Twenty-six wolves killed—including the Profanity Peak Pack—due to agency’s continued preferential treatment for livestock grazing over coexistence with wildlife

Spokane, WA – WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and Kettle Range Conservation Group filed a lawsuit today to ensure that the U.S. Forest Service protects endangered gray wolves on the Colville National Forest in northeast Washington where livestock ranching activities have incited conflict. This woeful negligence by the federal agency has resulted in the deaths of 26 wolves since 2012, including the total destruction of both the Profanity Peak Pack and the Old Profanity Territory Pack.

Specifically, the lawsuit challenges the Forest Service’s revised Colville National Forest Plan for failing to evaluate how the agency’s federally permitted livestock grazing program adversely affects wolves—a species eradicated from most of the contiguous United States by the 1920s. The groups are also challenging the Forest Service’s approval of cattle grazing for Diamond M Ranch, which is responsible for the majority of wolf deaths on the Colville National Forest since 2012, without requiring any measures to prevent these wolf-livestock conflicts from recurring.

“The blood of these wolves is on the Forest Service’s hands. Just because the agency didn’t pull the trigger, doesn’t mean the agency didn’t supply the gun and ammunition,” stated WildEarth Guardians’ Wildlife Coexistence Campaigner, Samantha Bruegger. “The Diamond M Ranch livestock grazing allotments, on 78,000 acres of the Colville National Forest, have been notorious as the place where wolves go to die. We want to change that and we think the agency can and should demand ranchers who receive grazing permits must coexist with wolves on national forest land.”

Located in the Kettle River Range and the Selkirk Mountains, the Colville National Forest is mostly comprised of densely forested, rugged terrain—ideal habitat for native carnivores like wolves, grizzly bear, and lynx. Yet nearly 70 percent of the national forest (about 745,000 acres or 1,164 square miles) is allocated to livestock grazing, making the region the epicenter of wolf-livestock conflicts in Washington State.

In its newly revised Forest Plan, adopted in October 2019, the Colville National Forest failed to even acknowledge the gray wolf’s return to the region, yet the plan sets management directives for livestock grazing, wildlife and other uses across all the forest’s 1.1 million-acres for the next 15 to 30 years.

“The gray wolf only began reclaiming its historic habitat in Washington State around a decade ago, yet the Forest Service entirely ignored the management implications of this native carnivore’s return to the Colville,” explained Jennifer Schwartz, staff attorney at WildEarth Guardians. “The Forest Service is legally obligated to explore measures for reducing these recurring conflicts so wolves can hold their rightful place on this forest and carry out their critical ecological role. This deliberate agency inaction is contrary to federal law.”

“It is the responsibility of National Forest leadership to protect, restore, and maintain wildlife habitat, but it has abdicated its authority,” said Timothy Coleman, director for Kettle Range Conservation Group. “Whether you love wildlife, like to hunt and fish, or enjoy beautiful trails free of manure, putting one cattle corporation’s profits ahead of all other interests is a blatantly outrageous waste of our Public Land.”

“Washington’s wolves deserve better than to be cast aside for private business profits,” stated Jocelyn Leroux of the Western Watersheds Project. “The Forest Service has ignored its charge to protect wildlife and instead relinquished power to a wolf-hating private livestock operation. By failing to consider the impacts of cattle grazing in the Colville National Forest on Washington’s native wildlife, the Forest Service has all but guaranteed the wolf slaughter will continue.”

The Forest Service’s inaction is symptomatic of a larger problem within the institutions charged with “managing” wildlife on these federal public lands. Much like the federally-funded wildlife killing program, Wildlife Services, the Forest Service has also chosen to blatantly ignore the changing values of the public and scientifically-backed coexistence practices that can proactively avoid and reduce conflicts between native carnivores and livestock. In fact, for the last 5-10 years, environmental groups have engaged in a relentless and tenacious effort to reform the reckless ways of Wildlife Services and those efforts have resulted in significant steps forward, like in WildEarth Guardians’ most recent settlement in Montana.

“Unfortunately, it takes litigation to force these federal agencies to fulfill their legal duties when it comes to dealing with conflicts between livestock and gray wolves, and this case is just another example,” stated Laurie Rule, senior attorney with Advocates for the West who is co-counseling the case.

