Mt Hood Wilderness, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

In the final hours of the 118th Congress, the Senate took up and passed the EXPLORE Act, which former President Biden signed into law on January 6. Some of our members reached out, confused after seeing other conservation nonprofits urging support for this bill, even as Wilderness Watch opposed it. News articles covering the EXPLORE Act suggested it could be a blueprint for conservation moving forward. But the EXPLORE Act has stirred fundamental questions about conservation, specifically, whether public lands like Wilderness should be protected for their own intrinsic value, or if their value lies solely in what we can extract from them.

As Howard Zahniser, author of the Wilderness Act, said, “The purpose of the Wilderness Act is to preserve the wilderness character of the areas to be included in the wilderness system, not to establish any particular use.” Wilderness is a priceless place to recreate—it provides us solitude, a chance for reflection, and an opportunity to experience a world we don’t manipulate and control. But, as John Muir once said, “Nothing dollarable is safe.” This includes Wilderness.

Consumptive activities include mining, logging, grazing, drilling, and, yes, recreating. While logging litters stumps and slash piles across clearcuts, and mining strips away soil, recreation consumes the space and security of plants and animals. Recreation can destroy habitat, and displace or habituate wildlife. Human presence can drive wildlife to ecologically inferior habitats where food may be in short supply and predator risk is higher. It can also physiologically stress animals, making them more susceptible to disease. High-use and concentrated recreation areas, such as climbing spots, can decrease the nesting success of birds. To top it off, recreation contributes to the introduction and spread of invasive species. These pressures influence whether individual animals produce offspring, affecting broader population levels. For these reasons, we must consider limits and restraint on our recreation impacts.

Some conservation groups supported the EXPLORE Act because of provisions aimed at expanding access to public lands, especially for broader socioeconomic groups. While that’s a worthy goal, the bill gives the National Park Service discretion to install cell towers in backcountry throughout the National Park system, including within designated, potential, recommended, or eligible Wilderness. The EXPLORE Act also increases mechanized and motorized access on public lands; upgrades cabins, campgrounds, and resorts; loosens restrictions on commercial filming; and reduces the public’s ability to review outfitter impacts to wild places on all public lands, including Wilderness.

Alarmingly, the EXPLORE Act makes the first ever exception for a nonconforming recreation activity in Wilderness by allowing climbers to hammer fixed anchors into rock faces. Wilderness cliffs of gneiss and quartzite, limestone and slate, once untarnished by evidence of recreation, can now bear permanent proof of human presence. Moreover, the installation of permanent, fixed anchors will inevitably draw more climbers to what were once quiet wilderness cliffs.

Politicians driving the EXPLORE Act didn’t attempt to veil its purpose. Bringing the bill to the floor for a vote, Senator Joe Manchin—who caucused with the Democrats—said, “We have made a focus of supporting our public lands and the outdoor recreation economy, which is the fastest growing element of our economy in every state.” His Republican colleague, Senator John Barasso, said, “It is a first-of-its-kind recreation package, and it will boost our nation’s outdoor economy…Outdoor recreation added over $1 trillion to our national economy in 2023—$1.2 trillion. That is 2.3 percent of our entire gross domestic product…This is a big deal.”

Yes, this is a big deal, but one where humans aren’t paying the price. Dwindling populations of flora and fauna foot the bill through increasing habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. And contrary to Senator Barasso’s claims, the EXPLORE Act is not “a first-of-its-kind recreation package.” It’s only the latest in a long line of bipartisan legislation that has conflated recreation with conservation—slowly chipping away at protections for the wild. Before the EXPLORE Act, it was the 2023 Outdoor Recreation Act. Before that was the 2019 John Dingell Act. Maybe next year we’ll be fighting the Wealth and Income Landscape Development Act—the WILD Act—because America’s leaders can’t resist a quippy acronym when weakening environmental protections for profit.

By design, the EXPLORE Act is human-centered and extractive—what can nature do for us? But anthropocentric utility was never the reason for protecting Wilderness. This reality is at the core of why Wilderness Watch and our members—who sent thousands of messages to Congress—so strongly opposed the bill. Conflating recreation with conservation causes untold harm to the wild. Perhaps this conflation is based on the myth that recreationists are, by default, conservationists—though there is little evidence linking these qualities, and emerging research suggests the opposite. Anecdotally, we’ve just observed a vocal subset of the climbing community lobby for recreation over preserving Wilderness. More so than individuals, however, capitalism fuels this conflation.

In an economic system where industry is controlled by private ownership, where self-interests and me-firsts feature prominently, and where gains are measured in dollars, it’s not surprising that the common value assigned to public lands extends only so far as who can profit from them. The bipartisan introduction the EXPLORE Act received on the Senate floor wasn’t rooted in equity—it was rooted in money that the recreation industry can generate if turned loose on public lands. Even if recreationists are the foot soldiers, at the end of the day, those who provide goods and services will profit the most from the EXPLORE Act. It’s certainly not groups of veterans or disadvantaged youth who profit financially from constructing cell phone towers, modernizing cabins, or selling bikes, climbing hardware, and ATVs.

Whale Creek, Clackamas Wilderness, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

With less than 3 percent of the Lower 48 designated as Wilderness, does capitalism not consume enough space already? If you drive through the endless agricultural development of the Midwest—essentially clearcuts of the native prairie—you become acutely aware of how much “progress” has shaped and terraformed our corner of the planet. In the urban sprawl of American cities and their suburbs, you have to wonder if there is any space we don’t feel entitled to, despite the history of overconsumption and ecological destruction that feeds civilization. Or, perhaps we’re suffering from a collective cultural amnesia—we’ve forgotten that these places used to be wild and can’t imagine what they once were like.

Upon witnessing how rapidly industrialization was chewing through the wild over a half-century ago, a few visionary women and men—with the help of an overwhelming majority of Congress—laid the groundwork for a more ecologically ethical future. In the Wilderness Act, they developed a new idea to counter the threat of expanding settlement and growing mechanization. That new idea was Wilderness, and Wilderness offered something invaluable in the face of unprecedented and unrelenting development—it offered domains of respite for the natural world.

