Can one tree save a forest? Absolutely. The Place: The Black Ram region of extreme northwestern Montana — on the U.S.-Canada border — exists in a magical seam of unparalleled biodiversity where the Pacific Northwest integrates into the Northern Rockies. It’s the first place where water flows into the state of Montana, and the last place where sunlight falls each day. Black Ram is in Yaak Valley, itself part of the Kootenai National Forest, which excels at storing significant amounts of carbon in long-term safekeeping. It’s the wettest place in Montana. It’s the lowest elevation. It’s the northernmost. Its waters are the purest — the only watershed in the state that remains free of aquatic invasive species. Fire will come here, too, but it will come here last.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Yaak Valley Forest Council (@yaakvalleyforestcouncil) There’s still not a single acre of permanently protected land in the Yaak, which we at the Yaak Valley Forest Council define as the million-acre land mass lying north of the Kootenai River (the largest tributary to the Columbia) and south of the Canadian border. The Yaak’s western boundary is the Idaho border, and its eastern boundary is the enormous (and aging) manmade reservoir of Lake Koocanusa. The Yaak is literally a land that time forgot; during the last Ice Age, when the glaciers retreated, the Yaak remained uncarved, sleeping in a nest or bowl of ice that did not retreat, and which took a couple extra thousand years to melt. In this regard, it’s one of the newest places on Earth. And in it a rare primary forest such as the one at Black Ram is an extremely valuable and mysterious thing, worthy of much deeper study. The U.S. Forest Service has plundered Yaak for decades — two-thirds of it has been roaded or clearcut, when once roughly 50% of the valley was old growth. And yet the Yaak lives and possesses an unvanquishable rainforest spirit of eternal green fire. Here, rot is the primary agent of change, not fire. Its spectacular biodiversity is still intact, for nothing has gone extinct here yet — not since the last Ice Age. Fully 25% of Montana’s list of sensitive species are found on this one national forest. Dozens of migrating bird species depend on its unique habitat. So do cutthroat trout, northern alligator lizards, pika, and endangered grizzlies. An estimated 18-25 bears remain in the Yaak, and the recent deaths of female grizzlies leaves this isolated population even more imperiled. The Yaak is also the epicenter of western larch, a deciduous conifer that can live nearly 1,000 years and rains billions of golden needles onto the valley in the fall, covering everything, the animate and the inanimate, in spun gold, sometimes over the course of but a single night. Why It Matters: Not every gesture in the Anthropocene should be made purely for the sake of that brief, wobbling, severely untested species called humanity. It should be noted, however, that old and mature forests such as those in the Black Ram region protect us: They can store up to 12% of the globe’s annual carbon emissions in long-term safekeeping. The Yaak itself has been called “the Fort Knox” of aboveground carbon storage in Montana. So it matters that Yaak Valley is the poster forest for Forest Service overreach — for the agency’s stealth campaign to liquidate old growth rather than protect it. In this case the Service has proposed a timber sale at Black Ram that would affect more than 95,000 acres, including 4,000 acres that could be clearcut. The Service has already hacked its way into this ecosystem, widening a road near an existing clearcut and harming centuries-old trees in the name of “fire prevention.” It matters because an enormous timber lobbying group, American Forest Resources Council, has declared Black Ram a line in the sand. Well, so too have the six employees of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, The Montana Project, and a whole lot of other people, including writers Wendell Berry, Richard Powers, Bill McKibben, Terry Tempest Williams, musicians Maggie Rogers and James McMurtry, poet laureate Beth Ann Fennelly, painters Monte Dolack and Clyde Aspevig, and many more. AFRC has specifically listed YVFC’s 2023 court victory, which temporarily blocked the logging plan at Black Ram, as one of the key reasons they’ve petitioned the Supreme Court to do away with the National Environmental Policy Act, complaining that a group as small as ours should not be able to intervene in lawbreaking. As you can see, democracy is under attack here, too — one of 10,000 arrows fired at it daily. The successful defense of Black Ram — since appealed by the Forest Service — also matters because it is important from a scientific perspective that the general populace understand that the wildfires of this century are wind- and drought- and temperature-driven, not forest-driven. One need look no farther than the streets and buildings of Hollywood to understand this: that the dark cool forests of the north country are not our enemy; they are our solution. Global warming and the burning of fossil fuels is invisible, unfortunately, and therefore deniable. Black Ram matters also because it is the foundation for a new social movement of artists-as-activists. Much as the Harlem Renaissance and the Hudson River School became a place-based social and artistic movement, so too is the old forest at Black Ram becoming one, attracting the nation’s finest photographers, painters, poets, musicians, sculptors, performance artists, luthiers, and more. U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón visited the old forest and wrote two poems about Black Ram, one of which she read to President and Mrs. Biden. Actor and musician Jeff Bridges has commissioned several craft guitars to be made from a piece of ancient tight-grained spruce damaged by a Forest Service roadbuilding operation — 315 years a tree, and now but in one year a guitar. The guitars are being played around the country as part of Bridges’ and Breedlove Guitars’ “All in This Together” sustainability campaign.