Our Approach to Conservation

We embrace collaboration because it’s the most effective tool we have for keeping Montana wild
Hiking in Wagner Basin to Castle Reef on the Rocky Mountain Front (photo by Kerry Neils)
Hiking in Wagner Basin to Castle Reef on the Rocky Mountain Front (photo by Kerry Neils)
Category: Insights | | 8 min read

The last time Wilderness was designated in Montana was in 2014. That was when Congress passed the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act. It happened because a group of Montanans, united under the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front, spent years collaborating on a proposal that conservation, hunting, ranching, outfitting, and many other interests could rally behind. Without that sort of involvement and backing from a range of interest groups, Montana’s Congressional delegation would never have considered supporting the proposal as legislation, leaving crucial habitat for grizzly bears, wolverines, elk, and host of other imperiled species on the Rocky Mountain Front unprotected to this day.

Wild Montana was a founding and integral member of the Rocky Mountain Front coalition, as we are a founding and integral member of the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Project, the Lincoln Prosperity Group, and the Gallatin Forest Partnership (GFP). In these collaborative groups, we work in partnership with other conservation groups and with fellow Montanans who also have a stake in public lands – as ranchers, horse packers, timber mill operators, mountain bikers, motorized users, small business owners, and more.

We work in these coalitions because we believe that our best – and sometimes only – chance of protecting large landscapes depends on joining in collaboration with those who have different interests than our own. Only then can we achieve the kind of robust public support that makes our conservation proposals viable for success.

As poll after poll has shown, the proposals that emerge from these collaboratives enjoy an enormous amount of support. Colorado College’s 2023 State of the Rockies poll showed 84% of Montanans support the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act. The 2022 University of Montana public lands survey showed 83% of Montanans support the BCSA, 71% support the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal, and 77% support the GFP agreement.

Each of these proposals will result in conservation gains that will help mitigate the climate crisis and help native fish, wildlife, and plants endure. They will keep large landscapes intact, securing crucial wildlife habitat and corridors at the southern end of the Crown of the Continent, along the Continental Divide, and in the northern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. They will keep large landscapes connected, providing imperiled plants and wildlife room to move in response to the warming climate. And they will keep headwaters and streams running cold, clean, and connected, thereby providing life-saving thermal refuge for fish during extreme heat events, like the ones we’ve seen in recent years.

The GFP agreement has already provided these benefits by playing a significant role in the Forest Service’s revision of the Custer Gallatin National Forest plan, completed last year. The popularity of the agreement demonstrated to the Forest Service that there was more than enough support for Wilderness in the Gallatin Range, as the GFP proposed. The final Custer Gallatin plan recommends 92,500 acres of Wilderness between Yellowstone National Park and Hyalite Lake, giving this acreage as much protection as it can possibly receive in a Forest plan. (The Forest Service can only recommend Wilderness, and only Congress can designate it).

The new Custer Gallatin plan marks the first time the Forest Service has ever recommended Wilderness in the Gallatins. Does the plan recommend as much acreage as the GFP wanted? No. The GFP proposal calls for a little more than 100,000 acres of Wilderness in the Gallatins. But I can say, without a doubt, the 92,500 acres the Forest Service did recommend is far, far greater than what the agency would have recommended had the GFP not submitted a proposal with such broad public support.

Now it’s up to Congress to designate Wilderness here. The GFP proposal offers a proven and popular blueprint for doing so.

The necessity of reasonable compromise

When Sens. Mike Manfield and Lee Metcalf were negotiating passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the granddaddy of all conservation bills, they both agreed to allow new mineral claims to be staked in designated wilderness areas for 20 years following passage of the bill. Anything less than a willingness to compromise would have doomed the Wilderness Act from the get-go, as it would have most likely doomed every Wilderness bill in Montana to follow, including the 1983 bill that designated the Lee Metcalf Wilderness.

For that bill to advance, an area called Cowboy Heaven, on the western flank of the Spanish Peaks, was left out of the newly designated wilderness. (Thirty years later, we incorporated Cowboy Heaven in the GFP proposal as proposed Wilderness. Thanks again to the popularity of the proposal, the Forest Service has recommended Cowboy Heaven as an addition to the Lee Metcalf in its Custer Gallatin Forest plan.)