Conflating recreation with conservation completely fails to preserve Wilderness. A mountain goat and her kids crossing the steep terrain of the Northern Rockies, as goats have done for eight million years, will never generate profit like the climbing industry. The wilderness idea means protecting the intrinsic value of Wilderness and all of the life it safeguards, regardless of utility to humans or profit capacity. While recreation was always meant to be a part of Wilderness, elevating it to an all-consuming priority will trammel the natural world. Only when we step back and allow space for the more-than-human will we see the wilderness idea fully realized.

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The Pallisades. Photo: Michael Hoyt,

Thanks to our threat to sue the Forest Service over using a categorical exclusion to avoid analyzing impacts on bull trout, grizzly bears, and lynx, a massive deforestation project in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley has been halted.

The Forest Service’s Eastside Project authorized 15,000-45,000 acres of tree cutting and burning per year for 20 years and the 500,000-acre project covers almost the entire east side of the Bitterroot National Forest from Stevensville to over 50 miles south in the Sapphire Mountains.

The Forest Service illegally authorized this massive project through the use of a categorical exclusion, which was intended for projects that would have no impact on the environment such as painting an outhouse or building a shed at a Ranger station.

But now the project has been halted since the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Center for Biological Diversity, Fiends of the Bitterroot and other conservation groups sent the government a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue for violating the Endangered Species Act. We notified the Forest Service that they failed comply with the Endangered Species act in a number of ways including failing consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the project’s effect on bull trout and grizzly bears — both of which are listed as threatened species — in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

Congress included the 60-day notice requirement in the citizens’ enforcement provision of the Endangered Species Act specifically to give the government that much time to correct their illegal activity before facing a lawsuit.

Normally the Forest Service responds to our 60-day notices with a letter telling us to go jump in a lake. Then we sue the agency — and have won in court over 80 percent of the time. But this time, undoubtedly realizing they were fighting a losing battle, the Forest Service agreed to halt actions to implement the tree cutting and burning until they followed the law.

It would be great to think the Forest Service has all of a sudden became a law-abiding agency, but unfortunately, they are still violating other laws with this project, including by authorizing half a million acres of tree cutting and burning without environmental review.

Despite the vast landscape the project will impact, the Forest Service did not disclose where the tree cutting and burning will occur. That’s a clear violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the federal government — and anyone who does a project using federal money — to notify the public of what they plan to do, where they plan to do it, and how it will affect the environment.

In the case of the Eastside project, the Forest Service claims that the precise location, timing, and scope of the treatments will be decided immediately prior to implementation, but without further analysis or public input which is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

The law also requires the Forest Service to take a “hard look” at potential impacts to wildlife, including wolverines which are particularly important since scientists have discovered a lactating female wolverine in the project area, and there have been multiple instances of confirmed grizzly bear presence in the Sapphire Mountains over the past year. Grizzly bears, lynx, wolverines, bull trout and bull trout critical habitat are all protected under the Endangered Species Act.

American citizens are required to follow the law every single day. It is time for the Forest Service to start following the law and quit destroying habitat for threatened and endangered species.

During the last Trump administration, our small, gritty organization, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, sued 18 times to protect our planet and we won 16 times.

Please help the Alliance for the Wild Rockies fight to make the Trump Administration’s Forest Service follow the law and help Counterpunch spread the word.

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Image by Ivars Utināns.

This year’s annual UN climate conference COP30 with 50,000 expected attendees held in Belém, Brazil is one-upping the past two COPs (UN Conference of the Parties) that were held by, and dictated by, Middle Eastern fossil fuel countries, eye-openers that many eco-minded people, still to this day, cannot stomach. Now, Brazil is set to upstage the oil sheiks by bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of “protected rainforest” to build a 4-lane highway to “help reduce traffic” during the two-week conference. This is not made-up. It is true.

The new highway smack-dab down the middle of thick rainforest is known as Avenida Liberdade (English translation: Avenue of Liberty, oh please!) According to the Brazilian government it has “sustainability in mind” with solar lights, bike lanes, and animal crossings so, hopefully, attendees will catch a glimpse of a roaming jaguar, a top predator in the Amazon moseying along glancing at and growling at passing automobiles. If only attendees get lucky enough to take a photo of the jaguar growling, showing teeth, to show friends back home how they faced danger in the rainforest. Venturesomeness and courageousness will be celebrated.

In a statement reminiscent of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four term “newspeak,” meaning propagandistic language characterized by euphemism and circumlocution, as reported by BBC News: “The focus of COP30, according to the host country, Brazil, will be ‘Uniting for our Forests.’ It is their hope that this year’s conference will be a first step to advance and unite climate and biodiversity agendas.” Really?

In a lighthearted fashion, BBC commented: “The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world and providing biodiversity, and many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.” (Amazon Forest Felled to Build Road for Climate Summit, BBC News, March 11, 2025) Oh really, no kidding!

And the Brazilian government, cranking up newspeak to a higher pitch yet, claims: “The Brazilian president and environment minister say this will be a historic summit because it is ‘a COP in the Amazon, not a COP about the Amazon,’ The president says the meeting will provide an opportunity to focus on the needs of the Amazon, show the forest to the world, and present what the federal government has done to protect it,” Ibid.

The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest – spanning 6.9 million square kilometres (2.72 million square miles) across nine countries and covering around 40% of the South American continent. Making up half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests, the forest is also one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems, home to about three million species of plants and animals and 1.6 million indigenous people. The forest is also an important regulator of weather cycles, owing to its cooling effect and its contribution to rainfall and moisture supply in the region, and it is one of the world’s largest natural carbon sinks, absorbing and storing an amount of carbon equivalent to 15 to 20 years of global CO2 emissions from the atmosphere. (Source: Up to 47% of Amazon Rainforest at Risk of Collapse by Mid-Century Due to ‘Unprecedented Stress’ From Global Warming and Deforestation, Earth.org, Feb. 15, 2024)

Here’s what COP30 should hand out to the 50,000 attendees: The Amazon Rainforest is at risk of exceeding tipping points, leading to a death spiral for up to 47% of the forest within the next several decades because of a combination of climate change-related drivers of severe stress. According to research in Nature: “The region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system,” the study, published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, read, adding that crossing potential critical thresholds – or tipping points – might trigger “local, regional, or even biome-wide forest collapse” and knock-on effects for regional climate change. Once we cross this tipping point, we will lose control of how the system will behave,” said ecologist Bernardo Flores of the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, lead author of the report. “The forest will die by itself.” (Nature)

Moreover, a 2021 study found that the Amazonian region had turned into a carbon emitter, in competition with cars, trains, airplanes, and industry. According to the 2021 study, the forest emits about one billion tonnes of CO2 each year, equivalent to the annual emissions released in Japan, the world’s fifth-biggest polluter.

