2007 Annual Report

Bringing home the bacon… That short phrase pretty much sums up Wildlands CPR’s most significant successes last year. Through two campaigns, we helped secure $73 million for federal and state agencies for public lands watershed restoration (to be spent mostly in 2008)! To accomplish this and our other work, we expanded significantly — increasing our staff from six to ten people and engaging in more work on-the-ground.

Restoration Program
A few years ago, we determined that a lack of funding was a primary reason that road removal and watershed restoration are not common wildland management activities. We shifted our work to focus on increasing both private and public funding for all watershed restoration, including road removal. In 2007 we saw our first major success with such work.

In Montana, we continued our work with the Restore Montana network, leading that nascent coalition in its efforts to build a vibrant, sustainable restoration sector of the economy. Restore Montana is a unique coalition that includes state universities, labor, hunters/anglers, industry and conservation representatives. In 2007, our state legislature passed a budget with $34 million in new funding for watershed restoration, with a significant portion specified for particular projects, and almost $6 million for new projects. The legislature also set up a new office of watershed restoration at the Department of Natural Resources, and in December 2007, the DNR hired a state restoration coordinator to run that office. Restore Montana worked hard to get these initiatives passed through the MT legislature. We will continue to work closely with the state to ensure that the funding is well spent and that it results in real restoration work on the ground — including road reclamation!

Our Restoration Program Coordinator, Marnie Criley, took a leadership role in our Restore Montana work and also in the Montana Forest Restoration Working Group, a separate broad-based collaborative group (including agency staff, conservationists, hunters, anglers, practitioners, and timber representatives) that crafted, negotiated, and eventually adopted 13 principles for watershed restoration in Montana. This diverse group then proceeded from theory to reality, by creating two sub-groups to test the principles on the Lolo and Bitterroot National Forests.

Early in 2007 we began working with the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative (WWRI) to advance their efforts to secure funding for road removal in Washington State and beyond. In mid-summer, we hired Sue Gunn to be the Campaign Coordinator for the WWRI effort. The WWRI is a network of conservation organizations and state agencies working to restore watershed health by reclaiming damaging and unneeded forest roads, and ensuring that those that remain are fully maintained to meet water quality standards. The WWRI went to work with Congressman Norm Dicks’ office to promote the Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative. In December 2007, the President signed the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Act, which included $39.4 million for the Forest Service for this initiative. The WWRI, in one short year, had its first major victory!

Transportation
Our transportation program expanded tremendously in 2007, with the addition of three new staff and on-the-ground work on transportation plans in MT and UT. We also continued our national and regional policy work.

In Montana, Adam Rissien chose the Bitterroot and Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forests as priorities, reinvigorating quiet recreation groups, submitting complex comments on plans, and influencing travel planning on these and other forests. Adam also partnered with the Forest Service to coordinate a day-long travel planning session for conservationists, recreationists and staff from eight different national forests.

In Utah, Laurel Hagen partnered with grassroots groups to hold information workshops, prioritize field needs, and increase capacity for these groups to challenge off-road vehicle use. One result of her work: The town of Escalante turned away state funding to build a new ORV trailhead in town!

In 2007, we tackled an under-addressed problem with off-road vehicle management: Enforcement. In May, we published a new report, “Six Strategies for Success: Effective Enforcement of Off-Road Vehicle Use on Public Lands,” which we distributed to hundreds of agency staff and activist organizations. The Forest Service’s national off-road vehicle team leader sent a message to travel planning staff encouraging them to use our report in their travel planning process. We conducted an extensive media effort to highlight enforcement problems nationally and received great coverage in the southeast and intermountain areas and we are now pushing this issue on Capitol Hill.

In 2007, the Foundation for Deep Ecology granted us 5000 copies of a new coffee table book about off-road vehicle problems, Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of Motorized Recreation. Packed with alarming photographs and insightful essays, Thrillcraft is a powerful medium for conveying the graphic abuse that off-road vehicles inflict on public lands, waters, and wildlife habitat.

Within two months, we had sent more than 4500 copies to activists around the country for them to redistribute to decision-makers, agency staff, media and interested citizens. We also developed (in partnership with the Center for Biological Diversity) a messaging and distribution package for these activists.

On the legal front, our new Legal and Agency Liaison, Sarah Peters, took the lead in settling a lawsuit with the Forest Service over a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we made in 2005. Almost two years after our initial request, we finally began receiving data on road and off-road vehicle management on the 85 forests in the western U.S. We’re now knee-deep in data analysis, which is a 2008 priority for us. We also continued our legal battles to protect Big Cypress National Preserve by joining several other groups to file another lawsuit to challenge off-road vehicle use there.

Science
We hosted a fantastic organized session at the Society for Ecological Restoration/Ecological Society for America meeting in California, which helped us identify new priorities for road removal research. On-the-ground, our Clearwater National Forest (ID) monitoring program documented lots of wildlife using decommissioned roads, including large carnivores such as bears, a cougar, and a wolf. In fact, we expanded our monitoring program to incorporate projects in the Flathead National Forest. Staff Scientist Adam Switalski worked closely with the Wild Utah Project to develop a set of off-road vehicle Best Management Practices (BMPs). We finished the BMPs at the close of 2007 and published them in early 2008. These guidelines will be a major contribution to off-road vehicle management in the future.

Funding Wildlands CPR was supported by the following foundations in 2007: 444S, Firedoll Foundation, Foundation for Deep Ecology (via Tides), Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation, Google Adwords, Harder, LaSalle Adams, Lazar, Maki, National Forest Foundation, Norcross Wildlife Foundation, Page Foundation, Patagonia/Dillon, Tides, Weeden, and Y2Y Partner Grants.

Conclusion
2007 was a banner year for Wildlands CPR. We successfully campaigned for new federal and state funding for watershed restoration and engaged new, diverse partners throughout the west. Our off-road vehicle program experienced profound growth, with new staff laying the foundation for influencing travel planning in UT and MT in the most positive way. We also worked with activists across the country to control off-road vehicle abuse.

None of this would have been possible without the support of individuals and foundations. Our successes are your successes, and we hope to make even more progress in 2008.