Message from the President

April 18, 2021

As the months progress and we await the Final Forest Plan of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest, we want to alert all citizens who love The Last Best Place.

The Forest Service is poised to recommend for Wilderness legislation only about one-fifth of the Forest's ecosystem-vital and Wilderness-quality lands.

And venerable conservation organizations, Montana Wilderness Association (MWA), of which I am proud to be a former President, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC), and The Wilderness Society (TWS) have all partnered with "recreationists" to remove from Wilderness Study Area status the most important lands of the Hyalite Porcupine Buffalo Horn WSA, and to cede them to motorbike, snowmobile, and mountain bike usage.

There has been a now decade-plus push among mainstream environmental groups around the country to practice their advocacy in exactly this way. They collaborate with various segments of a local or regional community, and they make land use compromises that all its partners can live with. The problem with this effort is that many groups are excluded from these partnerships, which are presented to their communities and politicians as though they are inclusive, and as though they represent a heartwarming event of historically antagonistic groups finding ways to harmoniously live together. But it is really only "as though," since serious disagreement and tension remain.

We highly value much of what all these groups have done over the years to protect our wild places. And what they are still doing on some fronts!

But we respectfully implore their members, donors, staff and Board members to seriously consider the following. Earth is on a precipice. We are losing species at a frightening rate around the world. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, its 22 million acres in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, is a bastion of conservation, still containing all of its pre-1492 wildlife!!  This is an amazing feat and is a huge part of why we are all here! 

If the Partnership accomplishes it aim, though, a new mountain biking and motorized recreation mecca will be born, very quickly, in Big Sky, Montana. Just a bicycle ride away from Big Sky's restaurants and hotels is the trailhead of Porcupine Creek, with the Buffalo Horn a gentle ridgeline away to the south. These lower-elevation valleys, interspersed with forest and vast meadowlands, are home to one of Yellowstone's major elk herds; they are its wintering and birthing grounds. If the PBH loses its protections, that elk herd will be displaced, lost, with nowhere to move. It will be lost, much like Vail, Colorado famously and tragically lost its iconic elk herd due to human excesses.

The Yellowstone grizzly uses these valleys as a crucial migration corridor in order to maintain species genetic integrity by reaching beyond GYE's 700-bear population to the grizzly populations to the north. The Yellowstone wolf, the imminently endangered and human-averse wolverine both also call these places home. A recreation mecca here would displace these animals, too.

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The Gallatin Range just to the south of Bozeman and Livingston, and especially its Porcupine and Buffalo Horn drainages, crucially need Wilderness designation as part of our sustaining what is still wild in Southwest Montana, Wilderness as part of what will keep this our Last Best Place.

MWA, GYC, and TWS believe they are doing the best they can. They believe it is impractical to try to protect the Porcupine and Buffalo Horn. Yet the public has not been rallied to know the dangers. At Earth Day Bozeman, I was deeply moved by how many people of all ages, one after another after another, were troubled to hear what might be about to happen to the all-important northwestern portion of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

I asked them to speak to anyone they know within these environmental groups and let them know that they are worried about what kind of world we are creating, and will leave behind, and will have left to live in in coming decades. If any or all of MWA, GYC, and TWA were to throw their considerable weight behind scientifically rigorous and ambitious goals for our Forest, we just might be able to protect it. There is tremendous desire out there to do so. People just have to know what is going on. Please, speak out before we have to write a terribly momentous elegy for this sacred place!

"Yellowstone Wilderness"

A short film by GYWA