Online Messenger #238

(view with pictures, as displayed in email)

Western Watersheds Project Board and Staff members extend thanks and our best wishes for the New Year to all WWP members and supporters.

WWP counts on the contributions of all our supporters to carry out our critically important and successful work to protect and restore western watersheds and wildlife. We encourage you to consider a generous end-of-the-year tax-deductible contribution to Western Watersheds Project.

Western Watersheds Project continues to gain strength and momentum in reforming public lands management throughout the west including advocating for gray wolf protection in California, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming, protecting Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Nevada, ensuring that impacts on bats are monitored at wind farms on public lands in Nevada and advocating for voluntary grazing permit retirement in Washington, D.C. With your help here are a few of WWP’s accomplishments in 2012:

• WWP won a federal district court ruling in Idaho protecting Greater sage-grouse habitat from livestock grazing impacts. In his ruling, Chief Judge B. Lynn Winmill stated, “To the extent livestock and sage-grouse conflict, it is grazing that must yield.”

• Through the untiring efforts of WWP and other organizations, a new federal statute was written that allows for the permanent retirement of voluntarily waived federal grazing permits where there is conflict between domestic sheep and bighorn sheep.

• WWP joined in a legal challenge to the delisting of wolves in Wyoming.

• WWP continued its legal challenge of the denial of Endangered Species Act protections for pygmy rabbits.

• WWP was honored by the Desert Tortoise Council with the James St. Amant Special Award for WWP’s efforts to protect desert tortoises from industrial solar development in the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts.

• WWP brought litigation in federal District Court to protect threatened Chinook salmon and steelhead trout from abusive cattle grazing within the Frank Church River-of-No-Return Wilderness in central Idaho.

• WWP filed a federal case challenging illegal grazing management on the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

• WWP won closure to livestock grazing of 95,000 acres of the Sonoran Desert National Monument in southern Arizona.

• WWP legal efforts in Wyoming helped restore “The Path of the Pronghorn,” northwest of Pinedale, Wyoming by requiring the Forest Service to remove fencing, corral structures and other impediments to pronghorn migration.

• For 13 years WWP has overseen the closure to livestock grazing, protection and passive restoration of over 55,000 acres of tributary watersheds of the Salmon River on public lands in central Idaho.

With our efficient staff, small budget and unwavering commitment to conservation, Western Watersheds Project is a force to be reckoned with.  With the recent re-election of President Obama the next four years have the potential for improvements in public policy for conservation of watersheds and wildlife, so more than ever, Western Watersheds Project needs our members and supporters to contribute to WWP’s efforts.

Please consider a generous end-of-year contribution towards WWP’s continued success. With your financial help 2013 will be another good year for Western Watersheds Project.

All of us at WWP send our best wishes for the New Year!