Don’t mourn. Organize.

A phrase attributed to labor organizer Joe Hill is fitting for this moment: “Don’t Mourn. Organize.”  Or in the words of writer Ed Abbey, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

During the last Trump Administration our small, gritty organization, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, sued the Trump Administration 18 times to protect our planet and we won 16 times. 

We plan to do it again. Instead of mourning, we are gearing up to fight for our public lands and endangered species once again. We are ready and we plan to be aggressive about it. We will defend the grizzly bears, the wolverines, the lynx and the wolves. We will protect the old growth forests, the wild rivers and our wild native fish. 

We will hire the best lawyers and we will win again and again.

The Trump Administration cannot take away our right to sue the government for breaking the law. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution not only guarantees freedom of speech, it also gives citizens the right to sue the federal government for very good reasons. 

If someone throws a brick through a window, the police enforce the law. But when the federal government breaks the law, citizens are often the only “enforcers,” so the Alliance for the Wild Rockies ensures that the government follows the law by filing and winning lawsuits.  

Some of the things we stopped the last Trump administration from doing included killing 72 grizzly bears in a cattle grazing allotment in the Upper Green River Watershed in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in Wyoming.  

We also stopped the Trump Administration twice from clearcutting and burning 80,000 acres in the Payette National Forest in central Idaho. We also repeatedly stopped the Trump Administration from destroying rare occupied habitat for the imperiled Selkirk grizzly population in northern Idaho and the equally imperiled Cabinet-Yaak grizzly population in northwestern Montana.

When federal government agencies fail to protect our public lands, wild rivers and native wildlife populations as required by law, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies actively participates in the entire government process. 

Before we can sue the government in court, we have to file multiple types of public comments with scientific references to back up what we say, often amounting to hundreds of pages per illegal action. 

If the government ignores science and the law, we go to court to force it to follow the law. And contrary to the lies told by the politicians, we do not get paid for any of the work we do before filing the lawsuit or after the lawsuit is filed. We have to hire a lawyer for each lawsuit. If we win the case, the lawyer gets paid, but we do not.  

This means that the costs of preparing our lawsuits, and paying the lawyer’s retainer for each case, falls 100% on our members. So this means that the number of lawsuits we file is directly dependent on how much financial support you give us.  

We are ready and willing to fight the Trump Administration from the moment he steps into office. But your financial support dictates how much work we can do. 

Mike Garrity is the Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.