Historically, the Forest Service has largely escaped intense scrutiny for its practices. Yet, it is this agency’s actions, through the permitting of livestock grazing, that are driving the killing of wolves, grizzly bears, and other carnivores on public lands across the West. With cattle just turned out for the 2020 grazing season on the Colville National Forest, wildlife advocates don’t want the fate of a new wolf pack in this territory—the Kettle Pack—to similarly hinge on whether one of them attacks a cow, wandering unattended, in this vast, heavily wooded expanse.

A very long and very in-depth piece by Oregon Public Broadcasting, the Oregonian and ProPublica.

Read it: https://features.propublica.org/oregon-timber/severance-tax-cut-wall-street-private-logging-companies/

“The Rise of Wall Street Forestry Leaves Oregonian’s Paying the Tab.”

“Half of the 18 counties in Oregon’s timber-dominant region lost more money from tax cuts on private forests than from the reduction of logging on federal lands, the investigation shows.”

The U.S. Forest Service will forego a road building project in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests this summer. Here’s the press release.

SANDPOINT, Idaho— In response to a lawsuit filed by five conservation groups, federal agencies today agreed to forego planned summer construction on the Bog Creek Road project in northern Idaho.

Earlier this year the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection received approval to reconstruct the road, located just south of the Canadian border, under the guise of border security. In addition to reconstructing this road, the project would also increase motorized traffic on other nearby roads in crucial habitat for imperiled grizzly bears, mountain caribou, wolverines and other wildlife in the Selkirk Mountains.

In their March lawsuit, conservation groups said the two federal agencies violated the National Environmental Policy Act and National Forest Management Act by failing to consider the road project’s impacts on grizzly bears and their habitat.

“We’re pleased this lawsuit has pushed the Trump administration to hit pause on reconstructing an abandoned road in this pristine area where a fragile grizzly bear population is struggling to recover,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is a great first step, and we’ll continue to fight until this unnecessary and destructive plan is completely abandoned.”

Crossing the Selkirk Mountains near the U.S.-Canadian Border, the Bog Creek Road cuts through prime habitat for grizzly bears, Canada lynx, wolverines and other sensitive wildlife. The road has been overgrown with trees and vegetation for decades. The Forest Service closed Bog Creek Road in the late 1980s to protect Selkirk’s grizzly bears, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

“This is a step in the right direction,” said Brad Smith, the Idaho Conservation League’s North Idaho director. “In the meantime we will show the court that this project will unnecessarily undermine efforts to recover the Selkirk Mountains grizzly bear population.”

Customs and Border Protection officials contend that a restored road is necessary to monitor border security but have provided little evidence of current threats. Currently the agency is able to access the border through other avenues.

“We continue to believe that accessing the border in northern Idaho from the Kootenai side of the drainage will best serve the interests of the Border Patrol while also protecting the environment,” said James Lea of the Selkirk Conservation Alliance.

Under the decision the Forest Service would open 4.9 miles of road #1009 for unlimited motorized use from July 15 – Aug. 15, and would decommission approximately 26 miles of roads, which improves wildlife habitat and is necessary to meet grizzly bear recovery standards. Under the agreement reached today, road # 1009 will not be open for public use this summer and the Forest Service may move forward with decommissioning activities.

“Today we won a reprieve for wildlife and especially grizzly bears in the Selkirk Mountains, which is great news,” said Adam Rissien, a ReWilding advocate at WildEarth Guardians. “Shrinking the sprawling road network improves habitat and is the kind of true restoration work the Forest Service should be doing, not opening roads and expanding motorized use.”

The parties are hoping that the court will reach a decision in this case before determining whether a new agreement would be needed next summer. Briefing is likely to begin in the case this fall.

The Assistant editor of High Country News’ Indigenous affairs desk, Anna V. Smith, just sent out the following tweet:

If you are a U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management employee who would like to speak with Smith about public hearings/tribal consultation moving to a virtual format, here’s how you can get in touch with her. Also, here’s the link to the article “How to share confidential news tips with HCN.”

According to this 2018 NPR story “Just over half of Native Americans living on American Indian reservations or other tribal lands with a computer have access to high-speed Internet service, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.”

Yesterday, Grist published this story, “Saving Chaco: As coronavirus consumes New Mexico, drilling threatens sacred land.” It included this information:

“Despite their concerns about the prospect of increased drilling, these Navajo communities were largely excluded from the BLM’s virtual public meetings because they either don’t have reliable high-speed internet access or lack it altogether, according to Daniel E. Tso, [who represents eight local government subdivisions, or chapters, within the Navajo Nation Council]. A 2019 Federal Communications Commission report found that less than half of households (46.6 percent) on rural tribal lands have access to fixed broadband service. Beyond the technological hurdles, many residents primarily speak Navajo, so virtual meetings conducted by the BLM in English present an added obstacle.”

