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Adding more grazing land so close to Yellowstone is bear baiting
Montana’s Paradise Valley is aptly named, sitting between two towering mountain ranges, it cradles the mighty Yellowstone River that flows from its headwaters in America’s first national park and provides critical habitat to the native species still present 200 years after Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Yet, the Forest Service decided to expand cattle grazing on […]
Daines and Rosendale are timber industry puppets
Just like clockwork, Montana’s junior senator, Steve Daines and representative Matt Rosendale, have repeated the timber industry propaganda on forest management at their recent Western Caucus roundtable in Bozeman. Montanans, however, not only deserve better, they deserve the truth. Rep. Rosendale, like Sen, Daines and Gov. Greg Gianforte, has once again attempted to demonize conservation […]
Hurting today’s bull trout at the expense of the 19th century
The Clark Fork River is federally-designated as “critical habitat” for bull trout, which have been listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act since 1999. The Upper Clark Fork is also part of the nation’s largest Superfund site having suffered severe pollution from flushing a century of toxic mining and smelting wastes down the river. […]
How to really protect old growth forests
On Earth Day, President Joe Biden announced a new policy to protect mature and old growth trees which store the most carbon. Unfortunately, the president’s order will not ban logging of mature and old-growth forests or even protect the trees. Instead, the President’s order is the latest version of a long bipartisan, Orwellian plan to subsidize the destruction […]
What’s the price on the Greater Yellowstone Coalition’s ethics?
Do you ever wonder how much your ethics are worth? Apparently, for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the price is considerably more than the “30 pieces of silver” Judas got for his sell out, but that was 2,000 years ago. A cache of recently released documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows the Forest Service spent […]
Forest Service withdraws its appeal of massive logging project in grizzly country
It’s hard to imagine the damage an enormous timber sale would have had on 70 square miles of Montana’s Ninemile Valley, located about seven miles northwest of Huson, in the Lolo National Forest. But thanks to our lawsuit and two federal court rulings in our favor, the forests, rivers and wildlife in the Soldier-Butler project […]
Groups halt grazing in Elkhorn Mountains
Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council successfully halt grazing and sagebrush-juniper burning in the Elkhorn Mountains Wildlife Management Area A federal district court ruled in favor of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council in a lawsuit to force the Bureau of Land Management to conduct an adequate environmental […]
Big problems with small nuclear reactor proposals for Montana
Politicians and investor-owned utilities are now proposing small nuclear reactors in Montana to replace the old coal-fired power plants at Colstrip. For the last 44 years a successful Citizens’ Initiative banned nuclear power in Montana unless approved by the voters. But Republican majorities in the 2021 Montana legislature repealed the initiative and Republican Gov. Greg […]
Lee Metcalf would despise Tester’s Blackfoot bill
As a fifth-generation Montanan I vividly recall when true wilderness icons like Montana’s Sen. Lee Metcalf successfully fought for the 1964 Wilderness Act and passed bills designating millions of acres as Wilderness Areas. Then, there’s Senator Tester’s S.1493, the Blackfoot-Clearwater Stewardship Act, that designates only 80,000 acres as wilderness while mandating “logging without laws” on […]
Setting the record straight about citizens’ rights
Politicians like Sen. Steve Daines and Gov. Greg Gianforte have erroneously claimed that the Alliance for the Wild Rockies gets rich off the Equal Access to Justice Act for working to keep Montana, “high, wide and handsome.” It appears they either don’t understand how this federal law works or are intentionally misleading the public. Montanans […]
A big win for lynx, grizzly bears
Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) are medium-sized wildcats with a thick coat and broad, furry paws that allow them to stay on top of the snowpack. Lynx are an old-growth forest-dependent species, whose numbers have fallen due to the loss of old-growth forests from logging, the effects of climate change, and trapping. On March 24, 2000, the contiguous […]
Federal court halts massive logging and road building project in Ninemile Valley
Approving a magistrate judge’s recommendations, on Oct. 5, the Montana federal district court ruled for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Flathead-Lolo-Bitterroot Citizen Task Force in their lawsuits opposing the Soldier-Butler timber sale. The court ruled that the Forest Service failed to comply with its own self-imposed rules to protect elk winter range […]