They must obey the law. • Daily Montanan

On June 27, a federal court halted an illegal logging project on federal public lands in Montana's Little Belt Mountains.

In April 2021, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Native Ecosystems Council filed a lawsuit to stop the Horsefly project in the Helena-Lewis-Clark National Forest. The project planned to cut and burn trees across 10,343 acres, or more than 16 square miles. To accommodate the logging, the agency planned to bulldoze 40.7 miles of new logging roads in the Little Belt Mountains north of White Sulphur Springs, Montana.

The scale of Horsefly's massive landscape modification project is alarming, and because the project violated federal law, it had to be stopped.

The Forest Service has used a number of euphemisms to try to disguise what used to be more honestly called logging. For example, the agency has labeled 3,278 acres of commercial logging as “intermediate processing,” 1,049 acres of clearcuts as “regeneration harvest,” 409 acres of clearcuts and eventual burns as “grassland restoration,” and 465 acres of noncommercial logging as “fuels reclamation.”

They are “reorganizing” them, that’s true — from forest ecosystems to stump fields.

This is an ecosystem, not a private logging operation. So we need to preserve habitat for sensitive wildlife. One such species is the northern goshawk, which is declining in population and is listed in the forest plan as an indicator species for old-growth forest management. Because of the importance of this species, the law requires that 100% of the goshawk nets be monitored each year.

In 2018, the entire forest was surveyed for goshawks, and the Forest Service found an alarming 47 percent decline in active goshawk nests, which the agency failed to disclose to the public, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act. The agency also ignored its own forest plan requirement to issue an assessment report if active nests decline by 10 percent.

The court’s decision was very clear about the Forest Service’s failure to comply with the law. As the order states: “The court agrees with the Alliance that the Forest Service’s failure to disclose and assess the decline in active goshawk nesting areas is a violation of both the NFMA and NEPA. . . . The federal defendants virtually admit that the Forest Service’s failure to publicly disclose the decline in active goshawk nesting areas in the EA and its failure to comply with the Forest Plan’s requirement to complete an assessment report if active nests decline by 10 percent is a violation of the NFMA.”

Yet the Forest Service continues to log the last remaining mature and old-growth forests, and the goshawks are in danger.

The court order returned the project’s permit to the agency and ordered that the project be brought into compliance with federal law. We follow the law every day, and the Forest Service must follow the law as well. When a government agency violates the law, it must be held accountable in court. It’s not easy to fight the federal government, which has far more resources than we do, but we are determined to ensure that the government follows its own laws to protect our native wildlife and public lands ecosystems. Despite attacks from politicians, intimidation tactics, and misinformation campaigns, nothing will stop us. We are determined to continue this essential work.

Mike Garrity is the executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

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