MISSOULA, Mont.— Local and national conservation groups today filed a notice of their intent to sue the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for violating the Endangered Species Act by approving a 135,000-acre logging project in the Bitterroot National Forest.

“This lawsuit takes aim at the Trump administration’s complete failure to consider how clearcutting this area will threaten grizzly bears, bull trout, wolverines and other imperiled animals that call the Bitterroots home,” said Kristine Akland, Northern Rockies director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s utter nonsense to justify this massive project as an emergency action when it’ll take at least two decades to implement. Those of us who love the Bitterroots know that this spectacular forest and its endangered wildlife deserve stewardship and care, not reckless acquiescence to the logging industry.”

The Bitterroot Front Project authorizes extensive commercial logging, road building, prescribed burning, herbicides and other industrial activities that will significantly damage the forest. The Forest Service approved the project as an emergency response to wildfire risk, but the agency says implementation will take more than 20 years.

“The Forest Service is planning on logging and burning the entire Bitterroot Front, and building new roads to access the last remaining old growth trees,” said Jim Miller, president of Friends of the Bitterroot. “They've been managing our forests with industrial scale logging for over a century, and now they're telling us that yet more logging will protect us from wildfire and fix the so called forest health problem. But how can the cause of the problem also be the solution? It can't. The people in our community don't want to see the beautiful mountain and canyon vistas on the Bitterroot front scarred by more roads and clearcuts.”

Today’s notice says federal agencies violated the Endangered Species Act by approving the project without adequately analyzing how it will harm threatened and endangered species including grizzly bears, bull trout, Canada lynx, wolverines and whitebark pines. The groups say the agencies failed to disclose critical details about where roads, logging units and other project activities will occur, making it impossible to accurately assess threats to wildlife and habitat.

“With this project, the Forest Service's actions show quite convincingly they are an agency that can no longer be trusted to be good stewards of the public's national forests,” said Jeff Juel, forest policy director for Friends of the Clearwater. “In using their 'conditions based' decision-making, they feel comfortable hiding from the public such important details as how much logging and roadbuilding the logging industry will inflict on the Bitterroot National Forest, where it will happen, and what the environmental impacts will be. Anymore, the only way the public can hope to influence the agency under this corrupt system is to go to court.”

The legal notice also challenges the agencies’ reliance on a scientifically unsupported assumption that 1-acre fragments of land would be suitable for grizzlies, which would allow the forest to be carved into small, disconnected patches of so-called grizzly habitat. Earlier this month a federal court rejected the Bitterroot National Forest’s use of that same fragmented standard, finding that it failed to rely on the best available science regarding grizzly bear habitat needs. Grizzlies need large, connected areas to survive and thrive.

“The Forest Service is playing a shell game with its sprawling road network by claiming to remove roads that it already decommissioned years ago — essentially double dipping to make the project look better than it is,” said Adam Rissien, rewilding manager with WildEarth Guardians. “Building roads and using others that shouldn't even be there to begin with harms habitat for elk and trout and will hinder the natural return of grizzly bears to the Bitterroot ecosystem.”

The federal agencies failed to adequately evaluate how the project’s proposed extensive road network and motorized access would affect grizzly bears, the notice says. Because of intense historic logging of the Bitterroots the area already has more roads than is considered compatible with grizzly bear recovery.

“Commercially logging and intentionally burning down forests is not going to protect people or their homes from wildfire,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “Instead the Forest Service needs to help people harden their homes from wildfire by having non-flammable roofs and decks, removing all vegetation right next to a home and thinning trees 100 feet out from a home. Anything beyond that is a waste of money and will do nothing more than destroy habitat for fish and wildlife.”

The groups — the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Bitterroot, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, WildEarth Guardians, Friends of the Clearwater and Native Ecosystems Council — are asking the agencies to reinitiate consultation under the Endangered Species Act and fully analyze the project’s harms before moving forward with the logging project.