Here’s a story about E-bikes and public lands by CBS in Denver. Here are some highlights:

Allowing e-bikes on non-motorized trails, as ordered by the secretary of the Interior Department last fall, is pitting traditional pedalers versus e-bikers as federal land agencies craft rules to implement the new order. Cyclists fear the embrace of electric-assisted pedalers could get all bikes banned from trails. Trail builders worry about impacts from motorized bikes that can reach more than 50 mph. E-bikers fret their opportunities to explore public lands could be relegated to motorized thoroughfares.

Thousands of public land users are flooding the public comment portals in what is emerging as one of the most controversial rules in years for the Bureau of Land Management.

For Jake Roach, the CEO and co-founder of QuietKat, the Eagle-based maker of off-road e-bikes, the conflict boils down to “outdoor elitists” who are able to power themselves into the backcountry.

“I think what you find is that currently in public lands access, it’s basically set up to really benefit the individual who has a lot of time and is in really good shape,” said Roach, whose QuietKat has seen explosive growth in recent years. “That is not necessarily the demographic of the typical American taxpayer.”

Roach is helping to mobilize the growing swell of e-bikers to sway federal land managers to allow the electrified rides. He hopes to spread the idea that e-bikes might not only open public lands to a wider range of users, but disperse those users across public lands.

“The first mile is crowded, but once you get past that first mile, it can get lonely,” Roach said. “Spreading out the public on public land can only add value. There’s a perception that outdoor elitists want to keep public lands for themselves and that’s not a fair assessment of how public lands should be used.”…

E-bikes are grouped into three categories. Class 1 e-bikes have a motor that kicks in when the rider is pedaling and tops out at 20 mph. Class 2 e-bikes have a motor that doesn’t require pedaling and also tops out at 20 mph. Class 3 e-bikes have motors that deliver power only when the rider is pedaling and go faster, up to 28 mph. Those classes are getting blurred though as e-bike technology grows. Southern California’s Hi-Power Cycles, for example, is making an 82-pound mountain bike with an electric motor that can hit 55 mph.

It’s that blurring that troubles Scott Winans, the longtime head of the Colorado Plateau Mountain Bike Trail Association. For more than a decade, he has guided his team of volunteer mountain bikers in building and maintaining hundreds of miles of rolling single track across the Western Slope. Since 1989, the group has built trails for non-motorized use, with banked berms and tight turns made for pedalers, not throttle twisters. The group’s trail work is largely on BLM land, making the Colorado Plateau a national testing ground for new e-bike access rules.

COPMOBA is supporting Class 1 e-bike access on some, but not all non-motorized trails it maintains around five communities in Western Colorado. They oppose Class 2 or Class 3 e-bike access on any non-motorized trails. But most importantly, the association wants land managers to follow the same public processes it followed for more than 30 years of trail-advocacy work.

Winans and his association have issues with the top-down order allowing e-bikes. He hopes this current round of public comment is just the first of many more rounds of public review allowing local BLM land managers to craft trail-specific management plans for e-bikes.

That’s the process Western Slope mountain bikers have been following for decades as they work to develop new trails on BLM land, Winans said. And it’s part of the process any time there’s a change to the agency’s local travel management and resource management plans.

“This is tough because we have such a solid community coalition that has come together to address trails from a local perspective and a bunch of stakeholders have worked together for many years to build a great plan and the feds, in essence, throw that out the window,” Winans said.

There’s a similar sentiment on the Uncompahgre Plateau, where farmers, hunters and water-users in the North Fork Valley spent decades crafting a plan that would limit oil and gas development in the valley only to have that plan dismissed earlier this year under the Trump Administration’s “energy dominance” agenda.

The system of public land management is not built for sudden shifts through presidential agendas or secretarial orders.

Highlighting recreation in land management processes is arduous, and it’s taken decades for the outdoor recreation industry to win a seat at the land-management table alongside energy and agricultural interests. It takes years of work to win approval for a new trail before shovels hit dirt, as evidenced by the 12 years of planning behind the Grand Valley’s new Palisade Plunge trail off the Grand Mesa. The community has to be shown the value of the trail to sway public support, land agencies have to work together and plans must follow environmental laws, Winans said.

