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What's New?
and these new reports:
Swan View Coalition
3165 Foothill Road
Kalispell, MT 59901
406-755-1379
redraven@digisys.net
Home
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What We Have
Accomplished
on the Flathead National Forest
Using a barrage of well-aimed appeals and lawsuits against
the Flathead, Swan View, Friends of the Wild Swan and other grassroots
groups have brought its wishful 75 miles-per-year new road construction
program down to essentially zero and replaced it with a 10-year program
to instead obliterate some 650 miles of its forest roads.
In turn, our lawsuits have helped lower its official
100 million board foot-per-year timber sale target to 54. Meanwhile, the
miles of road closed to motor vehicles have come to outnumber the miles
left open by nearly 2:1 and road engineering staff on the Flathead has
shrunk from 130 to 34. (See the attached graphs "FNF Forest Plan
and Accomplishments", compiled by Keith Hammer).
- Graph
A-- Timber Sale Volume Offered and
New Road Construction
- Graph
B-- Road Obliteration and Open and Closed Roads
Our series of lawsuits against the 1986 Flathead Forest
Plan and its subsequent timber sales forced the agency to use the most
current results of grizzly bear research being conducted in the Swan Mountains.
As a result, the Flathead was ordered by the court to amend its Plan to
afford better protection to the threatened grizzly bear and other resources.
The annual timber target was halved and some of the most restrictive-to-date
road density standards were adopted, requiring 68% of each grizzly bear
management area to be free of either open or gated roads.
Not only does adoption of these standards require the
Flathead to obliterate an estimated 650 miles or roads over a ten-year
period, these grizzly bear standards have become the benchmark for standards
on all other national forests in the Glacier-Bob Marshall Ecosystem and
will benefit bull trout, westslope cutthroat trout and other wildlife
as well.
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