John Williams: “I came up with the idea for this study because industry and timber industry workers in Montana asked me to find a way to…”

“I came up with the idea for this study because industry and timber industry workers in Montana asked me to find a way to determine the carrying capacity of the land in order to be certain that Montana's natural resources extractive industries would have a stable future. That is how this study got in the bill. Does it make sense to do it? Well, consider the spotted owl problem. That crisis, that catastrophe out there, our neighbors to the West of Montana, does not have a thing to do with the spotted owl. It has to do with folly, folly, the folly of the timber industry and the Federal Government, primarily the Forest Service, which would conspire to cut 90 percent of the old growth timber in the Pacific Northwest and then leave the workers, the small businesses, the Main Street merchants with one argument, one debate left. Do we cut out all the rest or do we put out the foreclosure and bankruptcy signs? Do we go on unemployment? Out our way in Montana, and I would add in Idaho, we still have an opportunity to avoid that kind of folly. However, to do so, we have to understand for tomorrow better than we do for today what the carrying capacity of the land is.”