Restoration Opportunities with Montana Legacy Project

A huge conservation victory was announced on June 30 - the plan for The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Lands to purchase roughly 500 square miles of forested land in western Montana currently owned by Plum Creek Timber Company. These are extremely important lands for habitat connectivity and the Montana Legacy Project will ensure that almost all of these lands remain free of subdivision and home development. In fact, most of the land will end up in public ownership, erasing the legacy of the checkerboard landscape. However, what has not been mentioned much in the press around this issue is that these lands provide many restoration opportunities.

Wildlands CPR has been promoting watershed restoration through road removal in the Swan Valley of Montana for the last several years. The Swan is home to much of the land that will be purchased and is a critical area for wildlife, providing corridors for grizzly bears and important habitat for bull trout. As the Plum Creek lands are purchased and put into public ownership, we should be looking at road restoration opportunities, not only to improve the land's value as habitat, but also to provide high-wage, high-skill restoration jobs to the local communities. The Montana Legacy Project will be a huge benefit to our lands, our wildlife and our human communities.