Fifteen Years and Going Strong
Sometimes you get so busy with day-to-day work that you don’t even realize when you’ve crossed an important milestone. That’s just what happened this June at our annual board/staff retreat when we realized it was our 15th anniversary this year. And what a busy, exciting and successful 15 years it’s been…
Wildlands CPR was founded in 1994 by a group of activists, conservation biologists and environmental lawyers who met to share strategies for fighting roads and off-road vehicles on public lands. Founders Katie Alvord and Kraig Klungness coordinated the meeting and took on the responsibility to implement the many strategies that were developed there, including creating a new organization to act as a clearinghouse for scientific, legal and strategic information about roads and ORVs on public lands. Katie and Kraig spent that first year overseeing the development of some of Wildlands CPR’s resources that remain key foundations of our work, including:
During our first few years we focused primarily on being a clearinghouse, providing assistance to thousands of activists on road and ORV strategy questions, while also training more than 1,000 activists to conduct road surveys and ORV impact surveys. Our bibliographic database was publicized long before “road ecology” became popular, providing a critical resource to land managers, scientists, activists and decision-makers regarding the impacts of roads and off-road vehicles – the database has been used by people all over the world, and by every land management agency in the country.
After that initial burst of key resources, we focused the next few years on building strong relationships with grassroots groups throughout the country. Those relationships provided us with a unique “bird’s eye-view” about common management problems/themes cropping up in multiple places, enabling us to provide strategic leadership on public lands transportation policy reform nationally. For example, in 1999 we led a coalition of more than 100 groups to formally petition the Forest Service to overhaul their off-road vehicle management. (A few years later we updated our strategic plan with a specific goal of stopping cross-country ORV travel on 50% of the national forests.) Our petition provided a compendium of the available science on off-road vehicle impacts, as well as site-specific examples of problematic management on dozens of national forests. In large part as a response to our 1999 petition (though perhaps a little after the fact), in 2005 the Forest Service began a national “transportation planning process” to close national forest lands to cross-country travel and to complete new travel plans for all national forests. We’ve been co-leading (with The Wilderness Society) the national campaign to influence these travel planning processes. And while travel planning isn’t finished yet, to date it appears that more than 20,000 miles of roads and user-created routes have been closed (about ¼ of the former, ¾ of the latter), and more than 10 million acres of land have been protected from cross country travel by ORVs. The bulk of the decisions will be coming out in the next 12-15 months, and the trend looks positive for a continuation of statistics like these. We’re thrilled to report that by the end of 2010, as the new travel plans come on line, nearly all national forest lands will be closed to cross country travel (except in discrete designated areas).
And it’s not just on the ORV side that we’ve been succeeding – Wildlands CPR is trusted by state and federal agency staff, congressional staff, activists and university professors as THE source for information about watershed restoration emphasizing road reclamation. During the past few years we’ve focused our energy on securing new funding for the Forest Service, in particular to implement watershed restoration priorities, and we’ve been outrageously successful. In fiscal years 2008-09 combined, the FS received ~$90 million for the newly created Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative. They also received at least $228 million in stimulus funds for road and trail maintenance, including critical culvert upgrades. While it remains difficult to analyze how those stimulus funds were allocated, we were informed that $25 million of that went directly to road decommissioning work! If you add that to the $90 million already allocated, that’s $115 million in two years, with another $100 million on the table in the FY ’10 appropriations bill that is still under consideration. We also worked directly in the state of MT to increase watershed restoration funding by $34 million in 2007, largely overseen by a new statewide office of watershed restoration. What are the on the ground results of all that money? The FY ’08 Legacy Roads funds were used to reclaim more than 500 miles of roads nationally, resulting in more than 60,000 acres of habitat improved (and many forests didn’t even calculate the habitat acreage). For FY ’09, the FS estimates it will more than double their restoration efforts – reclaiming more than 1300 miles of roads, resulting in more than 65,000 acres of habitat and 566 miles of streams restored this year alone. Wildlands CPR’s work is having an unprecedented and very significant impact on the ground!
A huge obstacle to restoration work has always been funding, thus our emphasis over the past few years on getting the money to the Forest Service to do the necessary work. And it turns out that all that money provides real jobs on the ground. Wildlands CPR was one of the first conservation organizations to embrace and promote the concept of green jobs – well before it was popular to do so. We published our first report on restoration and jobs in 2003 – once again showing cutting-edge leadership in the restoration arena. This year we worked with The Wilderness Society to analyze how many people received jobs from the first year’s Legacy Roads allocations in Idaho and Montana (see pages 14-15 this issue), so we could start to show real green jobs progress on the ground. In addition, we just completed a series of reports on the political economy of watershed restoration (see cover story this issue). We understand that road reclamation isn’t the only step to restoring watersheds, and we’re excited about expanding our programs to incorporate more watershed restoration activities.
During the past 15 years, Wildlands CPR has been instrumental in dramatically changing transportation management on Forest Service lands, with a couple of small excursions into BLM and Park Service lands as well (e.g. we were part of an important lawsuit that reduced ORV trails in Big Cypress National Preserve (FL) from 23,000 miles of user-created routes to 400 miles of designated routes). Our work has increased the Forest Service’s capacity to restore watersheds by reclaiming unneeded roads and upgrading/maintaining needed roads. We have also played an essential role in beginning to reform Forest Service off-road vehicle management nationally. Thanks to our many grassroots partners, and our extraordinarily talented staff, we’ve been able to identify effective, cutting-edge strategies that have profound results on the ground. We’re looking forward to continuing to provide leadership to the conservation community and public land managers regarding transportation and watershed restoration for at least another 15 years!