Prior to human-generated CO2 from fossil fuels, which traps heat, the Amazon rainforest was a net carbon sink for millennia. Now, it’s joining the global warming/extreme drought onslaught. Drought Leaves Amazon Basin Rivers at All-time Low, BBC News, Sept. 18,2024. Additionally, and of consequence for the world at large, the Amazon is not alone, Europe’s rivers ran almost completely dry in 2022. In places, the Loire could be crossed on foot; France’s longest river never flowed so slowly. The Rhine was nearly impassable to barge traffic. In Italy, the Po was 2 metres lower than normal, crippling crops. As Serbia dredged the Danube.

COP30 attendees hopefully take notice and focus on the blatant fact that these recurring bouts of severe drought throughout the world are happening more frequently and with much more gusto or destructiveness. For example: China Drought Causes Yangtze to Dry Up, Sparking Shortage of Hydropower, The Guardian, Aug. 22, 2022. The only solution to recurring bouts of increasingly more severe droughts caused by overheating the planet is to stop burning fossil fuels. Science is nearly 100% on this.

Aa for the Amazon rainforest: According to researchers, the only way to avoid biome-wide collapse is to limit deforestation to 10% of the forest’s total cover, restore at least 5% of the biome, and limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement target. In other words, since the world is far removed from those data points, and headed in the opposite direction with increasing speed, Avenida Liberdade is a posterchild for the collapse of the Amazon rainforest.

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Dawn from Shenandoah Mountain. Photo: Steve Krichbaum.

The corruption of the US Forest Service is manifest nationwide, not just in the West. Numerous huge desecrations, such as at Buffalo Springs on Indiana’s Hoosier National Forest (“NF”) or the Jellico Project on Kentucky’s Daniel Boone NF, are proposed/happening all over the East, and Virginia is no exception.

The public have submitted formal Objections to three recent projects on the George Washington NF in Virginia: the Dunlap Creek (“DC”) TS on the James River RD, the North Shenandoah Mountain (“NSM”) TS and Archer Knob (“AK”) TS on the North River RD. The project areas (”PAs”) are some of the most exceptional lands I have ever encountered on the Forest. Nonetheless, at just these three sites the FS is proposing to log almost 10,000 cares,  burn 7,912 acres, and build 28 miles of so-called “temporary” roads.

As usual, their disclosure/analysis of these projects is biased, deceptive, omissive, and obscurant. Aspects of the Forest Service’s documentation and analysis demonstrate unsound assumptions, misrepresentations of science, omissions of relevant studies/data, and illogical or unsupported reasoning that are the hallmarks of arbitrary and capricious decision-making. In addition, by flagrantly refusing to fully develop and analyze action alternatives to their proposal, they turn the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) into a joke and disregard clearly controversial public issues and concerns. The agency also explicitly claims that there are no “conflicts” involving the disposition of NF resources. All of which are an abuse of their discretion that numerous court rulings have found to be illegal under the Administrative Procedures Act (“APA”).

The agency’s Environmental Assessments (“EAs”) and supplementary documents/appendices are loaded with conclusory assertions without validation by empirical evidence. When an EA is “woefully light on reliable data and reasoned analysis and heavy on unsubstantiated inferences and non sequiturs … [t]he record simply does not provide a rational connection between the licensing decision, the record evidence, and the finding of no significant environmental impact.” (Am. Rivers v. FERC, 895 F.3d 32, 51 (D.C. Cir. 2018))

RED FLAGS at NSM, DC, and AK

For the NSM, DC, and AK Projects, a multitude of red flags are extremely prominent  — Present in/associated with the PAs are priority watersheds (“functioning at risk”), “impaired” waters, at risk watersheds, rare and vulnerable taxa (such as Threatened, Endangered, Sensitive, and Locally Rare species), large unroaded tracts that are Virginia Mountain Treasures [“VMTs”], large tracts in the project areas that the FS identified during the GWNF Plan revision as Potential Wilderness Areas (“PWAs”), mature and old-growth forest [“OG”], Conservation Areas (“CA”) explicitly identified by the VA Dept. of Conservation and Recreation [“VDCR”] (e.g., Peter’s Mountain CA at the DC PA is “one of the largest intact patches of old growth forest in Virginia and possibly the central Appalachians”), ecologically critical areas — sites with “Outstanding or Very High Ecological  Integrity” rankings, identified “ecological cores”, steep slopes, group D soils, soils susceptible to compaction and erosion, clear public issues/concerns (“controversy” and “conflict”),  site-sensitive species not adequately represented/analysed by use of the current FS Management Indicator Species, great uncertainty (e.g., status and distribution of numerous affected species, lack of pre-fire and post-fire population monitoring data), burning that is NOT targeted at restoring fire-dependent communities, and existence of a nation-wide movement and process to amend Forest Plans to protect and recruit OG/mature forests on NFs.

And yet despite all this, the GWNF managers still unlawfully fail to fully, and fairly consider/analyse any action alternatives for managing the project areas aside from their preferred proposed action. And their “no action” alternative disclosure fails to honestly and adequately disclose/analyse the “existing conditions”.

A full and accurate appraisal of the “existing conditions” is the sine qua non of informed decision-making and honest public disclosure of impacts and rationale. Without this, logging decisions on NFs are unreasonable, an abuse of agency discretion, and illegal (in violation of the NEPA and APA).

