 |
Long before the highway connected northern Idaho's upper Lochsa area with the outside world, Bud Moore roamed the Bitterroot Mountains as the forest ranger. He was responsible for the Lochsa, part of the Selway and the North Fork of the Clearwater, and all the country in-between.
It was a time when folks in the Forest Service wore the white hats. "My job was to steward this country, to know it better than anybody else," said Bud. "And I'd look in the mirror every night and say, 'how did you do today?' I didn't look and say 'what's the supervisor thinking?' It all comes down to the forest ranger, then and today. That's the key."
Watch a video segment of Bud Moore.
Bud remembers the 1960's, when charges of overharvesting began to tarnish the reputation of the Forest Service. "I called it the timber cut syndrome. The budget would come out from the district. They'd say, 'tell us what you need to do this and this, but be sure you cut this much timber.' Leaders in the Forest Service were torn apart, people that loved the land, yet they were still trying to get that wood out. They were damaging other values and they knew it."
But today Bud is optimistic that something called "ecosystem management" can turn things around for the Forest Service and the land.
 Forest Ranger Bud Moore in 1946 at Blodgett Pass |
"The challenge is to go in there and take what we have to take to take care of ourselves as a society and still keep all the connectivity, all the stuff that's important, to make that thing stay alive and function."
"This land has some broken pieces. For example, the grizzlies are gone; we lost something great... the sea run fish, that's another weak link. So there are some broken linkages -- big ones -- that go clear to the ocean."
Bud calls ecosystem management "the biggest change in my lifetime"; and yet he realizes that without the public trust, not much will improve. "Just how in the blazes can a ranger run a show with the public fighting each other, the public he's supposed to be working for? You're just stalemated, until we join up a little bit.
"Working together works, and that's what I'm trying to represent today, in whatever way I can."
 |
Bud practices what he preaches on his own two hundred acres just over the Idaho border in Montana's Swan Valley. He and his neighbors have developed a landscape analysis of their respective properties, to help them understand the inter-relatedness of things. "The challenge here really is to get some income back from the land," says Moore, as he turns timber into rough-cut 2x6's with his one-man saw mill. "I couldn't keep this place if I couldn't get something back from it. This is the centerpiece, where the payoff comes."
"I think nature has, over eons of time, come up with a scheme that we just can't beat. That's the way I look at it. So we work with that. But we're part of this thing, too, and we have to take something out of it, too, to survive. And so right in there is the challenge." Bud Moore has written a book about land ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains, called The Lochsa Story; it's part history, part philosophy, and part autobiography.