Last fall during Wood Products Week, a young man from the Seeley area approached me. He said his logging company had his and three other families working in the woods that very week because of our focused efforts. Families that wouldn’t be getting that income from the forests, had we not been pushing to get more projects on the ground.
People talk about the timber industry in numbers of acres, board feet and stream miles restored. We cannot forget that people do that work — people who know how to work in the woods, how to sustainably harvest trees, and how to restore our watersheds. Years ago, Colorado lost nearly all of its mills, and with it, the ability to keep Coloradans working in the woods. It also lost the families who know how to do this work. I will not let that happen to Montana.