BOZEMAN, MONT.- Snow is still ten feet deep on the Spanish Peaks just south of town, but summer is coming to the Gallatin Valley. Greening fields and the sudden emergence of kayaks and mountain bikes tells us the annual crush of tourists will soon arrive in the region's national parks and forests.

Recreation is serious business in Montana. Locals aren't pleased with the U.S. Forest Service's latest proposal to sell timber in Bozeman's backyard. The Forest Service plans to sell 4.7 million board feet of timber from the Gallatin National Forest, which borders Yellowstone National Park. If the sale goes forward, approximately 1,175 18-wheelers full of dead trees will roll down Hyalite Canyon, one of the most heavily used recreation areas in the state.

The Forest Service first tried to offer this sale in 1990. Planning proceeded until a 1995 judicial injunction stopped it. But the Forest Service offered the sale again under a legal provision called the Salvage Rider, an amendment to the 1996 budget designed to speed the harvest of dead trees. The Salvage Rider insulates sales like this one from citizen appeals and mandates the Forest Service offer almost 5 billion board feet of "salvage" timber this year.

The Hyalite sale exemplifies how Congress misses opportunities to harmonize sound economics with ecological values. Freshman Republicans, who claim to favor markets over bureaucracies, instead require command-and-control agencies to mandate flows of commodities. The laws treat Forest Service officials as if they are commissars of a socialized factory producing trees. And Democrats offer nothing more constructive than the standard orthodoxy of "improved" regulation and oversight.

The Gallatin National Forest is one of the nation's premier recreation areas. The Hyalite sale faces massive local opposition over aesthetic, economic and ecological concerns. As in typical, this sale will cost taxpayers far more than the timber is worth; even the agency's creative accounting describes the sale's profitability as "marginal."

Increasingly, the highest economic use of national forests lies in recreation rather than commodity production. In the Gallatin National Forest according forest economist Randal O'Toole, of the Oregon-based Thoreau Institute, it costs taxpayers $50,000 per year to maintain a single timber-related job. Mr O'Toole found that the recreation industry directly employed 1,200 people; timber jobs only 50. By requiring the Forest Service to sell goods at far below their true costs, Congress undermines the region's natural transition from a commodity-based to service- and information-based economy. What's more, government "dumping" of cheap timber makes the market unpredictable for private-sector commodity suppliers, reducing their incentive to manage land responsibly.

Such policies represent the last gasps of Progressive Era resource management identified with Teddy Roosevelt. His well intentioned but naive idea that benevolent centralized bureaucracies would protect the nation's natural resources and provide a measure of economic stability has proved a failure.

In 1905 Roosevelt's boxing buddy, Gifford Pinchot, created the Forest Service to protect vast tracts of Western lands. The agency developed the image as a tough white-hat in a still untamed region. Pinchot promised efficient, responsive and scientific management; the agency still poses as the model of bureaucratic efficiency. But over the next 90 years the Forest Service mutated from a small, idealistic bureau of scientific managers into a growth-addicted agency intent on protecting and perpetuating its own budget and power. Well intentioned and hardworking professionals are caught in a pressure cooker of conflicting values: central planning, changing social values, strict environmental regulations, new ecological science and an increasingly amenity-based Western economy.

In today's West the irony of the Progressive legacy is starkly clear. Remote bureaucrats, allied with subsidized production interests, establishh mandates both insensitive to local values and insulated from market processes. The results devastate both communities and ecosystems. Meanwhile, Western senators and representatives, addicted to subsidies, perpetuate the myth that the region is a land of rugged individualists.

It's time for the Forest Service to abandon its role as a producer of commodities. Instead, the agency should focus its considerable expertise on the protection of wilderness and wildlife and the promotion of recreation and research in national forests. Commodity production is best left to the private sector. Rethinking Progressive Era approaches to natural resource management challenges politicians of all stripes. Successful reforms must encourage harmony between ecology, sound economics and responsible liberty. These intellectual foundations are well established. The politician who builds on them will earn the mantle of conservationist, in the best tradition of TR.