Wildlands CPR was founded in 1994 by a group of activists, conservation biologists and environmental lawyers who met to share strategies for fighting roads and off-road vehicles on public lands. Founders Katie Alvord and Kraig Klungness coordinated the meeting and took on the responsibility to implement the many strategies that were developed there, including creating a new organization to act as a clearinghouse for scientific, legal and strategic information about roads and ORVs on public lands. Katie and Kraig spent that first year overseeing the development of some of Wildlands CPR’s resources that remain key foundations of our work, including:
- a bibliographic database on the ecological effects of roads (first developed by Reed Noss in 1995, and updated every other year since then) – now in the update process for 2009 and including more than 12,000 citations;
- the “Road-Ripper’s” Guides to the Forest Service, Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, quickly followed by guides to off-road vehicles and road removal; and
- our original workshop series to train citizen activists to document roads and calculate road densities to pressure the agency to comply with road management standards.
During our first few years we focused primarily on being a clearinghouse, providing assistance to thousands of activists on road and ORV strategy questions, while also training more than 1,000 activists to conduct road surveys and ORV impact surveys. Our bibliographic database was publicized long before “road ecology” became popular, providing a critical resource to land managers, scientists, activists and decision-makers regarding the impacts of roads and off-road vehicles – the database has been used by people all over the world, and by every land management agency in the country.
After that initial burst of key resources, we focused the next few years on building strong relationships with grassroots groups throughout the country. Those relationships provided us with a unique “bird’s eye-view” about common management problems/themes cropping up in multiple places, enabling us to provide strategic leadership on public lands transportation policy reform nationally. For example, in 1999 we led a coalition of more than 100 groups to formally petition the Forest Service to overhaul their off-road vehicle management. (A few years later we updated our strategic plan with a specific goal of stopping cross-country ORV travel on 50% of the national forests.) Our petition provided a compendium of the available science on off-road vehicle impacts, as well as site-specific examples of problematic management on dozens of national forests. In large part as a response to our 1999 petition (though perhaps a little after the fact), in 2005 the Forest Service began a national “transportation planning process” to close national forest lands to cross-country travel and to complete new travel plans for all national forests. We’ve been co-leading (with The Wilderness Society) the national campaign to influence these travel planning processes. And while travel planning isn’t finished yet, to date it appears that more than 20,000 miles of roads and user-created routes have been closed (about ¼ of the former, ¾ of the latter), and more than 10 million acres of land have been protected from cross country travel by ORVs. The bulk of the decisions will be coming out in the next 12-15 months, and the trend looks positive for a continuation of statistics like these. We’re thrilled to report that by the end of 2010, as the new travel plans come on line, nearly all national forest lands will be closed to cross country travel (except in discrete designated areas).
And it’s not just on the ORV side that we’ve been succeeding – Wildlands CPR is trusted by state and federal agency staff, congressional staff, activists and university professors as THE source for information about watershed restoration emphasizing road reclamation. During the past few years we’ve focused our energy on securing new funding for the Forest Service, in particular to implement watershed restoration priorities, and we’ve been outrageously successful. In fiscal years 2008-09 combined, the FS received ~$90 million for the newly created Legacy Roads and Trails Remediation Initiative. They also received at least $228 million in stimulus funds for road and trail maintenance, including critical culvert upgrades. While it remains difficult to analyze how those stimulus funds were allocated, we were informed that $25 million of that went directly to road decommissioning work! If you add that to the $90 million already allocated, that’s $115 million in two years, with another $100 million on the table in the FY ’10 appropriations bill that is still under consideration. We also worked directly in the state of MT to increase watershed restoration funding by $34 million in 2007, largely overseen by a new statewide office of watershed restoration. What are the on the ground results of all that money? The FY ’08 Legacy Roads funds were used to reclaim more than 500 miles of roads nationally, resulting in more than 60,000 acres of habitat improved (and many forests didn’t even calculate the habitat acreage). For FY ’09, the FS estimates it will more than double their restoration efforts – reclaiming more than 1300 miles of roads, resulting in more than 65,000 acres of habitat and 566 miles of streams restored this year alone. Wildlands CPR’s work is having an unprecedented and very significant impact on the ground!
A huge obstacle to restoration work has always been funding, thus our emphasis over the past few years on getting the money to the Forest Service to do the necessary work. And it turns out that all that money provides real jobs on the ground. Wildlands CPR was one of the first conservation organizations to embrace and promote the concept of green jobs – well before it was popular to do so. We published our first report on restoration and jobs in 2003 – once again showing cutting-edge leadership in the restoration arena. This year we worked with The Wilderness Society to analyze how many people received jobs from the first year’s Legacy Roads allocations in Idaho and Montana (see pages 14-15 this issue), so we could start to show real green jobs progress on the ground. In addition, we just completed a series of reports on the political economy of watershed restoration (see cover story this issue). We understand that road reclamation isn’t the only step to restoring watersheds, and we’re excited about expanding our programs to incorporate more watershed restoration activities.
During the past 15 years, Wildlands CPR has been instrumental in dramatically changing transportation management on Forest Service lands, with a couple of small excursions into BLM and Park Service lands as well (e.g. we were part of an important lawsuit that reduced ORV trails in Big Cypress National Preserve (FL) from 23,000 miles of user-created routes to 400 miles of designated routes). Our work has increased the Forest Service’s capacity to restore watersheds by reclaiming unneeded roads and upgrading/maintaining needed roads. We have also played an essential role in beginning to reform Forest Service off-road vehicle management nationally. Thanks to our many grassroots partners, and our extraordinarily talented staff, we’ve been able to identify effective, cutting-edge strategies that have profound results on the ground. We’re looking forward to continuing to provide leadership to the conservation community and public land managers regarding transportation and watershed restoration for at least another 15 years!
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