My friends from Norway were astounded a few years ago as we drove through the forests of Western Montana. Their shock was at the waste they saw. In Europe, timberland is intensively managed for the sustained use of forest resources. What is not milled into building material becomes biofuel for heating and electrical generation. There are almost no forest fires in Europe because there is no jungle of combustible material helter-skelter across the landscape, and no massive insect infestations.

With the vastness of our public domain we Americans enjoy our magnificent wildlands in a way Europeans cannot. For doing so, we a pay a price. Today, 3 million acres of our national forests are dead or dying from the pine beetle, and next year the number of acres is projected to go as high as 6 million. The infestation won't grow endlessly, of course, because the more bug-killed forests the more catastrophic the inevitable fires will be. The Forest and Jobs Recreation Act recently introduced by Sen. John Tester is the first serious effort in nearly two decades to address Montana's out-of-control forests.

As I grew up in the fir and larch country of Northwest Montana, perhaps my first recollection of a public policy issue was the Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act of 1960. The concept was simple and sensible: If timber is not harvested at a faster rate than it can regenerate it can be used forever. Traditional harvest practices are generally compatible with grazing, recreation and wildlife propagation. Good, sustainable jobs are created, and managed forests are healthier and less susceptible to forest fires.

Forest standoff

Sadly, by the 1980s greed complicated the balanced concept of multiple use and sustained yield. The amount of timber that could be harvested each year, the "allowable cut," was based on the tree-growing capacity of the forest land. Creation of wilderness removed land from the timber base, and so reduced the calculated allowable cut. Therefore, the timber industry opposed any new wilderness.

At about this same time industry began to adopt harvest practices based on "even age management." That is the euphemism for clear cutting. The public became alarmed when vast mountainsides were denuded of timber on a scale unimagined at the time of the Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act. Clear cutting appeared to be a single use of the forest land.

In the ensuing wave of litigation between the environmentalists and the timber industry, the lawyers stumped the loggers every time.

Harvest shrinks

In 1987, over 600 million board feet of timber was harvested from Montana's national forests. In 2007, the number from the same lands was 87 million. Since 1990, 22 Montana sawmills have closed, starving for lack of timber while surrounded by an ocean of it, tied up in litigation and growing up in stagnation and infestation.

For nearly two decades, Montana politicians have kept their distance from the controversial forest issue. It has been the big wet dog of Montana politics. Now, to his credit,Tester has shown some leadership. His bill will create 700,000 acres of wilderness in areas well suited for it, and it will guarantee timber harvest at an easily sustainable level of 10,000 acres a year.

Tester's bill won't prevent the catastrophic fires that now must result from many years of litigation and neglect. It is too late for that. But late is better than never, and if the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act becomes law it may lead to other balanced and farsighted legislation addressing the rest of Montana's festering forest lands.

Bob Brown, former Montana secretary of state and Senate president, is a senior fellow at the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana.