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Eagle Cap Wilderness by Leon Werdinger Photography

Dear friend of the wild,

We’re 30 years old this year, and we need your help to keep raising a ruckus for another 30! Please consider a special 30-year anniversary donation to help safeguard our irreplaceable Wilderness system.

Wilderness Watch will always put Wilderness and its wild inhabitants first. Protecting Wilderness has never been easy, but as you know from our action alerts, the breadth and scale of issues we’re confronting today would have been hard to imagine even a couple of decades ago.

Huge mining projects threaten the Frank Church-River of No Return, Boundary Waters, and Cabinet Mountains Wildernesses. The states of Alaska and Idaho have declared war on wolves and bears in Wildernesses in those states. Domestic livestock grazing devastates our wildest places and the demands of ranchers for more predator  killing, structures, and vehicle use threatens to transform Wilderness into something more akin to cattle ranches.

Not to be outdone, the Trump Administration continues pushing to open Wildernesses in Alaska to the despicable “hunting” practices of bear baiting, aerial gunning of wolves, and killing bears and wolves at their dens. And it signed an unprecedented "Agreement" that would allow a permanent road to be built bisecting the irreplaceable Izembek Wilderness in Alaska.

And though the wilderness system has significantly grown over the years, the agencies have fewer wilderness rangers and trail crews, rely more on motorized equipment, make more unlawful decisions, and demonstrate less fidelity to the letter and spirit of the Wilderness Act. That’s the current reality we will have to change in the years ahead.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Congress seems to have little concern or institutional memory for the high ideals of our wilderness law with new wilderness bills each session that would end Wilderness as we know it. Special interests promoting mountain biking, fixed-anchor climbing, and unlimited habitat manipulation to benefit hunting and angling have captured Congress’ ear. Educating a new generation of Congressional leaders and their staffs is high on our priorities list.

None of this will be easy but we will do it because the future of Wilderness and all the values we hold dear are on the line.

We need your support. Please consider sending a special donation now to help ensure that in another 30 years we’ll still have a wilderness system worth fighting for.

For the Wild,

George Nickas
Executive Director

Now is the best time to give as all first-time donations to Wilderness Watch will be matched by one of our generous members.

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Photo: Eagle Cap Wilderness, Oregon by Leon Werdinger Photography

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