Dear Friend of Wilderness,

Thank you for being a key member of our activist network, and for joining tens of thousands of Americans in telling the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject a proposed titanium and zirconium mine along the eastern border of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southern Georgia!

You should have recently received our letter urging you to join Wilderness Watch, and we’re sending this note along as a reminder. Speaking up for Wilderness is essential and appreciated, but we really need you to take one more step and join Wilderness Watch so we can continue keeping you informed and fighting the battles—like at Okefenokee—to preserve our nation’s wildest places.

The 354,000-acre Okefenokee Wilderness is the second largest designated Wilderness east of the Mississippi, and it comprises 90 percent of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. This intact blackwater-swamp ecosystem is so rare that the United Nations recognizes the Okefenokee as a Wetland of International Importance.

Unfortunately, as you know, Twin Pine Minerals of Birmingham, AL, wants to build a strip mine along the eastern border of the Okefenokee, which would severely degrade this unique landscape. You stood up and said no, and it worked! Together, we sent Twin Pines back to the drawing board. But they’ll be back, and we’ll be ready.

Help us remain vigilant and protect this incredibly special place. Please become a member of Wilderness Watch today.

Wilderness Watch has a 31-year record of uncompromising defense of Wilderness and its wildlife. The fight to save the Okefenokee Wilderness is just one of dozens of challenges in which we’re engaged, and in which we’ll prevail with your help. Below are a few of them:

• We’re suing the Forest Service to stop the killing of grizzly bears at “bait stations” in national forests and Wildernesses in Wyoming and Idaho.
• We’re pushing our campaign to remove invasive livestock from Wildernesses across the National Wilderness Preservation System.
• We’re suing to stop oil and gas drilling on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
• We’re urging the U.S. Air Force to drop its proposal for up to 10,000 fighter jet flights a year over the Gila Wilderness and seven other Wildernesses in New Mexico.
• We’re suing to stop egregious hunting practices on national preserves in Alaska.
• We’re fighting to bring quiet back to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota by removing the motorized commercial towboats.
• We’re opposing a plan to build a dam that would inundate part of the Holy Cross Wilderness in Colorado.
• We’re challenging dozens of individual projects that would harm Wildernesses from the Everglades to the Arctic Refuge and many wild places in between.