Pilgrim timber sale challenged by nature group

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, the organization that filed a lawsuit to halt the Pilgrim timber sale in the Kootenai National Forest, lists thousands of contributors. But a call to the organization’s Helena office found just one person who performed multiple duties.

“That’s me,” Alliance for the Wild Rockies Executive Director Mike Garrity said when asked for the agency’s public relations director. “The executive director? That’s me, too. I’m pretty much it. I wear many hats.”

Attorneys for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies last month filed the lawsuit in federal district court in Missoula, claiming potential danger to habitat for the endangered Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear. The lawsuit challenges the U.S. Forest Service’s decision to allow the Pilgrim project to proceed. The project would allow 4.7 miles of new permanent road construction, and 1.1 miles of new, temporary road construction to facilitate logging and burning activities on 1,434 acres of the Cabinet Ranger District, including 898 acres of clear cuts. The activities will occur in the Huckleberry Mountain and Lone Cliff Smeads Inventoried Roadless Areas in occupied bear habitat, said Garrity.

“The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear is almost certainly going extinct,” said Garrity. “Reams of studies have found that roads pose the most imminent threat to these bears, and this project calls for more than 50 miles of new, reconstructed and temporary haul roads for logging.”

While Garrity’s staff is small, he believes his motives are pure and consistent with the Alliance for the Wild Rockies members he represents.

“The target population for recovery of the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bears is 100 bears,” Garrity said. “The agency is blatantly ignoring its own scientific evidence and these projects would only have accelerated the loss of this population of grizzlies.”

Grizzly bear studies are currently being conducted in the Cabinet-Yaak area, but results of those studies are inconclusive.

Grizzly bear biologist Wayne Kasworm said  the augmentation program in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem creates positive growth; however, without augmentation the grizzly population is in decline.

Augmentation is the transportation of grizzlies from one area to another.

“Without augmentation, the population is 0.08 percent in decline,” Kasworm said Thursday. “The mortality rate is exceeding the birth rate, at least according to 2012 numbers.”

Kasworm said next month he will begin assessing the grizzlies in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem to get an updated count.

“Right now, not all the bears are in their dens,” Kasworm said. “I’ll have a better idea next month.”

Garrity said historical studies prove grizzlies in the area have yet to recover, and this project would further threaten the species.

“In 1993, and again in 1998 and 1999, the (U.S.) Fish & Wildlife Service revisited its decision to list all of the grizzly bear populations in the lower 48 states as threatened,” Garrity said. “It concluded every time that the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly population had deteriorated to the point of warranting an endangered classification because the suggested protective measures have not achieved desired goals for habitat protection.”

According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Cabinet-Yaak population is in danger of extinction due, in part, to the cumulative impacts of timber harvest and its associated road construction.  

“The predictions regarding the bear’s survival have become increasingly bleak,” Garrity said.  “Yet the Forest Service continues to exacerbate the situation through more road building and logging in the bears’ last refuge, even as human-caused mortality rates have tripled in the last decade.”

The Forest Service does not typically comment on litigation, and messages left for Kootenai National Forest Supervisor Paul Bradford for comment went unreturned. However, retired Kootenai National Forest Supervisor Jim Rathbun did comment.

“The Forest Service is totally aware that one guy can have this kind of impact,” Rathbun said. “They’ve been doing it for years. That’s the reason I got out in 1989. I couldn’t take it anymore. Timber sales like this are held up and who pays? Our forests do. They become old and prone to insects. We’re not logging them and they grow old and die. We’re wasting resources.”

Libby logger Tom Horelick of North Fork Forestry said the Alliance for the Wild Rockies lawsuit further cripples logging efforts.

“The only thing I can say is I think the Forest Service likes it,” Horelick said. “They prepare this sale, everyone gets paid, and then it’s stopped. I’ve seen it with the Ecology Center. It’s a ridiculous game.”

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies website states for just $25 a year people can add their  “voice to that of thousands of AWR members, and join this effective, grassroots organization devoted to securing the ecological integrity of our beloved wildland heritage in the wild Rockies.”