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Stop Black Ram (@stopblackram) Who’s Protecting It Now: The tiny band of six employees of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, whose mission is “working for a wild Yaak through science, education, and bold action,” are aided by an arts-based organization called the Montana Project. YVFC has partnered to provide invaluable ground truthing to partner in legal victories along with the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator), the Alliance for Wild Rockies and Wild Earth Guardians, as well as Save the Yellowstone Grizzly, to help hold back the bulldozers — for now. The heart of wildness, heart of science, heart of mystery, heart of art is at stake, clinging by one thread: a good story. The story is this: We went into the old forest with rage against the U.S. Forest Service, which plans to clearcut this ancient primary centuries- or perhaps millennia-old forest — but we realized our rage might not be the most effective advocacy. Instead, we’re gambling on art, paired with an increased dosage of science. The Forest Service went in prematurely and painted the trees with bright orange and blue paint. It strung what seemed like miles of ribbons and widened a road to the edge of the proposed giant clearcuts. We went to court and prevailed, but still the Service hungers for this land, appealing our victory. In the old-growth clearcutting that occurred when the Service widened the road (calling it “fire protection”), they damaged numerous ancient giant Engelmann spruce at the edge of the new clearcut. Engelmann spruce are prized for producing guitars that make the cleanest, clearest sound. From this fallen giant, we cut out a section about the size of a whale vertebrae, which revealed the most perfect tight-grained spruce imaginable. We wheelbarrowed it out, took it to master luthier Kevin Kopp and the team at Breedlove Guitars, who used the thin sheets cleaved from its center to make a small handful of Black Ram guitars, which now advocate for the protection of old forests around the world. Can one tree save a forest? Absolutely. What This Place Needs: We need more artists to come paint it, poets to write about it, and musicians — around the world — to sing for it and to play the Black Ram guitar at concerts. We need more scientists to study this unique ecosystem, engaging grad students in long-term studies that measure the effects of climate change on sensitive species, including our own. There are so many questions to answer here: Do western larch hybridize with alpine larch, and if so, where is the strand line between the two, and is it rising or falling? What about our whitebark pine, the northernmost in the lower 48? What is the fungal profile beneath a clearcut compared to that of an ancient primary forest — never logged, never roaded — such as the rarity at Black Ram? What a great opportunity for a biological transect across the entire million-acre Yaak country, such as explorer Michael Fay and National Geographic did across the entirety of the African continent.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Stop Black Ram (@stopblackram) We also need a big green group or coalition to sponsor a national concert of awareness campaign — call it Climate Aid — celebrating the ability of old and mature forests to store up to 12% of the world’s annual carbon emissions. Sure it’s a big dream, but what have we got to lose? Oh, right: everything. How much time do we have left? Another 1,000 years? Certainly not. A thousand days? Unlikely. Hurry. Twelve percent is not 100%, but it is enough to buy us a bit of the commodity rarer than gold or silver, time, and life. The Yaak Valley Forest Council’s dreams are as big as the land itself, yet utterly achievable. Because forests of big old trees store far more carbon than younger forests and smaller trees, and because they continue over the course of their long lives to absorb and store carbon at a far faster rate than the pipe-stem youngsters. (Even when an old forest burns, the vast majority of its carbon remains stored on-site, aboveground, in the dramatic firescape of the sentinels and spars that then become the home of so many of the cavity-nesters that are part of the secret thrumming engine of the Yaak’s relatively unstudied ecosystem.) We envision Yaak being declared a Climate Refuge — the first in a national and then global Curtain of Green, old forests protected everywhere but particularly in the northern latitudes, where boreal and sub-boreal forests possess the ability to store extraordinary amounts of carbon, up to six times more than the Amazonian rainforests. We envision the Black Ram Climate Refuge as being a place dedicated to the maximum recovery of the Yaak’s grizzly bears — currently referred to by some scientists as “the walking dead,” unless current management practices change. We envision it being an area for increased scientific as well as artistic inquiry into the effects of climate change on sensitive species, including our own, and co-managed by a Tribal nonprofit such as the Montana band of the Kootenai, who traditionally performed the annual summer drumming ceremony of the Sun Dance along the banks of the Yaak River. And the tiny staff of YVFC needs financial support; for parts of nine years now, our little six-member group has kept the Department of Agriculture, 35,000 strong, from erasing this ancient inland rainforest. But most of all Black Ram needs one more year of grace, after the thousands that have preceded it — millennia that have been invested in this farthest and most unknown corner of Montana. Lessons From the Fight: We don’t have the kind of access where a lobbyist can freely enter a congressperson’s office, but each of you has the ability to write and let the politicians know they’re being watched on this issue. That a light is shining down from above on this dark shady cool wet ancient forest. You may well know a musician or other artist with whom you want to share this story, or a scientist. That’s what a refuge is, in part: a place to come to, in advance of the flames. It’s your land, our land; the law requires the management officials and agencies to take into consideration your input on these actions. Whether you’ve ever walked in the old forest at Black Ram or not is not the primary consideration. Your passion is your authority, this land is your land, and again, by joining in the defense of Black Ram — advocating to protect it forever as a Climate Refuge, rather than converting it to hot windswept dust — you can take active steps to help slow the rate of climate change. There is so much now that lies beyond our control that it’s exhilarating to find something we can do: that we still have the power of action available to us. All it takes is one short and direct letter: “Don’t clearcut Black Ram. Protect it as a Climate Refuge. Make the recovery of the Yaak’s supremely imperiled grizzly bear far more of a priority than it currently is for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.” Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator: Protect This Place: Ladakh, the Planet’s ‘Third Pole’ The post Protect This Place: Montana’s Untamed Black Ram Forest appeared first on The Revelator.

A proposed timber sale within the Yaak Valley threatens massive old-growth trees and habitat. Instead, could it become the nation’s first climate refuge? The post Protect This Place: Montana’s Untamed Black Ram Forest appeared first on The Revelator.