Wild Issues

Wilderness Watch submitted comments on Yosemite National Park’s Wilderness Stewardship Plan (WSP) Preliminary Concepts and Ideas. The 704,000-acre Yosemite Wilderness in California makes up 94 percent of the Park.

Wilderness Watch and other organizations are opposing a Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) plan to use helicopters to capture and collar non-native mountain goats in three Wildernesses along the Wasatch Front in Utah—Twin Peaks, Lone Peak, and Mt. Timpanogos. UDWR is trying to learn why the non-native goat population is declining, so it can try to reverse the decline and provide more goats for hunters.

Wilderness Watch is concerned that measures proposed by the National Park Service (NPS) in their Backcountry and Wilderness Stewardship Plan for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve (Wrangells) in Alaska will fail to adequately protect the wilderness character of this great landscape. Wrangells is our nation’s largest national park (13.176 million acres) and its designated Wilderness (9.078 million acres) is the largest in the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Wilderness Watch and several other conservation groups have scored a major victory for the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho! On August 2, 2016, a federal judge in Idaho issued an order declaring that the U.S. Forest Service’s approval of the Golden Hand Mine—an extensive drilling, bulldozing, and road construction project within the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness—violated the Wilderness Act, the National Forest Management Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

 

In August 2016, Wilderness Watch released a detailed analysis of the Wilderness provisions found in the “Utah Public Lands Initiative Act” (H.R. 5780), which was introduced in Congress on July 14, 2016 by Rep Rob Bishop (R-UT) and Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). Though the PLI proposes to designate 41 new Wildernesses, Wilderness Watch’s analysis shows that the bill guts protections these Wildernesses would receive under the 1964 Wilderness Act, and includes numerous unprecedented harmful provisions never before found in any wilderness designation law. The sheer number and types of these special provisions ensure the Wildernesses designated by the PLI would be nothing but WINOs—Wildernesses In Name Only.

 

 

Trump signed a law in early April 2017 to again allow the following practices to kill wildlife in national wildlife refuges in Alaska:
    •    Same day airborne hunting of bears, wolves, and wolverines;
    •    Use of traps, snares, and nets for killing bears;
    •    Killing of wolves and coyotes from May 1 to August 9, which is a significant part of the denning season;
    •    Killing of bear cubs or mothers with cubs (except for subsistence hunts where this is traditional); and
    •    Use of bait to kill brown bears.

In a major blow to conservation efforts in Alaska, including efforts to protect over 56 million acres of Wilderness in the state, in late March the U.S. Supreme Court held that John Sturgeon, a moose hunter, can “rev up his hovercraft in search of moose” on the Nation River, which flows through the Yukon-Charley Rivers…

Wilderness Watch has told the Forest Service (FS) it needs to drop its plan to significantly manipulate or trammel the Pusch Ridge and Rincon Mountain Wildernesses outside of Tucson, Arizona as part of its Catalina-Rincon Firescape Project. The Forest Service is planning extensive burns along with some cutting, slashing, and logging to build firelines within the Wildernesses. Wilderness Watch supports allowing lightning-caused fire to play its natural role in Wilderness, but there is nothing natural about this FS proposal which would significantly alter these Wildernesses and destroy the areas’ wilderness character.

 

The Forest Service (FS) has released an Environmental Assessment (EA) that would withdraw mineral rights on about 101,000 acres of national forest and Bureau of Land Management-administered land near the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in Oregon. The rugged, nearly 180,000-acre Kalmiopsis is one of the original Wildernesses designated by the Wilderness Act in 1964. The FS is proposing to add a five-year mineral rights withdrawal to its current two-year moratorium while Congress considers the Southwestern Oregon Watershed and Salmon Protection Act of 2015 (S. 346 and H.R. 682) to permanently protect the area from mining.

The Pasayten and Lake Chelan-Sawtooth Wildernesses east of the Cascade crest in Washington State are some of the wildest country in the lower 48 states, providing habitat for rare lynx, spotted owls, grizzlies, and wolves. Despite evidence of damage from existing levels of pack stock use, the Forest Service is considering a drastic increase in…