Imortant Accomplishments Our Members and Activists Helped Make Possible in 2010

Defending the Ground

• Protecting Desolation Canyon and the West Tavaputs Plateau.  SUWA reached a historic agreement with the Bill Barrett Corp. under which the company will reduce the footprint of a massive natural gas project.  This will protect the wild core of Desolation Canyon and also help protect the rich cultural heritage of Nine Mile Canyon.


• Changing destructive policy.  Spurred by SUWA’s efforts, the BLM curbed its inappropriate use of the so-called “categorical exclusion” that was rushing oil and gas projects through without environmental review.  And the BLM released new oil and gas leasing guidelines, stemming from SUWA’s suit against the last-minute Bush lease sale of December 2008.  The guidelines demand more study of the environmental impacts of leasing decisions.  The BLM announced that it would create master leasing plans to “fix” and further consider the oil and gas leasing decisions of the 2008 Resource Management Plans, additional evidence that the Bush administration’s plans are deeply flawed.


• Blocking large scale deforestation.  The SUWA staff successfully stalled and will continue to work against a number of ill-conceived vegetation devastation projects.  The worst is a scheme in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument that proposes to uproot thousands of acres of mature juniper and pinyon forest—all to “improve” forage for “wildlife” (read: cows).  The agency seeks to fund the project by improperly diverting money from the BLM’s wildland-urban interface fire budget meant to protect people and property from wildfires.  Our Washington office met with national BLM officials to help scuttle bad ideas hatched in the agency’s Utah field offices.


• Defending Factory Butte.  SUWA staff met with the BLM state director and other agency officials to highlight and protest serious damage unauthorized cross-country ORV use has caused around this southern Utah landmark.  We worked to prevent the local BLM field office’s attempts to reopen this fragile landscape to off-road mayhem.


• Fighting to reverse the “No More Wilderness” policy.  We have engaged our grassroots network in a campaign—both in Washington, DC and Utah—to urge the Obama administration to eliminate this Bush-era agreement.  It prevents the BLM’s creation of new wilderness study areas, an important form of administrative land protection.


• Protecting Arch Canyon.  We forced the BLM to conduct an analysis of the impacts of ORV use on fragile riparian areas and irreplaceable archaeological sites in Arch Canyon.


• Spotlighting mismanagement.  We released our Ten Most Threatened Wilderness Treasures report that called attention to the threats posed by ORVs, roads, and oil and gas development in some of Utah’s most scenic and ecologically valuable places.


• Providing a constant public presence with the agency.  SUWA staff members have attended field trips and meetings in every BLM field office in Utah on a wide range of proposed projects with the potential to affect the lands within America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act.  No other group has the capacity and on-the-ground knowledge to cover the issues as we do.

Building Momentum to Protect the Redrock

• Organizing volunteer projects.  Working with volunteers on National Public Lands Day we helped erect fencing and post signs on closed vehicle routes in the San Rafael Swell.  This on-the-ground work supports our policy efforts to identify and move against emerging ORV trouble spots, and also our work with the BLM to clearly mark and close unauthorized routes.


• Launching an ambitious pro-wilderness media campaign in Utah. The goal of this unprecedented effort is to shift public attitudes toward wilderness in a campaign that combines television, internet, and outdoor media.  SUWA has hired a media director to develop and manage this multiyear commitment to changing the nature of the wilderness debate among Utahns.


• Making real the promise of the 2009 Washington County wilderness bill.  SUWA is working with the BLM, and providing expert comment, as the agency develops a county-wide ORV travel plan and a management plan for the National Conservation Areas, both mandated in the legislation.  We are working to ensure that the plans and their implementation reflect the intent of the legislation.


• Organizing a coalition of conservation organizations to press the BLM to adopt serious, effective management strategies to respond to the reality of climate change.


• Using blogging and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to reach a large audience of supporters and policy makers quickly and efficiently.


• Building pressure at the “America’s Great Outdoors” listening events across the nation to encourage the Obama administration to step up Utah wild land protection.  We mobilized our grassroots network to attend these meetings and to speak out on behalf of the redrock.


• Organizing a wilderness stewardship event at the Utah State Capitol.  As part of SUWA’s highly successful “Faith and the Land” grassroots campaign, we brought together people of faith to rally for protecting wild Utah and to build political support for that work.


• Conducting slideshows, tabling and public outreach in 20 states across the nation to build national political support for protection of the redrock wilderness.


• Taking full advantage of lessons learned.  Because of SUWA supporters’ relentless grassroots pressure, as well as the pre-primary defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett, no county wilderness bills seem likely to move any time soon.  But SUWA was committed to, and actively involved in, discussions with a number of Utah counties, among them Emery, San Juan, Beaver and Piute.  We learned much in those discussions and forged some very productive relationships—all valuable as we look for new opportunities to protect the redrock.


• Partnering with BLM and Iron County, we began to develop a process by which RS 2477 claims may be negotiated.  We believe this collaborative approach provides a better way to deal with legitimate road claims.