 |
 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||||
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Quarterly update from AWR's Executive Director Executive Director's Report As Fall passes and the high peaks of the mighty Rockies are studded with new snows, Alliance for the Wild Rockies finds itself in a familiar place—right in the center of the action to defend our wild places and wild things.
Under orders from the Bush Administration, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has eliminated protection for 20,000 miles of rivers and streams from Montana's Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. These sweeping removals threaten the integrity of the Endangered Species Act as well as the quality of our waters throughout the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest. Industrial interests are seeking to check and reverse years of progress towards restoring the aquatic ecosystems of the Northwest. We are also working hard on our campaign to recover the grizzly bear by protecting its habitat and the connecting corridors of wildlands between the major ecosystems in the Northern Rockies. We are opposing the premature removal of Endangered Species Act protections for the Yellowstone grizzly until these corridors are protected. We have never been the ones to shrink from a stiff challenge when necessity calls and we do it on a shoe-string budget commensurate with our grass-roots nature. But we can't do it with nothing and we urgently need your help. We ask that you make an end-of-the-year extra contribution. Those who answer the call are the 'critical habitat' for groups like AWR. Corporately-funded foundations are often afraid of controversy, which means hard-hitting groups like the Alliance must do more with less. We've adjusted through belt-tightening measures to become leaner and meaner. We also partner with our member organizations to prevent bad projects. Our recent track history tells the story. Over the past year we have successfully stopped numerous large timber-cutting and road-building programs on national forests within prime grizzly bear, wolf, elk, and trout habitat. For example, we won our lawsuit stopping all logging of critical wildlife habitat in the Targhee National Forest, an important wildlife corridor for wolves and grizzly bears out of Yellowstone Park. At the Ninth Circuit, we assisted Native Ecosystems Council and stopped logging within the Elkhorn Wildlife Management Unit on the Helena National Forest in some of Montana's premier elk habitat. We await rulings on our challenges to road management plans allowing far too many roads in grizzly bear habitat on the Kootenai, Idaho Panhandle and Lolo National Forests. We've continued to spur excellent national media coverage of these issues. In just the past few weeks stories have appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Oregonian, San Francisco Chronicle and Salt Lake Tribune. But there's no way to sugar-coat it: Congress and the administration is putting on a full-court press to rollback or eliminate environmental protections across the board whether it is toxic emissions, water pollution or expedited development of public lands. We must stand firm and hold the line or some animals and their habitat will be lost forever. We rely heavily on the support of our members to make it happen, so please consider making an end of the year donation. We wish each of you a safe and enjoyable end of the year and thank you for your continued support for protection of the Wild Rockies. Sincerely,
|
|||
|
|||
AWR is preparing to file a lawsuit challenging the fraudulent final designations of habitat critical to the survival and recovery of the Threatened Bull Trout.