“Getting a project from idea to implementation is just a huge, huge process,” he said. “Just because a secretarial order flows into the community and makes a statement that this change is very straightforward, well, just saying that does not make it true.”

Winans says e-bike advocates should be wary of celebrating a top-down order that suddenly changes decades of planning and work.

“All these long processes and tools, they are really important to keep in the toolbox for the future,” Winans said. “The ship that runs slowly moderates extremism. Sometimes you may hate that it’s so slow to turn, but sometimes it saves your bacon and prevents bad decisions from flowing into the system on a moment’s notice.”

The Boulder-based International Mountain Bike Association — or IMBA — is crafting its lengthy analysis of the proposed e-bike rule. The association’s executive director, Dave Wiens, said this public comment period will lay the foundation for trail-by-trail identification of e-bike access in future planning by the BLM.

He hopes the BLM requires environmental study for every trail network that shifts non-motorized use regulations to allow e-bikes.

IMBA, the umbrella organization for more than 200 local mountain bike associations, does not support Class 2 or Class 3 bikes on non-motorized trials. The group’s primary concern is that expanding access to e-bikes could lead to human-powered bikes losing access. That worst-case scenario looks something like this: If an e-bike is now regulated like a bike, maybe instead of fighting e-bikes it’s easier to change a trail designation to prevent all bikes.

“We’re well-positioned to be balanced in our assessments and consider any implications that could impact mountain biking at-large, in order to always protect access for traditional, non-motorized mountain bikes,” Wiens said.

Roach has seen his QuietKat company grow from a start-up in 2012 to a national leader in the e-bike industry. He considers QuietKat as part of the growing overlanding business, where travelers deploy well-equipped vehicles to venture beyond defined paths. While his QuiteKat bikes work well on roads, he’s focused on off-road and not necessarily competing against urban bikes.

His bikes are sold in 126 Bass Pro shops and about 150 independent retailers, and soon QuietKat will launch a branded bike with Jeep. A demo of the Jeep-branded QuietKat appeared discreetly in the carmaker’s Super Bowl commercial.

“Look, this is not about if e-bikes happen on public land,” Roach said. “It’s about when.”

Roach worries the BLM’s comment period may be used to identify areas where e-bikes should be banned. His concern is that locally approved plans may restrict e-bikes from bike trails and keep them contained to areas where motorized use is allowed. Which is not the expansion of e-bike access pushed by the Bernhardt order, he said.

“My thinking is that this process should help the BLM make the rules easier to follow and not make it more confusing for a wider array of locations,” Roach said. “The whole process is very antiquated and really needs a revamp. Our systems and our economies move so much faster now than they did in the 1960s, when most of these rules were made. And so do our bikes.”

EPIC Files Lawsuit to Defend Old-Growth In Klamath National Forest

Federal public lands belong equally to all Americans. Will we see democracy in action on the Tongass National Forest regarding the Roadless Rule? I’m positive that we can expect some of the typical USFS and timber industry apologists to chime in here and defend whatever the USFS will end up doing. I do wonder, however, if anyone can share an example of where the USFS got 96% letters and comments in favor of a timber sale, or a coal lease, or an oil and gas lease, but then decided to side with the 1% of commenters who were opposed to the resource extraction? I know, I know…”It’s not a vote.” (Except for all the times the “vote” favors what the USFS was going to do anyway, then they will just be following the “will of the people.”).

According to the Daily Sitka Sentinel:

After months of hearings, analyses, and meetings, the U.S. Forest Service on Tuesday released an official summary of public comments in the rulemaking process that would exempt the Tongass National Forest from the Roadless Rule.

All told, 96% of the 267,000 letters and comments received were in favor of keeping the Roadless Rule in place in the Tongass, and one percent supported exempting it from the rule, the summary report said.

Comments were accepted from around the nation. For reference, the population of Southeast Alaska as of the 2010 census was just short of 70,000.

“This is now a litmus test to the state of our democracy,” Sitka Conservation Society Director Andrew Thoms said in an interview today.

“We will see if the government makes decisions guided by the people or if we have descended to the level of corruption that would be a tragedy for what Americans expect from their country and their government,” he said.

The Roadless Rule, in place since 2001, prohibits road building activities in 9.4 million acres of the 16.9 million-acre Tongass National Forest. Project exemptions are possible under the rule.

If you haven’t noticed, today crude oil prices have totally collapsed on Wall Street, at one point trading at nearly negative $40.00 a barrel. That’s 40 dollars below zero.

