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Your comments are needed by April 20 to help protect some of our least-developed and most ecologically-significant public lands in the lower 48 states. The Forest Service is proposing a weaker forest management plan for the four million-acre Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest (NPCNF) in Idaho. This area is a key part of the largest Wilderness complex outside of Alaska—the Selway-Bitterroot/River of No Return Wilderness Complex.
The NPCNF has tremendous diversity, from low-elevation habitat of wet cedar forests to wind swept ridges with mountain hemlocks on undulating peaks. The NPCNF has 1.1 million acres of Wilderness, including most of the Selway-Bitterroot, part of the Frank Church-River of No Return, and all of Gospel-Hump. Nationally known Wild and Scenic Rivers such as the Salmon, Selway, Lochsa, and Clearwater run through it.
The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest’s 1.5 million acres of undeveloped roadless wildlands, many of which are adjacent to Wilderness, are home to numerous threatened and endangered species, including bull trout, Chinook salmon, Westslope cutthroat trout, lynx, and grizzly bear (extremely rare but at least three were documented in 2019). The area is also famous for fisher, wolves, wolverines, black bear, mountain goats, and harlequin ducks. These roadless lands should be recommended for wilderness designation, but the Forest Service (FS) is instead pushing the opposite, with plans to log, build roads, and allow snowmobiles and ATVs.
The FS plan would also negatively impact Wilderness and the wildlife dependent upon it. The FS is doing nothing about addressing the impacts of growing visitor use in Wilderness, which has increased more than three-fold in just five years. It’s also hell-bent on interfering with natural processes through extensive use of manager ignited fire, though Wilderness is supposed to remain untrammeled. The Selway-Bitterroot/River of No Return Wilderness Complex is a primary recovery area for grizzly bears yet the forest plan barely mentions grizzly bears, much less discusses essential migration corridors and the habitat security necessary for their recovery. In another example, the FS allows wolves to be aerially gunned outside of Wilderness, but since wolf packs roam both inside and outside of Wildernesses, wolves in Wilderness could be affected. Additionally, as more roadless acres become motorized playgrounds and clearcuts, those seeking to escape the crowds and cacophony could concentrate even more use in the Wilderness.
Our allies at Friends of the Clearwater have a science-based plan to protect these important public lands. But the FS has so far failed to analyze and include their Citizen Conservation Biology Alternative in the draft forest plan, despite approximately 10,000 comments supporting this plan during the initial scoping period.
If all this weren’t bad enough, right now, local special interests are flooding the FS with anti-wilderness and anti-wildlife comments, calling for huge increases in industrial logging and roadbuilding in critical wildlife habitat, and demanding the FS open up potential wilderness lands, such as the Great Burn, to motorized and mechanized use.
Luckily, federal public lands like the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest belong equally to all Americans, so you can help stand up for Wilderness and wildlife by submitting your comments to the FS today!
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Please visit our website at www.WildernessWatch.org to see what other actions you can take! Thank you.
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