Don’t Mourn.  Organize!

A phrase attributed to labor organizer Joe Hill is fitting for this moment:

“Don’t Mourn.  Organize.”

Or in the words of writer Ed Abbey,:

“Sentiment without action
is the ruin of the soul.”

During the last Trump Administration our small, gritty organization, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, sued the Trump Administration 18 times to protect our planet and we won 16 times.  We plan to do it again. 

Instead of mourning, we are gearing up to fight for our public lands and endangered species once again.  We are ready and we plan to be aggressive about it.  We will defend the grizzly bears, the wolverines, the lynx, and the wolves.  We will protect the old growth forests, the wild rivers, and our wild native fish.  We will hire the best lawyers and we will win again and again.

The Trump Administration cannot take away our right to sue the government for breaking the law.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution not only guarantees freedom of speech, it also gives citizens the right to sue the federal government for very good reasons. If someone throws a brick through a window, the police enforce the law. But when the federal government breaks the law, citizens are often the only “enforcers,” so the Alliance for the Wild Rockies ensures that the government follows the law by filing and winning lawsuits.  

Some of the things we stopped the last Trump administration from doing included killing 72 grizzly bears in a cattle grazing allotment in the Upper Green River Watershed in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in Wyoming.  

We also stopped the Trump Administration twice from clearcutting and burning 80,000 acres in the Payette National Forest in central Idaho.  We also repeatedly stopped the Trump Administration from destroying rare occupied habitat for the imperiled Selkirk grizzly population in northern Idaho and the equally imperiled Cabinet-Yaak grizzly population in northwestern Montana.

When federal government agencies fail to protect our public lands, wild rivers, and native wildlife populations as required by law, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies actively participates in the entire government process. Before we can sue the government in court, we have to file multiple types of public comments with scientific references to back up what we say, often amounting to hundreds of pages per illegal action.  If the government ignores science and the law, we go to court to force it to follow the law.  And contrary to the lies told by the politicians, we do not get paid for any of the work we do before filing the lawsuit or after the lawsuit is filed.  We  have to hire a lawyer for each lawsuit.   If we win the case, the lawyer gets paid, but we do not.  

This means that the costs of preparing our lawsuits, and paying the lawyer’s retainer for each case, falls 100% on us.  So this means that the number of lawsuits we file is directly dependent on how much financial support we get.  

EDITOR’S NOTE: Having worked in the U.S. preservation /conservation world for a quarter of a century, my experience is that it is the small to tiny non-profit organizations like the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Sage Steppe Wild that do the heavy lifting in this work and are, by far, the most efficient. If I had money to donate I would avoid the big green groups, and groups with more than 15 staff members and any organization who gets funding from the Bullitt Foundation, the Wilburforce Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and the Walton Family Foundation (and a few other of the massive funders that have steered/controlled U.S. preservation/conservation work over the last 25 years through the strings attached to their funding).

A good metric I use to see whether an organization is worthwhile is to go to their staff page and go down the list of their staff and count up the number of staff actually doing the work and then count up the number of fundraisers, ‘outreach’, media, office support staff, supervisors, communications, etc. and see what the ratio is.

If its more than 7:1 or 10:1 I would steer clear of that organization.

Here is a typical example of a mid sized 501c3: The Greater Yellowstone Coalition

If you look at the big groups, like The Sierra Club, NRDC, World Wildlife Fund, The Wilderness Society, NPCA, etc., not to even mention entities like the Orwellian The Nature Conservancy, the picture is much worse.

So as we approach the end of 2024 and you are considering year end donations, look carefully at who you have supported in the past and if they are not lean, mean, kick-ass, scrappy fighters, consider breaking out of your habit and finding a few such organizations to support.