The potential for reasonably foreseeable significant effects from implementing  these projects is clear (with regard to the NEPA factors of “intensity” and “context”). The projects are proposed in and adjacent to “ecologically critical areas”. In addition, that “the effects on the quality of the human environment are likely to be highly controversial” is an absolute certainty – there is definitely a “substantial dispute [about] the size, nature or effect” of the projects. Further, the FS disclosure indubitably reveals that “the possible effects on the human environment are highly uncertain or involve unique or unknown risks”.

The agency’s consideration and disclosure are inadequate and lacking in supporting data and reasoning. From their flippant dismissal of significant issues and concerns clearly raised by the public, one would think that these Forest lands are the private property of FS bureaucrats.

ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY and CORES

According to the Virginia Natural Landscape Assessment by the DCR, unlike the vast majority of the state of Virginia the PAs have sites of “Outstanding” and “Very High” “Ecological Integrity”; such as the Peters Mountain North (Snake Run Ridge) area (“ Outstanding”) and the Slaty Mountain area (“Very High”) at the DC PA – see VANLA map (“Virginia Natural Landscape Assessment : 2017 Ecological Cores Ranked by Integrity” – available at https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/natural-heritage/image/vanla-2017-resize.jpg).

Also here is the Peters Mountain North Conservation Site which the VDCR identifies as a key area for preserving natural heritage species, communities (such as OG), and habitat (see, e.g., Dec. 2023 & April 2024 letters to the FS from the VDCR and the April 2000 Natural Heritage Technical Report 00-07 by Fleming & Moorhead).

“Ecological Cores” are significant aspects of the PAs that these timber sales would harm. “Ecological Cores are areas of at least 100 acres of continuous interior, natural cover that provides habitat for a wide range of species, from interior-dependent forest species to habitat generalists, as well as species that utilize marsh, dune, and beach habitats. … The proposed project will impact multiple cores with very high to outstanding ecological integrity.” (VDCR 2023) See Ecological Core(s) (C1, C2, C3 and C4) as identified in the Virginia Natural Landscape Assessment.

Here, the FS fails to fully and fairly consider and take a “hard look” at these important and significant red flag areas.  This reprehensible disregard by this big federal bureaucracy for conditions in the state of Virginia is simply unreasonable and an abuse of discretion; yet another violation of the APA and NEPA on exhibit in the agency’s documentation and Decisions. This abusive disregard is also made explicit by the fact that the FS only designated a small portion of the Peters Mountain North Conservation Site as a “Key Natural Heritage Community” (MPA 4D1) in the Forest Plan.

MOUNTAIN TREASURES

VMTs are also a significant part of the GWNF and of these three FS projects. Over 20 years ago conservationists in the Central & Southern Appalachians worked with The Wilderness Society (“TWS”) to identify and delineate unprotected unroaded tracts in the seven National Forests in the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. These wildlands were called “Mountain Treasures”. The results of this work were published in six booklets, e.g., “Virginia’s Mountain Treasures: The Unprotected Wildlands of the George Washington National Forest”. Mountain Treasures are tracts at least 2500 acres in size, with an average size of almost 6600 acres.

Virginia may have more NF unroaded acreage than any other state in the East (excluding Minnesota). There is more Mountain Treasure acreage identified here than that identified by conservationists in the 5 other Southern Appalachian NFs in four states put together (I do not have info on WV’s  Monongahela NF and KY’s Daniel Boone NF tracts at least 2500 acres in size identified by conservationists). In all, 262 areas were identified, totaling 1,720,537 acres; 130 of the MTs are in Virginia’s two NFs, totaling 878,530 acres, with 602,432 of these acres on the GWNF.

Mountain Treasure acreage identified in the TWS publications for five states (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia):

State/National Forest/ # Mountain Treasures/ Acreage MTs / Roadless Areas / Acreage of Roadless Areas / Percentage of National Forest

VA   GWNF  63  602,432   IRA 242,278  40%
VA   JeffersonNF  67  276,098   IRA 161,702  59%
GA  ChatoogaNF  44  235,700
TN  CherokeeNF   43  228,407   IRA  86,805  38%
NC  Nantahela & Pisgah NFs  35  323,000
SC   SumterNF (only Andrew Pickens RD)   10  55,000

Most of the MT acreage is neither formally “inventoried” by the FS as “roadless areas” (in VA only ca.45% is included in IRAs [Inventoried Roadless Areas]), nor ‘protected’ in the current NF Management Plans.

VMTs are de facto roadless areas. The FS states that “IRAs are characterized as having an undeveloped character and are valued for many resource benefits including wildlife habitat, biological diversity, and dispersed recreation opportunities.” (AK EA-90) Due to timber extraction desires, much VMT acreage was improperly not “inventoried” as roadless and/or placed in protective management prescriptions by the agency (e.g., 12D, 4D). VMTs “are not recognized as protected areas (Forest Service 2001).” (DC EA-16-17)

Various sites in the VMTs would be logged and roaded under the Projects’ Decisions. Including lower elevation slopes that are generally richer sites. And the anthropogenic disturbances would whittle away at the Treasures and reduce interior habitat and remote experiences. This is particularly egregious at the Elliot Knob site, where the FS proposes going around mile into the VMT at the Augusta Springs area.

The Archer Knob project includes regeneration logging units totaling 398 acres, 16 thinning units totaling 531 acres, and 1.6 miles of temporary road in the Elliot Knob VMT, plus regeneration units totaling 81 acres and 4 thinning units totaling 69 acres in the Archer Knob VMT.

The Dunlap Creek project includes 475 acres of “vegetation management” and 1.9 miles of temporary road within the Snake Run Ridge VMT, plus 37 acres of cutting in the Slaty Mountain VMT.

In the North Shenandoah Mountain Project Area are seven Mountain Treasures totaling almost 60,000 acres on the NF in the PA. None of this roadless acreage was “inventoried” by the FS. Three of these Treasures are threatened by this timber sale: in Hogpen Mtn. (9,229 acres) are logging, thinning, burning, and road building; in Little Cow Knob (5,335 acres) are logging & thinning; and in Beech Lick Knob (17,152 acres) are logging, thinning, and burning, including 355 acres of logging and 371 acres of burning within the agency’s own identified 14,085-acre Potential Wilderness Area.

