In 2025 the Alliance for the Wild Rockies protected 2,672 square miles — 1.7 MILLION acres — of wildlife habitat on National Forests with our victories in court. No other environmental group came even close to protecting this much habitat.

We did this by filing lawsuits. The Alliance filed 86 (46.7%) of the last 186 environmental lawsuits filed against the federal government to protect wildlife habitat. We are proud to say that dollar for dollar, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies remains one of the most effective small environmental nonprofits in the country.

We stretch every donation, whether it’s $10 or $10,000, and back it with legal muscle, scientific grounding, and a fierce commitment to fish and wildlife habitat in the Northern Rockies. Following are the highlights of our work.

1) Federal District Court rules in our favor and orders the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider its decision to not protect wolves under the Endangered Species Act. View article

National Park Service// Jacob W. Frank Photo

2) Saved Utah’s Manti-La Sal National Forest’s wildlife habitat from Bulldozers and Chainsaws. View Article

Photo: Wikimedia

The Alliance filed a lawsuit to stop the Forest Service from bulldozing, logging, and burning up to 1,487 square miles over the next 32 years– including Inventoried Roadless Areas — in the Manti-La Sal National Forest in southeast Utah. When faced with our lawsuit, the Forest Service decided to pull the project rather than lose in federal court.

The Alliance submitted detailed comments outlining the importance of pinyon and juniper trees for wildlife, including for the pinyon jay, a bird that is dependent on pinyon pine seed sand juniper berries to survive. Pinyon jay populations have nose-dived, falling by over 85 percent in the last 50 years; mainly due to habitat loss caused by Forest Service and BLM projects.

3) Won a court injunction to halt the Forest Service’s massive logging project in the Colville National Forest in eastern Washington. The project would have conducted logging, burning and road bulldozing for the next 20 years across 141 square miles in grizzly, wolverine, and lynx habitat. View Article

Photo: Dash Feierabend/USFWS.

4) Federal Court ruled for the Alliance, stopping the Black Ram clearcutting project and protecting 143 square miles of Cabinet-Yaak critical grizzly habitat in the Kootenai National Forest. View Article

5) Stopped the Knotty Pine clearcutting project by winning a ruling in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling protected 76 square miles of grizzly habit in the Kootenai National Forest. View Article

Photo: Glenn Phillips

6) Stopped the Hanna Flats logging project in a 10 square mile project area in lynx and grizzly habitat in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. View Article

Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

7) Halted massive illegal logging and burning project on 27 square miles in grizzly, elk, sage grouse, and lynx habitat in Montana’s Gravelly Mountains. View Article

Photo by USFWS

8) Stopped the 781-square mile, Eastside 20 year logging and burning project in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana. View Article

9) Alliance Court Victory Protects Grizzly Bears From Expanded Cattle Grazing in Paradise Valley. View Article

10) Stopped the National Park Service from dewatering the Clark Fork River, which is bull trout critical habitat in western Montana, to grow hay for cows. View Article. Also sued the State of Montana for not asserting its water rights for instream flows instead of allowing rivers to be dewatered in western Montana. View Article

10 a.) Filed a lawsuit against Yellowstone National Park to stop their new Bison Management Plan which authorizes widespread killing of bison. The Plan is based on outdated science that bison transmit brucellosis to cattle when, in fact, elk have given cattle brucellosis in every one of the 27 documented cases. Not one came from bison. View Article

Photo by National Park Service

Long standing Work

The Alliance continues to work to pass the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, S. 1198 in the Senate and H.R. 2420 in the House. The Act would protect all Greater Yellowstone Wilderness Study Areas as Wilderness along with designating all roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as Wilderness.

Please consider donating to help the Alliance for the Wild Rockies do even more in 2026.

The challenges have never been greater and the Alliance and our planet need your help.

Thank you for supporting our efforts to protect the Northern Rockies ecosystem…we couldn’t and can’t do it without you.

Mike Garrity is the Executive. Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies;