Preserving Our Treasured Wild Places

Clearcutting, oil drilling, roads and human sprawl have shrunk our wild lands. As a result, wildlife are struggling to find places to rear their young, feed, and find shelter and people are running out of places to fish, hike and seek a respite from civilization.

In 2010, Earthjustice advocacy convinced the governments of British Columbia and Montana to ban all mining and energy development on public lands near the Crown of the Continent—one of the last wild places remaining in the lower-48 states.

Earthjustice is preserving our last wild places by:

1. Preserving habitat and connecting landscape corridors, which builds resilience to climate change by allowing species to move through a network of ecologically rich areas that are uninterrupted by human development.
2. Advocating for strong national forest protections that limit old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest, preserving the Sierra Nevada’s vast acreage of wild forest and protecting the gem of the national forest system: Alaska’s Tongass rainforest.
3. Preserving roadless areas, which a vast majority of citizens and wildlife rely upon for recreation, repose and survival.
4. Pushing for the protected status of large tracts of lands to ensure that people can continue to experience wilderness areas through hiking, fishing and other outdoor activities.
5. Reducing environmental stressors, such as fossil fuel development, deforestation and irrigation, which disrupt habitats that are critically important to the long-term survival of species—especially in the face of climate change.
6. Stopping irresponsible water diversions. The once-mighty Colorado River is now so choked by dams that today it only trickles into the Gulf. Earthjustice is fighting to restore the Colorado as a fully vibrant waterway by tackling unsustainable water projects like the Flaming Gorge pipeline—one of the biggest, most environmentally damaging water projects in the history of the western United States.