- Conserve the Peace and Quiet essential to public health and the health of our native ecosystems.
- Ensure timber sale programs on public lands truly sustain water quality, fish and wildlife.
- Pursue these goals through public education and public involvement whenever possible, and through administrative appeals and lawsuits when necessary.
Your email is needed today to push back on 25 commercial Special Use Permits (SUPs) being issued on the Flathead National Forest!
Only you can help stop the commercial overcrowding of the Flathead NF, which is poised to permit 100-person backpacking trips, 400-person ultra-marathons, and more!
Click here to read about the 100-person Highlander backpacking event being promoted by the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce in order to bring more tourists to an area already overrun with tourists! They hope the event is expanded in future years!
Click here for the Flathead's summary letter inviting public comments by May 26, 2023.
Click here for more detail on each of the 25 commercial Special Use Permits.
Click here for our May 15 letter objecting to this "shotgun approach" to SUPs and requesting a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the Flathead's SUP and recreation programs.
Send your email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by May 26 and consider making these points:
1. Quit allowing commercial outfits like Croatia's Highlander to sell $700 positions in its 100-person event before the public has even been allowed to comment on the idea!
2. Quit trying to mask the impact of these events on wildlife and other forest users by bragging that participants will pick up their own trash!
3. Quit allowing commercial businesses to make money off of promoting the crowding of our National Forests!
4. Quit dumping two dozen SUP proposals on the public and expecting people to research and comment on them within two weeks!
5. Prepare an adequate EIS for the Flathead's SUP and recreation programs and allow the public the required months to comment on it!
Include comments about any of the individual SUPs you have time to become familiar with.
These are public lands, not commercial lands for private profit - and only you can help push back on this commercialization!
Thank you for taking a few moments to comment!
(photo credit: Glacier National Park)
Our Winter-Spring newsletter asks you to send a quick email to help stop DNRC from logging the last of its hemlock forests in Krause Basin, then shows how DNRC's proposal aligns with federal proposals that also promote logging to "restore" forests to false "historic" conditions. We provide links to a growing body of research revealing a "falsification of the scientific record in government-funded wildfire studies" that are being used to promote the logging of native forests.
We also announce that your donation to support our work will be matched/doubled by a generous local donor if you donate now!
Below is our newsletter's table of contents. Click here to view or download our newsletter as a pdf.
A big THANK YOU to those of you who have made donations that support our continuing work!
Won't you join them and make a donation today?
Fish, wildlife and people are counting on us - and you!
MT Department of Natural Resources and Conservation intends to log more of what little native hemlock forest it hasn't logged already in Krause Basin! Please help us stop this phony "forest restoration" now!
Don't let DNRC do to this hemlock forest:
What it did to this hemlock forest in Krause Basin:
Please email DNRC's Pete Seigmund at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) today and make the following points:
1. Don't log any more Western hemlock forests on DNRC lands!
2. Cutting down native hemlock forest to plant commercially valuable white pine and larch is not "forest restoration," it is ecosystem genocide!
3. Leave alone the block of hemlock forest along DNRC's access road running north from Foothill Road into Krause Basin. It is the last stand of hemlock the public can walk through and enjoy along this old closed road!
4. DNRC's past logging via the 2006 Foothills Timber Sale and subsequent blowdown "salvage" has turned the area into a denuded weed patch. "Restoration" requires that DNRC fix these problems, not create more problems through more logging!
5. Krause Basin cannot afford to lose another 50 log trucks full of logs cut from trees essential to ecosystem function and carbon storage!
Click here to read our letter to DNRC, along with our map and photos detailing these problems and logging threats.
Click here to read DNRC's "Initial Proposal: Foothills Restoration Project."
Your comments are due by May 5. Best send them today so you can't forget!
Thank you for taking a few minutes to let DNRC know you want the hemlock forests in Krause Basin left alone!
MDFWP photo
Wake up! A generous donor has agreed to match $5,000 in donations to Swan View Coalition!
So DONATE NOW and see your donation doubled!
Grizzly bears are emerging from their winter dens and are faced with logging, roads, industrial-strength recreation, and proposals to strip them of their protections under the Endangered Species Act!
They need our help and yours, so please help us to continue our lawsuit against the revised Flathead Forest Plan, to oppose the Flathead's onslaught of commercial recreational Special Use Permits, and to oppose efforts to "delist" grizzly bears.
When we protect the bears and their habitat, we also protect many other wildlife species!
Please join with others today to support our work on behalf of fish and wildlife!
Thank you!
Our Holidays 2022 newsletter looks at how recreation gets out of control on public lands and what we can do about it. It also provides a brief summary of our work in 2022 and why your membership is important!
Below is our newsletter's table of contents. Click here to view or download our newsletter as a pdf.
A big THANK YOU to those of you who have made donations that support our continuing work!
Won't you join them and make a donation today?
Fish, wildlfie and people are counting on us - and you!
This Thanksgiving we are thankful to have public lands worth protecting and your support of our work to do so!
It is your kind words and your monetary donations that have kept us at the forefront of public lands conservation since 1984!
Thank you for your support and may you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Our Summer-Fall 2022 newsletter examines two major public relations blunders by the Flathead National Forest as it attempts to force recreational development on a public that is tired of seeing its public lands turned into playgrounds for the rich and racy! We also announce the resumption of our biweekly Swan Range Community Potlucks and Music Jam Sessions - and our Annual Membership Meeting to be held November 20.
Below is our newsletter's table of contents. Click here to view or download our newsletter as a pdf.
A big THANK YOU to those of you who have made donations that support our continuing work!
Won't you join them and make a donation today?
Fish, wildlife and people are counting on us - and you!
Logging road landslide into Sullivan Creek bull trout habitat!
Keith Hammer photo.
