Members of the Sanders Natural Resource Council followed up their well-attended meeting in Trout Creek on May 10 by packing more than 130 concerned citizens into the sweltering Troy Town Hall on Tuesday. 

The Council, a non-government organization, is run by citizens from Sanders and Lincoln counties who are concerned with possible land closures by the U.S. Forest Service in several national forests.

The core of the group’s presentation revolved around the potential restrictions in the Kootenai National Forest as well as the Lolo and Idaho Panhandle National Forests that may be imposed as part of grizzly bear recovery plans. 

Paul Fielder, a wildlife biologist with more than three decades of experience, was one of the speakers Tuesday evening and summed up the council’s goals succinctly.

“I’m not here to fear monger and tell people a bunch of lies,” Fielder said. “But we are losing access to our forests and our economy is losing access to our forests.”

The central focal point of the meeting seemed to range wildly, as speakers lambasted what they perceived as failed grizzly policies, then decrying a lack of coordination between government and local entities.

But what it boiled down to was the conflict the Council saw between human interests and grizzly bears in the national forests. Ron Olfert, the Council’s chairman, read a mission statement from the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee that spoke of the needs of the stubborn bear species.

“You don’t see the economy considered,” Olfert said. “The bear comes first. If there is any discrepancy between humans and bears, the human has got to go.”

Much of the evidence the Council used came from Forest Service documents, specifically what it termed the “Grizzly Bear Amendment,” a plan detailing access to motorized vehicles in the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak bear recovery zones.

Of the 130-plus people in attendance, only six had read the Forest Service plan released in January. 

Matt Bowser, a Troy resident and one of the few who had read the document, thought the approach the Sanders Natural Resource Council was taking was perhaps less helpful than the Council thought it was.

“It’s a multi-layered document that can’t be summed up in a few misinformed sound bytes,” Bowser said. “The plan is based off of work groups done since 2003, so it didn’t drop out of the sky.”