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Monday, September 16, 2013
WildEarth Guardians Joins Forces with Wildlands CPR
Merger Will Expand Guardians Work to Protect Endangered Carnivores; Bring New Emphasis on Roads, Motorized Recreation and Rewilding
Contact: John Horning (505) 988-9126 x1153
Additional contact: Bethanie Walder, (406) 543-9551
Santa Fe, NM—WildEarth Guardians, a western environmental advocacy organization with a nearly 25-year history of protecting public lands and endangered wildlife is expanding its geographic scope, issue expertise, campaigns and size through a merger with Wildlands CPR, a Missoula, MT-based non-profit with a 20-year history of protecting and restoring healthy watersheds from the threats of roads and motorized recreation.
Both organizations share a common purpose to protect, restore, and preserve wildlife, wild lands and waterways throughout the American West. Integrating Wildlands CPR’s mission, expertise and staff complements and deepens WildEarth Guardians ongoing work to protect national forests. The merger also gives a significant boost to WildEarth Guardians’ mounting efforts to protect wildlife and wild places, and to confront fossil fuel development in Montana and the Northern Rockies while linking that work to other conservation campaigns throughout the American West.
"We've created a bigger, bolder and better organization to achieve our goals to protect national forests, restore watersheds and recover endangered carnivores – like lynx, wolves and grizzly bears – across the West," said John Horning, Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians. “I’m excited by the possibility of being a more powerful voice for nature and deepening our efforts to restore and rewild watersheds and public lands,” he added.
A small, nimble and creative organization, Wildlands CPR defined the cutting edge of wildlands protection and restoration for nearly two decades. Wildlands CPR has achieved many successes, protecting and restoring clean water, wildlife, and quiet recreation from the threats of roads and motorized vehicles. Highlights include:
• Spearheading efforts to ensure the U.S. Forest Service addressed the ubiquitous threat of off-road vehicles to public lands. These efforts ultimately led to the closing of 50 million acres of National Forest land to cross-country off-road vehicle abuse;
• Engaging Congress to invest $315 million (to date) in the Forest Service Legacy Roads and Trails Program, which has funded road reclamation and in turn protected drinking water supplies and endangered fish habitat across the American West;
• Spurring the Forest Service to adopt the Roads Rule, which opened the door for rewilding our heavily roaded National Forests by reclaiming unneeded, ecologically damaging forest roads. The Forest Service is in the midst of implementing the Roads Rule, which could reconnect wildlife habitat and core public lands across the landscape by creating up to 9 million acres of new roadless lands.
“Being part of WildEarth Guardians creates many exciting possibilities,” said Bethanie Walder, formerly Executive Director of Wildlands CPR, now Public Lands Director of WildEarth Guardians. “Together we can reach a larger audience, protect and restore more wild places in the Pacific Northwest and the Spine of the Continent, and, most importantly, increase our ability to implement our mission and achieve our mutual vision.”
WildEarth Guardians’, whose mission is to protect and restore the wild places, wildlife and wild rivers of the American West, accomplishments include: an historic legal settlement under the Endangered Species Act with the Fish and Wildlife Service requiring action to list more than 250 imperiled species; closing coal-fired power plants in multiple western states; winning millions of acres of habitat protections for endangered species and; legal victories that halted grazing and logging on millions of acres of public lands.
The group now has 24 staff members and a budget approaching $3 million. Guardians has main offices in Denver, Santa Fe, and Missoula, with satellites in San Diego, Eugene, Portland, Tucson, and Laramie as well as more than 100,000 members and e-activists from across the country.
In addition to adding new campaigns to address the threat of roads and motorized recreation nationally, the merger gives Guardians the opportunity to be a more powerful advocate for the Spine of the Continent vision, whose goal is to protect a series of large, core, wild landscapes all the way from Canada to Mexico along the Rocky Mountains.
WildEarth Guardians has worked in Montana and the Northern Rockies for years, most recently winning a lawsuit to prohibit the trapping of wolverines in Montana and launching efforts to safeguard the climate from coal mining in the Powder River Basin of southeastern Montana. The opening of a Missoula office provides an anchor for Guardians expanding work in the Northern Rockies.
“Climate change demands that we restore, re-wild and re-connect damaged landscapes,” said Horning. “The science is abundantly clear that big, wild landscapes with a full assemblage of native wildlife—especially ecosystem engineers like wolves, prairie dogs and beavers—are going to be much more resilient to the climate changes we are experiencing.”
In addition, “millions of Americans depend on national forest watersheds for their drinking water supplies. Healing damaged watersheds ensures high quality, low cost drinking water while also providing salmon and other migratory fish unobstructed access to travel from the sea to their spawning grounds,” said Walder.
WildEarth Guardians will continue to use ethics, science and the law to inform its strategies to protect wildlife and wild places and shift our energy policies. The group says that its greatest challenge is convincing Congress, state law-makers and federal policy makers that bold conservation strategies are in our economic and environmental interest.
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