In addition to expanding the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act included a unique designation called conservation management areas, which essentially keeps places with that designation exactly as they were when the bill was signed. That means no development, no permanent roadbuilding, and no possibility of additional fragmentation of wildlife habitat.

In all of these legislative efforts, reasonable compromise resulted in big gains for conservation.

Our approach to wilderness study areas

Congress created Montana’s Forest Service-managed WSAs in the 1970s to protect wilderness character in areas where it existed. In the 1980s, it gave the Bureau of Land Management the power to create them as well, and the agency used it to create the BLM-managed WSAs Montana has today. Only Congress can change those boundaries now. To many people, WSAs aren’t simply controversial places on maps. Instead, they hold our favorite trails, secret camping spots and fishing holes, and some of the best places to experience big game in Montana. Today, we rely on them for our community drinking water, after-work trail runs, and outdoor recreation economy.

Contrary to what some people claim, neither the Forest Service nor the BLM has ever managed all 44 of Montana’s WSAs as “defacto Wilderness,” subject to the same regulations wilderness areas are under. In some WSAs, agencies have allowed mountain biking and snowmobiling and kept roads and two tracks open to a variety of uses. Other WSAs, or at least parts of them, are still as wild, or even wilder, than most national parks and should be designated Wilderness, the Big Snowies among them.

Given the different management histories of the WSAs and the range of conditions that exist on the ground today as a result of that management, we take a community-driven, landscape-by-landscape approach to protecting WSAs, and we do it by elevating the voices of people who have a vested interest in the fate of these places. That’s how we convinced the Forest Service to recommend Wilderness for the Big Snowies WSA, something it never did before the release of the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest plan in 2021. Where possible, we believe the best approach involves collaboration.

The alternative to our approach is a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, ignoring Montanans who have a stake in the fate of the WSAs. That’s the approach Sen. Daines and other elected officials have taken.

In recent years, Daines has introduced two bills that would have simply stripped all protection from several WSAs. Wild Montana conducted a vigorous campaign against Daines’ legislation, rallying thousands of Montanans against them and helping ensure the bills never made it out of committee and onto the Senate floor. According to last year’s UM public lands survey, 94% of Montanans oppose stripping protections from all seven WSAs in Montana managed by the Forest Service, a tide of public opinion you can chalk up to the public outreach and education we did.

Our goal, however, is not to designate every acre of every WSA as Wilderness, but to maintain the wilderness quality that still exists in many of them, and do it under whatever protective status is feasible given the conditions on the ground, be it Wilderness or other conservation designations that prohibit development.

That’s certainly the goal for the Hyalite Porcupine Buffalo Horn WSA in the Gallatin Range. The GFP proposal would designate a little more than 100,000 acres of this 155,00-acre WSA as Wilderness. It would designate the remaining 52,000 acres under a wildlife management and watershed protection designation that would still conserve critical habitat and watershed health. It would not allow any new roads, and would almost entirely freeze the recreational footprint as it is today, allowing mountain biking and motorized use to continue in areas that have been open to those uses for decades. That’s our compromise, one we think is worth making because we don’t believe Congress would ever go along with shutting down existing uses and designating the entire WSA as Wilderness.

At the end of the day, Wild Montana is an organization that works within the realm of possibility. We find solutions for protecting wildlands, WSAs included, and Wilderness designation is one among many of the solutions. That’s how we got the Heritage Act passed, and that’s how we intend to protect the Gallatins, as well as the places that the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act and Lincoln Prosperity Proposal would protect.

The fact is, we live and work in much more polarizing times than our conservation predecessors did, and that comes with its own unique set of political challenges that make conservation designations difficult. But poll after poll shows conservation is still a bipartisan value in Montana. That means, if we are willing to do the hard work and partner with people whose values and interests don’t mirror our own, we can still unite Montanans around proposals that result in big wins for wild places and the wildlife that depend on them, proposals that garner the sort of popular support that make them successful.

Wild Montana is more than willing to do the work. We’ve been doing it all along.

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