Alliance for the Wild Rockies Forces Forest Service to Drop Plan to Log & Burn Grizzly Habitat in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains

The U.S. Forest Service caved after the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Bitterroot and Wildearth Guardians sent a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue to stop the massive Bitterroot Front Project which would have logged and burned 216 square miles of grizzly bear habitat in a bull trout watershed in the Bitterroot National Forest in southwest Montana.

Bull Trout image by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The Forest Service halted the project which authorized bulldozing 27 miles of new roads to log 31,330 acres and then intentionally burn the entire 138,026 acres of the project area.

As a final insult to the public the Forest Service then planned to spray the cancer-causing herbicide Roundup throughout the area. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is an endocrine disruptor.

The Forest Service has already lost in court multiple times on the same legal issues that apply here and would have lost again had the project gone forward.

Those issues include refusing to tell the public where the logging roads would be built; where and what type of logging would occur; and failing to assess the project’s dangers to grizzly bears, bull trout, and their habitat.

Logging road photo by Steve Platt.

The Forest Service also failed to explain how killing 35,000 acres of threatened whitebark pines, an important food source for grizzly bears, would help recover whitebark pines or grizzly bears - both of which are listed as “threatened” on the Endangered Species List.

Whitebark pine photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the Forest Service has to tell the public what, where, and how the agency is planning to log so the public can verify if it’s following the law, including requirements of the Forest Plan, the Endangered Species Act, and not poisoning the public.

Despite the charade that the Forest Service is essential to the nation’s timber supply, it only produces 5% of America’s lumber while over 90% comes from private lands. Yet, the agency increases the staggering national debt by billions every year to subsidize massive deforestation at the behest of the timber industry.

People and groups that want to restore the funding cuts that Trump made to the Forest Service are part of the problem. The record shows the Forest Service regularly broke the law and destroyed wildlife habitat long before Trump and will do so after he leaves office.

Simply put, the agency is a serial lawbreaker primarily concerned with maximizing its budget while “getting out the cut” for the timber industry. Which is why it makes no sense to refund the agency’s logging projects since the science shows the best way to avoid wildfire damage is by hardening homes by thinning trees within 30 feet of the home and using fire-resistant materials, not logging and burning wildlife habitat miles from homes.

In the early 1990s Professor Tom Power, then chair of the Economics Department at the University of Montana, said the Forest Service was so in thrall to the timber industry that it should be disbanded in favor of a new agency whose mission would be to protect the wildlife habitat and watersheds on our national forests.

Given that we are in the “sixth great extinction cycle,” we also need an agency that follows the law, which requires it to protect habitat to recover species listed under the Endangered Species Act. Doing so requires protecting and restoring the ecosystems upon which they depend so they can eventually be recovered and removed from the Endangered Species List.

Grizzly sow and cub photo by Glenn Phillips.

The Alliance goes to court to ensure the Forest Service follows the law, just as the rest of “we, the people” are expected to. The Alliance is a small group so anything you can donate to help must protect our national forests from the Trump administration would make a big difference.

Mike Garrity is the executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.