The VMTs’ roadless character and their naturalness would NOT be maintained and Project implementations would diminish their ecological integrity.

Lush Spring. Photo: Stave Krichbaum.

CUMULATIVE IMPACTS TO VMTs

Numerous recent projects/timber sales have failed to adequately protect VMTs. The cumulative impacts to VMTs on the GWNF, such as reducing or not maintaining their roadless or remote character and degrading, fragmenting or perforating their ecological integrity, is a significant issue of great concern. This is NOT meaningfully addressed in any of the agency’s EAs.

In just the recent couple of years on the GWNF, the Sandy Ridge, Potts Creek, Green Hill, North Shenandoah Mtn., Dunlap Creek, and Archer Knob projects ALL affect and degrade numerous VMTs. Many other projects since the 2014 Plan revision also have been significantly reducing roadless/unroaded acreage and degrading the ecological integrity, non-motorized recreation, and scenic qualities associated with VMTs.

Roadless areas/unroaded tracts/roadless blocks and Virginia Mountain Treasures have been diminished in size and degraded in quality on the GWNF. Implementation of these most recent proposals would continue this harmful pattern; the Forest Service typically and oftentimes fails to protect roadless tracts administratively. The direct, indirect, or cumulative impacts of the Projects to the Forest’s Roadless areas/Unroaded tracts/Roadless blocks/ PWAs/VMTs can certainly be considered to be significant.

The GWNF has 23 Inventoried Roadless Areas (IRAs) with a total of 242,278 acres. And as part of the 2014 Plan revision process, the FS identified 37 areas as Potential Wilderness Areas (PWAs) with a total of 372,631 acres. The PWA inventory includes all of the IRAs, with the exception of Southern Massanutten and The Friars (FEIS 2-56).

Only ca. 40% of VMT acreage on the GWNF is included in the current IRAs. Hundreds of thousands of acres of VMTs are not considered as PWAs or IRAs and are open to “active management” (e.g., logging and roading). Further, even 85,500 acres of PWAs that are outside of IRAs are open to “active management”, plus more acreage in S.Massanutten and The Friars.

The actions the agency wants to impress upon the VMTs are done in order to fabricate/perpetuate an artificial (i.e., human caused/controlled) environment regarding forest structure and composition. That is what attaining their so-called “desired conditions” there would result in; basically converting the land from the forest’s attempt at recovery from past anthropogenic disturbances to a human-designed/maintained plantation, a crop. These croplands do not provide all the ecosystem services which need to take priority here over timber production.

In addition to significant harm to wild habitat, Project implementation would significantly decrease recreational value at VMTs. A noticeable loss of contrast value would ensue, vegetation treatments would make them more like other places. That they provide other conditions different from the developed landscape (such as interior forest) is why we and wildlife go to such places — to get away from the alteration/anthropogenic disturbance that pollutes much of our landscape. With these Projects, the FS is intent on making the sites more like everywhere else — homogenizing the overall landscape, decreasing beta/gamma diversity.

And one must never forget that implementation of these Projects irreparably results in incomprehensible amounts of direct mortality of wildlife — squashing and burning turtles and toads and snakes and salamanders and nestlings and snails and slugs and other invertebrates, all those small and slow creatures who cannot run away or fly away from harm, including those who live in trees; these are all significant components of the GWNF. And any survivors would be left in intensively altered habitat conditions, conditions that would alter plant composition and structure as well. “Harvest” does not just alter landscapes, it erases lives.  Now more than ever we need to be on the side of life and be kind.

SHENANDOAH MOUNTAIN

The crown jewel of the Central Appalachians, Shenandoah Mountain constitutes what I believe to be the largest single contiguous tract of National Forest in the entire eastern United States (ca. 390,000 acres). As such, it is of national significance as one of the largest relatively intact wildlands of any kind in the entire East. Shenandoah Mountain is the largest massif in the 29 million acre Ridge and Valley Physiographic Province, rising above the valleys of the Shenandoah and South Fork of the South Branch Potomac Rivers to elevations over 4000 feet. The area is topographically unique within the Ridge and Valley PP in that rather than being a narrow linear ridge of resistant sandstone it is a broad dissected ridge of interlayered sandstones and shales.

Shenandoah Mountain provides some of the most rugged and remote land still left in the Appalachians. With ever increasing population and development pressures, places to escape to the “sounds of silence” and bask in nature’s song are increasingly rare in our landscape. Places to be treasured, they are where the wild things are. These sanctuaries are our natural heritage and a vital necessity for sustaining the health of not only ourselves, but also all that we call home. In a sea of noise and development, this place we call Shenandoah Mountain is nothing less than a modern-day Ark, precious and irreplaceable.

Here on Shenandoah Mountain are twenty-three identified “Mountain Treasures” (unroaded areas) totaling around 262,000 acres (see Virginia’s Mountain Treasures: The Unprotected Wildlands of the GWNF available from The Wilderness Society) – probably the greatest amount of roadless tracts and back-country recreational lands to be found in any single site between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (NC-TN) and the Adirondack State Park (NY). Here too are rare habitats such as shale barrens and tracts of old-growth forest, with around 75,000 acres in this condition. Here are endemic species such as the Cow Knob Salamander, Shenandoah Mountain Millipede, and Virginia Least Trillium, as well as Wild Trout streams, quality Black Bear habitat, and the southernmost Wood Turtle populations in the world.

GLOBALLY SIGNIFICANT

The remnant temperate mixed and deciduous forests on the public lands of the Appalachians offer a unique opportunity for ecological recovery, an opportunity certainly unmatched in the East, perhaps anywhere in the world. The wild old-growth forests that not long ago naturally blanketed this region have been extirpated, devastated, and dismembered. In 300 years, less than the life span of many a tree, we have gone from pockets of human development occurring in a matrix of natural landscape to natural areas – habitat fragments – eking out a living in a sea of human development. Now, in today’s world, islands of habitat like the George Washington National Forest have paradoxically become the floral and faunal source pools of the region.

