's 125-word definition of "mechanical treatment," but
would not elaborate on the "confidential meeting."

Murphy defined mechanical treatment as: "Any restoration
activity on forest land performed by human-controlled tools that
results in harvest of any wood fiber that could have a commercial
purpose."

The key word there, Murphy said, is "could."

"Activity on a forest has to result in something," he said. "It
can't just be looking at piece of land and deciding not to do
anything with it. It doesn't have to be sold, but it has to produce
material that could be."

So thinning out pine thickets that encroach on meadows would
count, even though the scrawny trees would never produce a 2-by-4.
Improving a trailhead would not count, because it's more about
moving dirt than trees. Prescribed burning doesn't count either (a
tool that's not a match).

Asked about the Weldon meeting, Murphy said the Forest Service
agrees on the principles of Tester's general definition of
mechanical treatment. Specific language would be worked out by the
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which is hearing his
bill.

Forest Jobs and Recreation Act supporter Gordy Sanders of
Pyramid Mountain Lumber Co. pointed out another wrinkle in the
wording. Mechanical treatment defines how something's done - but
not what is done.

"If you put mechanical treatment in a contract, that would
determine what kind of equipment would be appropriate," he said.
"But there's always more than mechanical treatment in the contract.
A contractor will perform treatments on the ground to meet an end
result."

In other words, how much valuable material gets produced in the
end? So what kind of trees are we talking about? Saw logs? Fence
posts? Pulp for paper mills or biomass burners? Slash to burn on
site?

***

A demonstration landscape stewardship project
that Pyramid Mountain Lumber recently completed produced 3.5
million board-feet of timber. That showed the company this process
could work, mill vice president Loren Rose said.

"Pyramid is going into this with no expectation of assured
volume," he told a Missoula audience two weeks ago. "We know
there's acres that need treatment, and we're comfortable that
something's going to get done."

Whether that's paid for in the value of lumber cut or
tax-subsidized fuel-reduction projects, Montanans will still have
jobs in the woods. Stewardship contracts are designed on a barter
system - loggers do some maintenance work like road removal and
culvert repair, in return for access to merchantable timber.

If the timber isn't available or the market won't support it,
Murphy said the Obama administration has already budgeted new pots
of Forest Service money to pay for the cleanup and repair work.

The 10,000-acre goal comes from several calculations, Murphy
said. One looks at existing requests to treat wildland-urban
interface zones for wildfire protection. The Beaverhead-Deerlodge
National Forest alone has 170,000 such acres.

Another involves existing Forest Service plans that show 1.9
million acres now appropriate for cutting, clearing or other work -
of which 100,000 acres over a decade would be a tiny fraction.

Which 100,000 acres could be sticky, however. EarthJustice
attorneys Douglas Honnold and Tim Presso went straight to that
point in an April 7 letter to Tester.

"First, we are concerned that a lack of clarity in the bill's
timber treatment provisions could lead to unintended outcomes when
the legislation is implemented at the National Forest level," they
wrote. Vague wording in how stewardship areas are defined and what
the secretary of agriculture can allow "leaves the Secretary with
discretion to authorize mechanical timber treatment otherwise
prohibited by forest plans and other legal requirements."

That's an even bigger issue for Matthew Koehler of Wild West
Institute. When he reads those words, he sees a guarantee to the
timber industry for far more timber than it's been able to get
before.

"That 10,000 acres is a bare minimum - there's no maximum,"
Koehler said. "What if a mill says, ‘You must maintain us, and we
want to cut 30,000 acres a year?' "

Murphy acknowledged the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act does not
have a ceiling on how much work it will trigger. But he said
existing forces will provide the brakes.

That's because there's a limit to the money and time the Forest
Service has to design projects. Plus, required environmental
analyses consider wildlife impacts, public wishes, erosion and
other forest health factors. Planners will be hard-pressed to meet
the 10,000-acre goal, let alone exceed it.

"As long as it's sustainable, and there's money and time for it
to happen, theoretically it could go over the 10,000-acre minimum,"
Murphy said. "But I don't think there's a lot to worry about. I
think that's pretty far-fetched."