One of the people who are going to save the wilderness I love-the Yaak Valley of extreme northwestern Montana-is Wayne Hirst, a man who has been proclaiming his hatred of wilderness for as long as I can remember. From his office on Main Street in Iibby, Wayne and his wife, Shirley, run their accounting firm, Hirst & Associates. Rumpled, voluble, and, despite recent heart trouble, coiled with excess energy, Wayne can recall the days when the sawmill in this town of 2,400 employed 1,200 people-all their clients, all their friends. Nobody knows better the economic collapse of the logging industry at the personal level.rnI think it's fair to say that when Wayne looks at a forest, he thinks of how many logs can be taken out of it, how many dollars those logs might yield and how many jobs. Whereas I tend to see something entirely different. I'm content to look at that same forest and celebrate the lady's slippers and kinnikinnick growing there, and admire the seething texture of an intact forest, uncut and unbroken.
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