For the world’s temperate deciduous forests, there is probably more unroaded acreage in these Southern/Central Appalachian public lands than in all of western Europe. And perhaps in China as well — but with a billion more people living there in the same area as the continental US, there is probably not much.  The unique opportunity in the Central/Southern Appalachians makes this a place of global significance.  These NF Mountain Treasures and other unroaded areas (e.g., Wilderness Areas in the NFs, plus acreage in the Shenandoah, New River, and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks) are important reasons to implement the Appalachian Ecosystem Protection Act (“AEPA”) proforestation proposal (citation 1&2). Truly protecting these vital lands under the AEPA means even the acreage not in large unroaded tracts is still protected from commercial logging and other destructive activities.

As Beverly Law and colleagues explain (cit. #3), key strategies for mitigating climate change and preventing biodiversity losses include:

1,) Establishment of national strategic reserves that protect existing mature and old forests from resource extraction, and expand wilderness areas.

2.) Resilience-building strategies that address elements of biodiversity (preventing extinctions, ecoregion diversity) and facilitate animal movement by connectivity of protected areas, and new and expanded protected areas.

“An integrated climate-biodiversity agenda is gaining momentum at multiple levels. We propose Strategic Forest Reserves for permanent protection of forest carbon and biodiversity at the highest levels (GAP 1 and 2, IUCN categories I–VI) to support targets that protect 30% of the area by 2030 and 50% by 2050.” (Law et al. 2023)

Stopping the NSM, DC, and AK projects, as well as numerous others in our National Forests, and implementing the AEPA (or some truly protective  legislation like it) are essential for meaningfully addressing the climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises confronting the world and all Americans (see e.g. cit. #4). Never before in human history has there been such a need to truly protect lands and keep our grasping extracting and exploiting hands off of them; especially the public lands that are virtually the only very large relatively undeveloped tracts left.

For managing our precious National Forests we need a true Forest Service, not a Timber Service. We must think Big and think Connected — the FS, politicians, and their corporate overlords are. They are increasing logging, altering natural conditions, and getting rid of laws and regulations all over our country. So, big regional and national legislation is vital for making fundamental systemic change in management and achieving true protection (cit. #5).

Big snags. Photo: Steven Krichbaum.

WE NEED A TRUE FOREST SERVICE, NOT A TIMBER/PROFITEERING SERVICE

For managing our precious National Forests we need a true Forest Service, not a Timber Service. We must think Big and think Connected  –  the agency, politicians, and their corporate overlords are. They are changing laws and natural conditions nation-wide  – increasing logging all over the country and getting rid of or circumventing numerous laws and regulations. So, big regional and national legislation is vital for making fundamental systemic change in management and achieving true protection.

Remember that “forest” is a single small word that refers to the most complex of terrestrial ecosystems. Yes there are trees, but it is far more than that — all the flora, fauna, fungi, microbes, soil, and water make up a forest. Current politicians in control can’t see the forest for the trees, that is the focus — more numbers of “desirable” species of trees, those wanted by the timber industry. Everything and everybody else is secondary at best. The FS is not in service to forests, it’s money. Turning our living world into dead money for the enrichment of the oligarchy.

It’s always the same prescription for our National Forests and Bureau of Land Management lands – doesn’t matter what state, what ecosystem, what forest type, what tree species, or what ecological conditions – it’s always: “We need more trees with diameters greater than their height” (aka stumps). Stumps for timber, stumps for wildlife management, stumps for so-called ‘restoration’, and stumps for fire management. The underlying consistency behind these rationalizations is the habitual dismissal of the critical importance of old and dead trees, wilderness conditions, natural disturbances, and limited roads to healthy forests (see, e.g., cit. #6).

The FS has timber quotas to meet, set in D.C. and Regional offices that the individual Forests are required to achieve. And now they prominently use fires to speciously rationalize using taxpayers money to subsidize the timber industry. It seems both major parties can be sadly misinformed about forests and fires. The President and his minions have promoted logging as a way to curb fires even though studies have clearly shown it to be ineffective. Logged-over areas actually aggravate wildfire growth and intensity. The most comprehensive scientific analysis conducted on the issue of forest management and fire intensity found that forests with the fewest environmental protections and the most logging actually tended to burn much more intensely, not less (cit. #7, 8).

Nonetheless, the agency’s focus is on commercially valuable trees. Is there a quota for numbers of salamanders or Box Turtles per acre ? Of course not. All this results in below cost timber sales that cost taxpayers billions of dollars a year (cit. #9). Will DOGE put an end to that and similarly money-losing and harmful subsidized grazing on BLM public lands?  Don’t hold your breath. And this benighted approach to forests gets even worse. To expedite logging, bills such as “Fix Our Forests” (H.R. 471) limit litigation involving fireshed management projects and limit remedies that courts may provide. In effect,  locking the public out of management decisions on our public lands. We “frivolous” taxpayers get to subsidize the degradation and destruction of our precious homelands, we just don’t get to have a say in it. Whenever politicians feel compelled to pre-emptively lock the public out of our day in court, it’s a sure tell that something is rotten.

It is not just the Trump administration that is the problem, it is the Republicans in Congress – along with a bunch of Democrats as well. We do need new legislation, but not the toxic brew cooked up by Trump and  the “Forest Fixers” (cit. #10). We need legislation and policies that free the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management from the internal and external pressures that promote and prioritize commercial logging and other exploitation. Not legislation that exacerbates these pressures as well as the underlying fire problem. The focus must be on real protection, not profiteering that gives the false appearance of dealing with a problem.

Congress needs to instead facilitate protection of the “defensible space” around homes and development. We must all urge our Senators to oppose the disastrous, dishonest, and destructive FOF Act (H.R. 471) and instead support H.R. 582, which focuses protection where it matters — where people live.

Since the Trump administration and its DOGE say they are so concerned about wasteful federal government spending, then obviously the first things that need to go are the entire below-cost logging program on our National Forests and the entire below-cost grazing program on our Bureau of Land Management lands (as well as hugely altering the payments from & the language of the 1872 Mining Act). And all the so-called ‘fiscal conservatives’ should be in support of all this and thereby discontinuing the federal government being in flagrantly unfair competition with private landholders. Obviously, right ?  But of course not for Trump and his lying minions. It’s not like what they are up-to is nuanced or difficult to understand. The money-loving creation-hating anti-lifers want to convert our living world into dead money for their personal enrichment, end of story.

