IN THE COURTS  Wilderness Watch, et al. Take Action to Protect Kofa Wilderness in Arizona: On February 13, Wilderness Watch, Arizona Wilderness Coalition, Grand Canyon Wildlands Council, Western Watersheds Project, and Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club filed an appeal of the US District Court of Arizona's ruling in favor of a US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) decision to construct water developments, called "guzzlers," in the Kofa Wilderness. Conservation groups had filed a lawsuit in June of 2007 after learning that the USFWS had constructed a 13,000-gallon guzzler within the Kofa Wilderness and was planning to install another similar structure. Read the rest...
Photo courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service
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BLM's decision authorizes helicopter landings at 33 sites within the Wildernesses. Up to 60 landings per training session could occur, resulting in more than 400 landings per year, in perpetuity. The decision represents the single largest motorized intrusion-by a factor of several-fold-ever authorized in a unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Read the rest...
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IN CONGRESS  Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) reintroduced in Congress: NREPA (H.R. 980) would designate 24 million acres of new Wilderness in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, would save taxpayers $245 million, and would restore wildlands. NREPA was reintroduced on 2/13 by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ). 
Map courtesy of Alliance for the Wild Rockies

H.R. 39;  S. 231 would designate the Arctic Refuge coastal plain as Wilderness. These bills, like NREPA, are clean bills.

Omnibus Public Land Management Act update: The Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (S 22) was passed by the Senate on 1/15/09. Many of the 15 wilderness bills within it are relatively clean-they don't contain special provisions that will diminish the integrity of Wilderness-but at least two of the bills-the Owyhee in Idaho, and the Washington County, Utah bills-contain numerous harmful provisions that would allow the routine use of ATVs for herding livestock, motor vehicle use (including aircraft), habitat manipulation by state fish and game agencies, and other damaging activities. Another terrible provision in the Omnibus Bill facilitates building a single-lane road through the 300,000-acre Izembek Wilderness in the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which provides essential habitat for a great variety of wildlife.

We urge you to contact your congressperson and House Speaker Pelosi and ask them to work to remove the Izembek road, Owyhee and Washington County wilderness provisions from the Omnibus Bill. Currently, a House vote on the Omnibus Bill is reportedly being held up over behind-the-scenes negotiations with the gun lobby, which is seeking a technical amendment to open lands to recreational shooting.

H.R. 170 would establish the Dominguez-Escalante Wilderness and National Conservation Area in Colorado. The harmful provisions in this bill would allow construction of stock watering reservoirs and inappropriate "invasive species" management actions in the Wilderness.  

The Central Idaho National Forest Public Lands Management Act (H.R. 192, formerly known as CIEDRA) includes a host of damaging provisions including routine use of motor vehicles for wildlife management activities, ATV corridors splitting the large Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness into four pieces, and several public land giveaways to local interests.
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ESSAY  Compromises for Montana wilderness go too far:
The Montana Wilderness Association's efforts to collaborate with wilderness opponents to get new areas of the state designated as wilderness go too far, giving too many concessions to logging interests in the Beaverhead Deerlodge Partnership, and in the Blackfoot-Clearwater Stewardship Proposal, too much access to snowmobiles along with funding for a new biomass burner for Pyramid Lumber which may increase local logging. Click here to read George Wuerthner's piece in NewWest.
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Wyoming Wilderness Association Gaining Support for Bighorn Mountains Wilderness Designation: This from The Casper Star-Tribune: It has been almost four years since Bighorn National Forest officials recommended that Congress designate more than 33,000 acres of backcountry in the Bighorn Mountains as wilderness. It appears there's still a long way to go for wilderness advocates to convince federal lawmakers that Wyoming should receive its first new wilderness area in the last 25 years.

But some progress has been made, said Liz Howell, executive director of the Wyoming Wilderness Association. "We're building a movement one dance at a time," Howell said. The Sheridan-based group is steadily gaining support for the Rock Creek campaign... and...is working hard to address the concerns of those who are opposed to the idea or who are at least hesitant to support it.
Read the rest...
Photo courtesy of Wyoming Wilderness Association
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WILD 9, the 9th World Wilderness Congress: Wild 9 will convene November 6-13, 2009 in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. WILD 9 is a project of The WILD Foundation, Unidos para la Conservacion, and many collaborating organizations, institutions and government agencies from Latin America and around the world. WILD 9 will highlight the best and brightest in policy, research and practice, bringing together diverse stakeholders from science, business, politics, native communities, the arts and more.

For information and to register your intent to participate, visit the WILD 9 website.
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