In the meantime, over the past several months, as the impending oil collapse became crystal clear to most everyone, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service continued to auction off public lands for fracking and oil and gas development for fire-sale prices.

On April 9, the Trump administration even released a final plan to expand drilling and fracking and other fossil fuel extraction across southwestern Colorado for the next two decades as part of the Bureau of Land Management’s final Uncompahgre land-management plan and record of decision. The plan would allow fracking on more than half of the 675,000 acres of public land and almost a million acres of federal minerals that it covers, and coal extraction on another 371,000 acres. The BLM’s environmental impact analysis fails to tally direct and indirect climate pollution that would result from fossil fuel production. The BLM’s oil and gas production forecast shows the plan would increase climate pollution in the region by more than 2,300% over the next decade. Colorado’s new law calls for cutting greenhouse gas pollution in half by 2030.

Look for Republicans in Congress, and GOP leaders around the country, to yet again become true believers in socialism…for the oil and gas industry and corporate America, anyway. When it comes to socialism for people, such as supporting a living wage or universal health care for the American people, the GOP still opposes these basic rights.

P.S. Today is also the 10-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploding, which killed 11 people and spilled more than 200,000,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.

This is a guest column from George Nickas of Wilderness Watch. 

It’s time for the U.S. Forest Service to put a stop to the state of Idaho’s relentless quest to kill as many wolves as it can on our public lands in Idaho, including in wildernesses.

Since being stripped of Endangered Species Act protections and having their “management” turned over to the states, thousands of gray wolves have been needlessly killed on public lands and wilderness areas across Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. But Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game (IDFG) is carrying out its war on wolves to a grotesque extreme.

Witness IDFG’s recent boasting — in a news release, no less — that using low-flying aerial gunships it chased down 17 wolves and executed them in the Lolo-Clearwater country adjacent to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

But that’s only the latest in a long string of such actions taken by the state. And here’s the thing: on national forests — federal lands that belong to all of us — IDFG can’t do this on its own, it needs “partners.” In this case, Idaho’s extermination efforts are being aided or abetted by the Forest Service (FS). Consider this.

In 2013, IDFG hired a professional trapper to wipe out as many wolves as possible in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness (RONRW). Incredibly, the FS regional forester in Ogden, Utah, went along with this plan, giving the trapper use of a Forest Service cabin for his base. Wilderness Watch and other conservation groups filed a lawsuit and, as a result, Idaho pulled the trapper from the wilderness before the courts could rule, but not before he killed nearly a dozen wolves.

But that isn’t the end of the story. IDFG has a plan to eliminate 60% of wolves in the heart of the RONRW, and it devised an unlawful helicopter-assisted elk-collaring project to initiate it. The plan was simple, though not straightforward. Use helicopters to capture and collar elk, document that wolves killed some elk, then use that info to justify killing wolves. The Forest Service should have said “no,” but instead the regional forester in Ogden again played lackey to IDFG and authorized their plan.

Thanks to another lawsuit by Wilderness Watch and our allies, a federal judge saw what the Forest Service apparently couldn’t — that the project violated the Wilderness Act. But before IDFG could be stopped in court, it had collared the elk plus four wolves it wasn’t authorized to target.

Then there’s the case of aerial gunning mentioned above. It’s the eighth time in the last nine years that IDFG’s helicopter-riding gunners have attempted to wipe out wolves in a large part of the Clearwater National Forest. The FS regional forester in Missoula could intervene, but like her predecessors she just turns a blind eye to the plight of the wolves and the wild ecosystems where they live.

Still not satisfied in its blood lust, Idaho in 2020 has lengthened all of its wolf hunting and trapping seasons in Wildernesses and other national forest lands, and it increased wolf-killing quotas to an obscene 30 wolves per hunter and trapper yearly. Again, Forest Service officials sit idly by, despite having the responsibility to protect the wilderness character of the region’s wildernesses and despite having the authority to intervene.

Why does Idaho have such a maniacal obsession with killing wolves? Because wolves have the audacity to eat elk that IDFG believes exist only for elk hunters. Never mind the ecological and moral bankruptcy of that mindset, it’s not likely to change without intervention.

Let’s be crystal clear: By not standing up to IDFG, the Forest Service is complicit in the ongoing slaughter of wolves within federal Wildernesses and national forests across the state.

The Forest Service has the authority to stop IDFG’s attempts to exterminate wolves on our national forests, and it’s long past time it did.

George Nickas is the executive director of Wilderness Watch, a national conservation organization based in Missoula.