Dear Friends:
As part of our online community you play a crucial role in protecting America’s timeless wilderness heritage. Your support and your actions help keep our efforts strong, our vision clear, our Wildernesses safe.
You don’t need us to tell you our wildest places face a tenuous future with a virulently anti-wilderness Congress backed by the Trump Administration. It’s not an exaggeration to say in the next two years the Wilderness Act itself will be on the line.
That’s why we’re asking you to make a special year-end contribution to Wilderness Watch to support our work in the year ahead.
You know from reading our alerts that Congress has already been pushing some of the worst wilderness bills we’ve ever seen. Bills that would effectively repeal the Wilderness Act’s key protections, that would force open millions of acres in Alaska to cruel and ecologically destructive hunting practices, that would allow mountain bikes and other machines, and that would designate nothing but WINOs—Wildernesses In Name Only.
Last year we asked for support to challenge some of the worst proposals we’ve faced in our 26 years: gold mining in the famed Frank Church-River of No Return (FC-RONR), an airport in the Kootznoowoo, Army helicopter training in the rugged Alpine Lakes, a commercial timber sale in the remote Red Rock Lakes, Idaho’s plan for hundreds of helicopter landings to capture and collar elk as part of an effort to kill more than half of the wolves in the FC-RONR, and more.
With your help, we stopped every one of these projects in their tracks.
We built a national coalition of 115 organizations to oppose legislation allowing mountain bikes into Wilderness, and we initiated litigation to end excessive motorboat use in the Boundary Waters and the secret construction of illegal shelters in the Olympics. And we’re working to ensure a wilder future for our nation’s largest Wilderness, Wrangell-St Elias, and several others.
Your contributions also supported a full-time staff attorney and helped launch a growing social media project reaching thousands of new wilderness supporters.
Your support allows us to take on all these issues and to be the voice of Wilderness wherever the debate might take us.
Please consider making a special donation today so we can continue to hold back those who would ruin our irreplaceable Wilderness system.
With your help we’ll continue fighting wilderness and wildlife destroying proposals in Congress, in the courts, and in the field. We will grow our legal and social media programs and launch a new wilderness organizer position—a range rider of sorts who will take our message on the road, help sound the alarm, and rally support for wilderness protection around the country.
We’re going to win. For the wolves, the bears, the wild River of No Return, the desolate Owyhees, the quiet Boundary Waters, the remarkable Kootznoowoo, and the dozens of other Wildernesses also threatened.
But the “we” is all of us. Wilderness Watch relies on members and supporters like you for 90 percent of our operating funds. We’re going to have to dig deep into our reserves for the battle ahead, and I urge you, too, to dig as deep as you can for Wilderness we all love.
This isn’t a fight we can afford to lose. Please be as generous as you can with a contribution now.
For the Wilderness,
George, Jeff, Dawn, Kevin, and Dana
Photos: Kootznoowoo Wilderness by Don MacDougall/USFS via Flickr; Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness by Greg Gjerdingen via Flickr.
