Mission and Overview

Wildlands CPR revives and protects wild places by promoting watershed restoration that improves fish and wildlife habitat, provides clean water and enhances community economies. We focus on reclaiming ecologically damaging, unneeded roads and on stopping off-road vehicle abuse.

Wildlands CPR has been working with citizens, grassroots groups, tribes, and land managers to protect and revive natural areas since 1994. We’re located in the west, but we work coast to coast—from the cypress woodlands of Florida, to the red-rock canyons of Utah, to the fragile tundra of the Arctic.

Our members include hunters, hikers, cross-country skiers, photographers, business owners, anglers, scientists, students, teachers, parents and many others.

We work to restore watersheds and rural economies by promoting road reclamation, which provides high-wage, high-skill jobs to people in rural communities. Their work to remove roads restores clean drinking water, reconnects fragmented wildlife habitat and ensures access to healthy habitat and quiet places, for human-powered recreation.

Our successes are many. In Big Cypress National Preserve, for example, we partnered with other groups to get the Park Service to rein in off-road vehicle use, reducing 23,000 miles of renegade tracks to just 400 miles of designated routes. In 2007 we helped secure more than $73 million for state and federal agencies to implement watershed restoration and remediation (Montana state lands - $34 million; (Forest Service - $39.4 million). In 2008 we coordinated the distribution of nearly 5000 copies of the book Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of Motorized Recreation, working in partnership with more than 100 groups nationwide to put these books in the hands of decision-makers, media and land managers.

We also continue to lead the Legacy Roads and Trails (LRT) campaign, which has resulted in $225 million in FS funding over the past four years for watershed restoration related to road management. The unprecedented amount of watershed restoration funding provided by Legacy Roads and Trails has had direct positive impacts on the ground. In the first three years of the program ($180 million) the agency improved 1,408 miles of fish habitat, decommissioned 3,703 miles of roads, and improved 1,656 miles of trails, among other accomplishments. The Forest Service is currently estimating that for every million spent on FS roadwork, 12 direct and 12 indirect jobs are created. With $225 million nationally this translates into creating or maintaining approximately 2,700-5,400 green jobs, mostly in rural, forest dependent communities.