On Monday, June 30,  U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen ruled against the U.S. Forest Service and in favor of the Alliance for the wild Rockies over a 36,000 acre logging project in the Kootenai National Forest. Alliance for the Wild Rockies spokesman Michael Garrity explains what the lawsuit was all about.

"Most grizzly bears are killed near logging roads," said Garrity. "With this timber sale, they were going to build new logging roads and the inter-agency grizzly bear guidelines say that you can't increase the density of logging roads in grizzly bear habitat and they were going to do that. The grizzly numbers are declining so if we want to keep the grizzly bears in the Cabinet-Yakk from going extinct, this is an important ruling."

This certainly isn’t the first lawsuit from the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, when asked how many there have been, Garrity said even he didn’t know and referred to a congressional research service study that said Alliance had sued the Forest Service more than any other environmental group in the country.

The forest service’s original plan had involved installing gates on the new logging roads, but Judge Christensen ruled that a working plan must end with the area being closed off permanently.

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