Montana’s Lolo National Forest is home to some of the most iconic and vulnerable wildlife in North America — including Canada lynx, grizzly bears, elk, and bull trout.

 But a massive industrial logging plan now threatens to destroy key habitat and undo decades of conservation progress.

The U.S. Forest Service’s proposed Wilkes Cherry Project would allow widespread commercial logging and road-building across 76,000+ acres near Thompson Falls. This plan was rushed through using an “emergency” provision in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — even though the project is scheduled to unfold over a full decade.

There is nothing urgent about clearcutting vital wildlife habitat over ten years. This isn’t restoration — it’s deregulation dressed up in crisis language.

The Forest Service is relying on outdated and unpublished science to justify the project, using flawed models from the 1930s to claim this is what “natural” forest conditions should look like. Its environmental assessment fails to meaningfully consider the project’s impact on threatened and endangered species — including grizzlies and lynx — and violates critical standards like the Northern Rockies Lynx Management Direction and required watershed protections for bull trout.

New roads and aggressive logging will fragment habitats, drive wildlife into more dangerous contact with humans, and undermine recovery goals for keystone species. The agency even admits that grizzlies could recolonize this area — yet never evaluates how this plan could block that progress.

We call on U.S. Forest Service Region 1, Secretary of Agriculture, and the Chief of the Forest Service to:

• Withdraw the Wilkes Cherry Project immediately
• Conduct a full Environmental Impact Statement that includes independent science, public comment, and climate modeling
• Prioritize wildlife corridors and habitat protections over short-term commercial logging

Montanans — and all Americans — deserve forest policy based on science, not politics or profit. And wildlife deserve a chance to survive and recover in the places they’ve always called home.

Sign now to stop this reckless plan before more irreplaceable habitat is lost.

Lynx, National Park Service photo