MISSOULA, Mont.— The Center for Biological Diversity and Alliance for the Wild Rockies filed comments today opposing the U.S. Forest Service’s proposed Wilkes Cherry Project, which would authorize widespread commercial logging and new roads across more than 76,000 acres in the Lolo National Forest south of Thompson Falls.
The groups say the plan relies on outdated, unpublished science, ignores climate change and threatens imperiled wildlife.
“This massive industrial logging plan will wreak havoc on Montana wildlife by destroying and degrading hundreds of thousands of acres of this beautiful national forest,” said Kristine Akland, Northern Rockies director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This project is a textbook case of the Forest Service using a crisis narrative to push through damaging industrial logging. It’s a terrible plan based on century-old data, and it’ll deliver a major blow to elk, Canda lynx and other wildlife in western Montana.”
The Wilkes Cherry Project was approved under an “emergency” provision of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — yet it would take up to 10 years to implement.
“There’s nothing urgent about a decade-long clearcutting plan,” said Akland. “If this were truly an emergency, the agency wouldn’t be logging low-risk areas over the next 10 years.”
The Forest Service bases the project on an unpublished 1993 report that misrepresents logged 1930s landscapes as “natural,” using those inflated figures to justify large-scale cutting. The agency’s own data contradict these claims, showing that previous regeneration harvests have created dense, Douglas-fir-dominated stands — the opposite of the “resilient” forests the project promises.
Despite citing climate resilience, the plan offers no modeling or analysis of how future drought, warming or regeneration failure will shape results.
The agency’s environmental assessment fails to meaningfully evaluate harms to species like grizzly bears, Canada lynx, bull trout, elk and pileated woodpeckers.
The agency predicts bears will recolonize the area within a decade but never analyzes whether logging and new roads will block their recovery. It also violates Northern Rockies Lynx Management Direction standards by not mapping or quantifying habitat loss, omits required watershed-scale analysis for bull trout, and relies on outdated, incomplete data for elk and old-growth species.
The groups urged the Forest Service to withdraw the environmental assessment and prepare a full environmental impact statement.
“True restoration means restoring function, connectivity and resilience, not repeating the mistakes of the past,” Akland said. “The Forest Service should start over and base this project on modern climate science and genuine public involvement.”