Citations

1.) S. Krichbaum. 2023. The Big AEPA: A Last Chance to Save the Appalachian Ecosystem. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/14/the-big-aepa-a-last-chance-to-save-the-appalachian-ecosystem/

2.) S. Krichbaum. 2024. Protection And Connection: Reasons for an Appalachian Ecosystem Protection Act. https://www.heartwood.org/heartbeat/HBeat-Spring-2024.pdf (at pp. 26-27)

3.) B.E. Law et al. 2023. Southern Alaska’s Forest Landscape Integrity, Habitat, and Carbon Are Critical for Meeting Climate and Conservation Goals. AGU Advances, 4, e2023AV000965. available at https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1029/2023AV000965

4.) C. Freund. 2019. Biodiversity loss is the very real end of the world and no one is acting like it. https://www.salon.com/2019/05/27/biodiversity-loss-is-the-very-real-end-of-the-world-and-no-one-is-acting-like-it_partner/

5.) S. Krichbaum. 2021. Protect Life Itself and Make Proforestation the Driving Policy on Public Lands. https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/25/protect-life-itself-and-make-proforestation-the-driving-policy-on-public-lands/

6.) K. Zimmer. 2025. The teeming life of dead trees. https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2025/rotting-logs-mini-ecosystems-habitat-and-food

7.) C.M. Bradley, C.T. Hanson, D.A. DellaSala. 2016. Does increased forest protection correspond to higher fire severity in frequent-fire forests of the western United States?https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.1492

8.) K. Lincoln. 2019. Study Finds Old Growth Forests Burn Slower and Cooler, Preserving Habitat. https://kymkemp.com/2019/07/06/study-finds-old-growth-forests-burn-slower-and-cooler-preserving-habitat/

9.) M. Garrity. 2025. The Forest Service Loses Billions Subsidizing Logging. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/28/the-forest-service-loses-billions-subsidizing-logging/.

10.) G. Wuerthner. 2025. The Fix Our Forests Act – A Trojan Horse for Logging. https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2024/09/20/fix-our-forests-act-trojan-horse-for-timber-industry/

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Image by Documerica.

In his first term as president, Donald Trump picked to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a virulent anti-EPA figure, Scott Pruitt. As the International Bar Association said back then, Pruit had been “the scourge of the EPA as attorney general of Oklahoma…abolished his office’s environmental unit” and, on a national level “sued the EPA 14 times.”

Moreover, the association which describes itself as the “foremost organization for international legal practitioners, bar associations and law societies,” added: “As a candidate for Oklahoma AG…Pruitt was bankrolled by the fossil fuel and power sectors, and by the Koch family of energy billionaires.”

Succeeding Pruitt as EPA administrator under Trump was Andrew Wheeler, whose background was as a lobbyist for major coal, chemical and uranium companies.

EPA standards were eliminated wholesale under Pruitt and Wheeler.

Now in his second term, Trump has appointed Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from Long Island, as EPA administrator. More of the same is happening—and worse is anticipated, especially regarding climate change.

Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club—which notes that it is “the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States” with 3.8 million members —reported last week that Zeldin “is ready to lead” a “far more radical retreat on climate change” than made in Donald Trump’s first term as president.

And other environmental and health necessities are also threatened.

The Sierra piece said the EPA, “the federal watchdog tasked with safeguarding the environment and human health is facing ‘unprecedented’ attacks under the new Trump administration, putting Americans’ ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and healthy lives at risk, experts say.”

“These attacks,” it continued, “from mass terminations of employees to axing programs and funding intended to address pollution and advance clean energy, are part of a sweeping effort….At the EPA, there has been an exodus of employees, a freeze on funding disbursement—including funds already authorized by Congress—as well as a dismissal of scientific advisory boards and a removal of climate change references from the agency’s website. Trump is installing industry lobbyists in key leadership posts, while his pick to head the agency—former New York Republican Congress member Lee Zeldin—has announced a set of five pillars to guide the EPA’s work, most of which deviate from the agency’s core mission to protect human health and the environment.”

The daily newspaper on Long Island, N.Y.—Zeldin is from the hamlet of Shirley on Long Island—covered its front page last week with the headline: “Zeldin’s Push to Shrink EPA.”

The two-page article by Tom Brune began: “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has begun to do what President Donald Trump wanted to do in his first term but couldn’t: Shrink the Environmental Protection Agency and cut its regulations on energy and business.”

It noted that in the previous week “Zeldin announced he would seek to slash EPA spending by 65%, twice the 31% proposed by Trump in his first term, and…recommended the repeal of a 2009 landmark EPA finding that greenhouse gasses endanger the public health and welfare.”

This move to undo what is called the “endangerment finding” was also focused upon in a New Yorker magazine article by Bill McKibben, a leader in challenging climate change. He wrote “the reversal of the long-standing federal position” as Zeldin “recommended….would be truly and deeply disgraceful—not just climate denial but basic-science denial…true ‘1984’ stuff…equivalent of ‘War is peace’ and ‘Freedom is slavery.’” It would be “an explicit repudiation” of the understanding of “the role of carbon in our atmosphere.”

The publication Inside Climate News said that Zeldin “recommended to the White House that the agency [EPA] should rescind its 16-year-old finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and the environment…the foundation of all EPA’s actions on climate change under the Clean Air Act.” This, if done, would eliminate “the agency’s mandate to regulate carbon pollution from power plants, vehicles, landfills and oil and gas infrastructure.”

This article by Marianne Lavelle said: “Scientists and environmentalists say the effort to revoke the endangerment finding flies in the face of reality in the wake of 2024, the hottest year on record,” happening as related “disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion hit the United States.”

The Newsday article concluded with comments by two Long Island figures—Congressman Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, and Adriene Esposito, executive director of the group Citizens Campaign for the Environment—both of them having said they were hopeful when Zeldin was nominated by Trump. Suozzi now says: “Gutting the EPA won’t save money, it will cost Americans their health, safety, clean air, clean water and the future of their children.” And Esposito was quoted as saying: “If the promise by the president and Lee Zeldin was to fight for clean air and safe water, this is really a broken promise. It clearly seems that Mr. Zeldin is carrying water for the president and abandoning his own personal beliefs and his own legacy.”

