Alliance Stops Secret Plans to Clearcut Yellowstone’s Western Flank
Gallatin Range. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The U.S. Forest Service and logging companies are frantically attempting to privatize public forests.
Know Your Enemy
Their multiple political and psychological tactics include:
1) Prohibit meaningful public participation,
2) limit full public disclosure of adverse ecological effects,
3) gaslight and push false narratives (propaganda), and
4) deny constitutionally protected rights to judicial review of massive, destructive clearcutting and roadbuilding programs and projects that continue to plunder, fragment and domesticate our wild, public national forests.
A growing number of people are fighting back against deregulation, deforestation and desertification. Clearly, the federal government’s reaction grows increasingly secretive and paranoid – and hyper-violent against Nature’s many gifts.
Government “yes men” posing as forest experts spew perennial lies as a sign of their unwavering servitude and loyalty to America’s feudal oligarchy. These useful tools have long suffered from mental disorders best characterized as systematized delusions of pretentious grandiosity and infallibility.
Even diehard timber beasts are sensing the socio-political shift away from unregulated fascist expropriation toward greater freedom and liberty for all living organisms and the ecosystems upon which all sentient beings depend. The ‘old guard’ should be frightened.
Another One Bites the Dust
Fortunately, in Missoula, Montana, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy delivered a glimmer of hope and welcome relief as we enter 2026, by ruling against the Custer-Gallatin National Forest’s massive clearcut logging project.
For now, peace and solitude are restored to this incredibly valuable wildlife connecting corridor in the rugged backcountry between the Continental Divide and Yellowstone National Park.
Many thanks go out to the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Gallatin Wildlife Association, Native Ecosystems Council, Council for Wildlife and Fish, WildEarth Guardians, and lawyers at Western Environmental Law Center and Center for Biological Diversity for standing up – and winning – against this gathering collaborative assault by faux-green groups, government “experts” and industry “sawdust merchants.”
Successfully defending essential wildlife and fisheries habitat in the Yellowstone Ecosystem is a huge victory for grizzly bears, wild buffalo, native trout, wolverine, lynx, moose, deer, migratory and local birds, and other wildlife.
The Court shut down the 40,000-acre “South Plateau Landscape Area Treatment Project,” designed and approved by the U.S. Forest Service and U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Sun Mountain Lumber, with mills operating in Deer Lodge and Livingston, Montana, purchased the “stumpage” (trees standing on the stump). Although 16,500 acres of primarily lodgepole forest would be killed, and 56 miles of new logging roads would be bulldozed (permanent linear clearcuts), the feds declared there would be “no significant impact” on the Yellowstone Ecosystem, or any wildlife species inhabiting the semi-arid project area.
What the Court discovered to be beyond belief was the fact that no details could be found in the record disclosing on a map, or anywhere in the hundreds of pages of vague, double-talk, as to the precise time or location of where death and destruction would occur.
Promoting their ‘Big, Secret Lies’ in Court, lawyers for the Defendants (neo-colonialist USFS-USDA plantation managers and their lackies) yammered on and on about how clearcuts would increase “resilience,” promote “forest health” and reduce wildfire risk – whatever that is supposed to mean.
Clearcutting mature lodgepole pine forests in these remote, undeveloped landscapes is a crime against Nature. Lodgepole pine is a dominant forest habitat type in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which has evolved for millennia with stand-replacing fires. Clearcuts often cause deforestation and desertification in similar harsh conditions.
Judge Molloy wisely halted the Forest Service’s logging plans, ruling that vague, undisclosed moving targets fail to meet the legal standards required by the Endangered Species Act when critical habitat occupied by wolverine, grizzlies and lynx is threatened.
Stayin’ Alive
If the government doesn’t obey the law, why should anyone else?
People must unite, stand together, and fight this gang of imperial outlaws trying to seize public forests. Small cash contributions are the lifeblood of grassroots, public interest organizations like the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and CounterPunch.
Each one of us must understand that ecological devastation is foundational to our collective descent deeper and deeper into American Dystopia. I respect and honor the resistance and courage of Renee Goodman, Palestinians, and many, many others, and endangered wildlife as we fight individually, and in small groups, against the tyranny of American Empire. It’s now, or never.
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