contact Michael Garrity, Executive Director, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, (406) 459-5936
The Kootenai National Forest has dropped an appeal of a federal court ruling that halted three planned road-building and logging projects on public land in occupied habitat for the endangered grizzly bear in Northwestern Montana.
“We are extremely pleased by this decision which is, quite frankly, one of the most sensible actions the agency has yet taken on this particular project,” said Michael Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “The district court overwhelmingly upheld our contentions that the project violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Forest Management Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.”
In a ruling last June, the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana not only halted implementation of the illegal federal projects, but also ordered the US Forest Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service to complete further environmental analysis and change the project designs to comply with federal laws before the projects could proceed.
“There are very few grizzly bears left in the Kootenai National Forest,” Garrity said. “So instead of wasting taxpayers’ money defending multiple illegal timber sales in endangered grizzly bear habitat, we hope the agencies will now start working to conserve and recover grizzly bears in this imperiled population in NW Montana.”
“The Forest Service knows most grizzly bears are killed because of encounters with humans near roads,” Garrity explained. “But the agency nonetheless wanted to build 14 miles of new logging roads for these projects. Besides costing taxpayers millions of dollars, these roads would have definitely threatened extinction of the isolated Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population.”
The dwindling population of the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear inhabits remote mountainous regions in Northwestern Montana and Northern Idaho and, according the US Fish & Wildlife Service, are almost certainly going extinct. “The agency is ignoring its own science,” added Liz Sedler, a long-time grizzly bear advocate for the Alliance. “The small population of only 45 bears is less than half of the minimum of 100 bears needed ensure a genetically-stable population. That fails to meet the federal government’s own recovery goal and these projects would only have accelerated the loss of this population of grizzlies.”
Besides the 14 miles of new roads, the three logging proposals would have re-opened 8.5 miles of closed roads and reconstructed 2.4 miles of existing roads to facilitate almost 4,000 acres of commercial logging in habitat currently occupied by the threatened grizzly bears.
“This is a relatively small area and losing that much habitat to road-building and logging activities would definitely displace the bears from thousands of acres,” Garrity said. “The federal government’s own data show the grizzlies need more secure habitat, not less, or this population of bears is going to vanish. We would just as soon see the federal government follow the law and its own science, but since the Forest Service chose not to, we were left with little option but to challenge these timber sales.”
The three federal logging projects successfully challenged by the Alliance are the Grizzly Vegetation and Transportation Management Project, the Miller West Fisher Project and the Little Beaver Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project — all located on the Kootenai National Forest in Montana. In addition to challenging the Forest Service’s approval of these proposals, the lawsuit also challenged the US Fish & Wildlife Service’s conclusion that the proposed logging and road-building would not harm the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bears.
“We won on six major points in this suit,” said Garrity, “including the need to discuss flaws in past studies in the project-level National Environmental Policy documents. As we contended, and the court agreed, both the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service have some work to do to get their act together in the future.”
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