Their hope for Zeldin was countered by others and also publications including the New Republic magazine which published an article headed “Trump Picks New EPA Head Guaranteed to Destroy the Environment,” its subhead, “This will be a disaster.” The piece said: “Trump opted to put his planned radical rollback of climate policy in the hands of a staunch ally.”

The headline of the New York Metropolitan Area news website Hell Gate said: “Lee

Zeldin Appointed to Oversee Climate Collapse.” The subhead: “Trump choosing a Long Island lackey as EPA administrator.”

Zeldin received a “failing” 14% score from the League of Conservation Voters on its National Environmental Scorecard for his environmental record in Congress.

The New York Times has reported that Trump nominated Zeldin to “a post that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle climate regulations.” Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.” It also has said some on the Trump transition team believed “the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are discussing moving the EPA headquarters…out of Washington.”

The Washington Post has published an article headlined, “Lee Zeldin didn’t ask to head EPA. Here’s why Trump picked him.” It told of “Zeldin’s political evolution from a moderate who occasionally collaborated with conservationists to a MAGA loyalist….Zeldin lacks extensive experience in environmental policy, and he did not seek out the position of EPA administrator, according to two people familiar with the matter….Instead, Trump called Zeldin and asked him to implement his agenda at the agency, and Zeldin agreed, the two people said. ‘The president-elect tapped someone who he believes will carry out what he wants at EPA,’ said former [upstate New York Republican] Congressman Thomas M. Reynolds, a friend of Zeldin’s, adding that ‘Lee has been a guy who Trump knows not only because he was a New York congressman, but also because he was an aggressive supporter.’ Zeldin was one of the first Republicans to endorse Trump’s candidacy in 2016, joining his impeachment defense team and supporting Trump’s efforts to deny the results of the 2020 election. During the 2024 campaign, he appeared regularly at Mar-a-Lago and stumped for the former president in battleground states.”

At the end of last week, The New York Times ran a piece about a museum devoted to the EPA “tucked away in a federal building near the White House” and headlined: “As the E.P.A. Withers, Will a Museum Follow?” The subhead: Tucked away is a tribute to the agency. For the time being, anyway.”

The article said: “With the Trump administration threatening potentially huge staff and budget cuts, the museum could soon come to serve as a testament to a hobbled diminished agency.” It noted how “Lee Zeldin, the new E.P.A. administrator, is a close ally of Mr. Trump…and has no evident experience in environmental conservation. Mr. Zeldin has canceled some $60 million in contracts tied to what a news release described as ‘wasteful D.E.I. and environmental justice initiatives,’ using an abbreviation for diversity, equity and inclusion.”

It reported that Zeldin has “celebrated the president’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as ‘the Gulf of America’ by promptly changing the name of the E.P.A.’s division focused on that region.”

“Mr. Zeldin,” it continued, “has expressed eagerness to work with Mr. Musk, praising recent federal dismissals, and has hired industry figures, including a formaldehyde lobbyist, to the top ranks of the E.P.A.”

In the wake of the archly anti-environmental Pruitt and coal, chemical and uranium company lobbyist Wheeler, Trump has again gotten himself with Zeldin someone who “will carry out what he wants at EPA.”

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Beartooth Range, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.“

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mountainous ecosystems of the Northern Rockies are under assault by the Trump administration, his oligarchic masters, and their soulless, plundering corporations and trust funds.

Mining, oil and gas drilling, clear-cut logging, roadbuilding, industrial recreation, livestock grazing, and commercial and residential real estate development threaten the continued existence of tens of millions of acres of publicly-owned lands that have avoided commodification and domestication since the Lewis and Clark expedition (May 14, 1804 –September 23, 1806).

Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, the mountainous red states, are pushing for state supremacy, rapid privatization and liquidation of all public lands and the animals and plants that live there.

States want to exploit the charismatic megafauna so trophy hunters will pay for a license to kill threatened grizzly bears, the same way they have exploited for decades the slaughter of endangered Yellowstone buffalo, wolves, elk, swans, native trout and anything to boost state revenues.

Booming global markets kill the last big mammals, photograph the gunner with a manly, domineering pose over the dead carcass, as populations go extinct. Apparently, killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs, evades irrationality because after everything on planet earth has been shot, or bombed, eaten, stuffed, or taken to the landfill, we’re all going to Disneyland Mars.

State religion in this God-forsaken backwater region is practiced at the altar of the God of Mammon (neoliberal, pseudo-Christianity). When combined with an extreme variety of cultural retrogression that longs to return to 19th-century, state and local politics takes on a soporific Nietzschean, nihilistic cognitive framework.

Until humanity comes up with a secular form of exorcism, the mass psychosis caused by the mind parasite wetiko will keep attracting m and more “mighty whitey” migrant killers who watched one too many episodes of Yellowstone.

How do we combat this gathering madness?

Grassroots activists in the region have a legislative plan. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) will reintroduce The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) in the U.S. Senate.

NREPA protects over 23 million acres of defacto wilderness in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington. In Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton NationalFrank Church–River of No Return, and Parks some 3 million acres of the nation’s most treasured mountain scenery and critical wildlife and fish habitat will finally be designated wilderness. NREPA legislates special regulatory protection for secure core wildlife habitat in linkage corridors connecting sacred places like Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, The Bob Marshall Wilderness Areas.

NREPA will designate all the inventoried roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as wilderness; protect some of America’s most beautiful and ecologically significant lands while saving taxpayers lots of money and creating jobs that restore impaired trout streams and critical habitat areas fragmented by too many roads. NREPA is national interest legislation with the strongest and most enduring protection the federal government can bestow upon public lands.

The Northern Rockies ecosystem is an important part of our natural heritage encompassing the largest block of wilderness lands outside of Alaska. NREPA is one of the most effective ways of combating climate change and reducing species loss in western North America. We are facing the world’s sixth major extinction. Congress must remember reverence of the sacred and act now to pass ecosystem protection before the last intact ecosystem in the Lower 48 is destroyed.

For more information about the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) contact the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

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