Four conservation groups, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Council on Wildlife and Fish, Yellowstone to Uintas Connection, and Native Ecosystems Council, filed suit on July 28th in Federal District Court in Missoula challenging the Cyclone Bill Logging Project, which is about 13 miles west of Whitefish, Montana, in the Flathead National Forest.

We are taking the Flathead National Forest to court over this project because the agency is violating its own Forest Plan rules for protecting old growth forest and grizzly connectivity requirements. The surest way to keep grizzly bears from recovering is allowing the Forest Service to continue their massive deforestation of the West.

Over the last decade, the Tally Lake Ranger District has run roughshod over the old growth forests and wildlife habitat west of Whitefish, authorizing project-after-project without ever considering the overall impact of their logging and roadbuilding apparatus. They have ignored how their litany of projects deters grizzly bears from connecting between recovery zones. They have ignored how logging is contributing to a mass die-off of species dependent on old growth forests, and how it is ruining lynx critical habitat. This death by a thousand cuts must stop.

Cyclone Bill authorizes logging and burning on 12,331 acres, including 9,192 acres – 14.3 square miles – of commercial logging and clearcutting. It also includes bulldozing 13.4 miles of logging roads in the already heavily roaded area which is federally designated critical habitat for Canada lynx and secure habitat for grizzly bears.

Here are the problems with the project.

1) The Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Biological Opinion violates the Endangered Species Act by failing to adequately analyze cumulative effects from state and private lands on grizzly bears.

The Tally Lake Ranger District is checkerboarded with state and private lands that routinely experience logging, roadbuilding, and residential development, yet the Forest Service did not look at how these stressors would impact grizzly bears. That makes no sense since we won a court decision on the same issue and stopped the Ripley logging project in the nearby Kootenai National Forest.

2) The project violates the National Environmental Policy Act and the Forest Plan by failing to take a hard look at connectivity to grizzly bears and demonstrate consistency with the Forest Plan’s connectivity guidelines.

The agency’s own Forest Plan addresses the importance of secure connectivity, stating: ‘The demographic connectivity area provides habitat that can be used by female grizzly bears and allows for bear movement between grizzly bear ecosystems. There’s no way around it, clearcuts and bulldozing logging roads destroy grizzly habitat.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says there is one population of grizzly bears in the lower 48 states. Yet, to recover grizzly bears, the separate populations of grizzlies must be able to travel through safe and connected corridors for genetic interchange to avoid inbreeding. Which is why it makes no sense since this project calls for massive clearcuts and miles of new logging roads in a designated grizzly corridor in the Flathead Forest Plan.

3) The Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act because they failed to analyze the impacts of the Cyclone Bill Project and Round Star Project together, even though they are right next to each other. 

Just as the project failed to account for cumulative effects from logging and road-building on state and private lands, it also failed to account for the impacts from nearby logging and road-building on National Forest lands. For years the Tally Lake Ranger District has authorized massive logging projects, only to narrow their resource analysis to the project-level, effectively ignoring that wildlife experience impacts at a landscape level.

4) The project violates the agency’s own Forest Plan requirement to protect old growth forests.

Old growth habitat, which has the highest density and diversity of birds nesting in tree cavities, is especially important for birds in western Montana. Old growth and mature forests also provide habitat for declining species such as flammulated owls, northern goshawks, black-backed woodpeckers, and fishers.

5) The Cyclone Bill Project fails to take a hard look at impacts to old growth-dependent wildlife in violation of the national Environmental Policy Act.

Not only did the Forest Service ignore its own old growth retention requirements, the agency failed to analyze the impacts on a host of old-growth dependent wildlife.

6) The Forest Service’s refusal to analyze the Cyclone Bill Project in a full Environmental Impact Statement violates the National Environmental Policy Act. 

Because this area has been so heavily logged and roaded in the past, the impacts from even more extensive road-building and logging require the in-depth analysis typically found in a more robust environmental impact statement. Instead, the public got the insufficient, or completely missing, analysis in the agency’s environmental assessment.

The Forest Service has broken the law over and over in the past. It’s even worse now under the Trump administration. Maybe they thought we would cower in fear but we are not, and we will not. The American people are expected to follow the law and will continue to fight to ensure the federal government does, too.

Please consider helping us pay for the cost of this litigation and also please consider donating to Counter Punch for keeping the world informed.

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