Swan View Coalition wishes you a Happy New Year and says Thank You for your support of our work in 2015!

May 2016 bring you good luck, good cheer, good friends, and lots of time in the great outdoors!

And may the only hangover you experience be snow-laden trees like these in the Swan Range's wildlife-rich Krause Basin!

Swan View Coalition wishes you a Happy Winter and Holidays!

Winter Solstice just ushered in two feet of new snow in the Swan Range, so it's not too late to celebrate Soltice!

May this Winter and the Holidays bring you much love and good cheer, time with family and friends, and replenishment of the spirit in all of us!

We need your help TODAY to stop Congress from attaching damaging logging riders to the pending must-pass spending bill!

Pro-logging members of Congress, including a number of western democrats, are attempting to boost logging, boost "collaboration" and weaken public environmental review of logging projects.

This is being done by attaching controversial, secretive "riders" to the upcoming must-pass Appropriations Bill!

The Forest Service supports streamling the National Environmental Policy Act to speed up logging projects, largely delegating NEPA's widespread public involvement to small groups of local collaborators. Companion authority to increase Congressional funding of  private "collaborative partners" is also being sought!

In other words, Congress is trying to take another giant step behind closed doors to buy "public support" for damaging logging projects, leaving most American citizens behind!

Please call the Capitol Switchboard RIGHT NOW at 202-224-3121! They will direct your call so you can leave a message for your Senators and Representatives to not allow logging riders to be attached to the Appropriations Bill! 

Or, you can find your Senators' Contact Information HERE and your U.S. House of Representative's Contact Information HERE!

Please also call the White House at 202-456-1111 to help insure President Obama does not follow the Dept. of Agriculture and Forest Service down this disasterous path!

You can read about the pending riders to the Appropriations Bill at http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060029355 .

THANK YOU for taking a few minutes to ACT TODAY!

Our Holidays 2015 newsletter celebrates spirited grass-roots conservation, faith, passion, and the support of our members!

We include encouraging words from Thich Nhat Hanh, Pope Francis, First Nations, and American Indian Tribes.

We report on Keith Hammer receiving the prestigious Macfarlane Plank Award from Friends of the Clearwater, thank you for meeting Cinnabar's Challenge Grant with your donations, and ask for your help raising $16,000 in December to meet our year-end budget!

Here's our newsletter's table of contents and you can click here to view or download it as a pdf:

We hope you enjoy the newsletter and will continue to support our work!

Fish, wildlife, wilderness, and people are counting on us - and you!

Swan View Coalition wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving!

We give thanks for a wonderful places to live, nearby public lands that are such a huge part of them, and to all of you that help us keep it that way!

May your Thanksgiving include lots of time with family and loved ones!

This is the last call to have your donation matched by Cinnabar Foundation!

Won't you DONATE NOW to help us restore quiet habitats for fish, wildlife and people? Your donation will do double-duty if received this week!

And don't forget our Annual Membership Meeting is Sunday, November 22, at 4 pm. Join us at the Mountain Brook School Library, 2353 Foothill Road, for a quick recap of our accomplishments and election of officers. At 5 pm we'll have a potluck dinner and no-alcohol social hour, followed by a regularly scheduled Swan Range Community Music Jam Session. So come on over and stick around for some good fun and music!

Nearly two-thirds of our work is supported by individual donations from people just like you, so please hit the DONATE NOW button today or send a check to 3165 Foothil Road, Kalispell, MT  59901!

Thank you!

Only a few weeks left to have your support of our work doubled by Cinnabar Foundation!

Won't you DONATE NOW to help us restore quiet habitats for fish, wildlife and people? Your donation will do double-duty if received soon!

And don't forget our Annual Membership Meeting is Sunday, November 22, at 4 pm. Join us at the Mountain Brook School Library, 2353 Foothill Road, for a quick recap of our accomplishments and election of officers. At 5 pm we'll have a potluck dinner and no-alcohol social hour, followed by a regularly scheduled Swan Range Community Music Jam Session. So come on over and stick around for some good fun and music!

Nearly two-thirds of our work is supported by individual donations from people just like you, so please hit the DONATE NOW button today or send a check to 3165 Foothil Road, Kalispell, MT  59901!

Thank you!

Though burning wood to produce electricity releases more carbon into the atmosphere than burning coal, the European Union says it releases no carbon at all - a bald-face trick of accounting!

This lie may be adopted by the U.S.'s EPA if it also ignores the many decades it will take for new trees to hopefully re-store that carbon and balance out as "carbon-neutral."

In other words, Europe is massively subsidizing the burning of wood to meet its 20-20-20 climate goals while actually increasing carbon emissions - while simultaneously and falsely claiming wood burning is as "renewable" as solar and wind and has no carbon emissions.

The U.S. already supplies half of Europe's wood pellets and is staged to repeat the same lies and mistakes at home as it also looks to reduce coal consumption!

Click here for Climate Central's must-read, in-depth report written in easily understood terms!

University of Montana researcher Diana Six and others fault logging as a misguided substitute for the natural forest thinning being conducted by beetles. 

In the journal Forests, Six and fellow researchers find the U of M, the Forest Service and others have failed to report failures of logging to maintain resilient trees while beetles have an innate ability to retain the most adaptive trees as they conduct nature's thinning.

They caution that misguided attempts to "do something" may simply over-log forests and point to research finding unlogged stands of both spruce and ponderosa pine have retained more live trees after beetle attacks than mechanically thinned stands.

They conclude "The manner in which policy makers have accepted beetle timber harvest treatments as a panacea for responding to bark beetle outbreaks in North American forests raises a number of red flags. . . It is perhaps no accident that the beetle treatments that have been most aggressively pushed for in the political landscape allow for logging activities that might provide revenue and jobs for the commercial timber industry. . . management should be led by science and informed by monitoring."

Click here for a summary article of Six's research in Mother Jones.

Click here for the paper by Six, Biber and Long in the journal Forests.

Facts are getting in the way of attempts to blame fires on a lack of logging and to blame a lack of logging on environmental lawsuits!

Greenwire reports Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told a U.S. House Subcommittee hearing on the matter Thursday that only 5% of Forest Service timber sales were taken to court this year, while 16% of the timber sales failed because the timber industry simply refused to buy them!

And an abundance of research shows the importance of not trying to replace or follow fire with logging: "There is substantially less high-intensity fire now than there was historically, prior to fire suppression policies, and this post-fire habitat deficit is worsened by extensive post-fire clearcutting on national forests and private lands, and by landscape-level mechanical 'thinning' designed to further suppress fire, making snag forest habitat the most endangered forest habitat type in the U.S."

However, these facts hardly sway Congress as it works alongside the Forest Service and industry to perpetuate the lie that public forests are sick and need a logging "cure!" Congress and the Forest Service are, in fact, paying collaborators that help perpetuate these lies! (See our recent newsletter and our letter to editors in this regard. Click here for more details and supporting documents showing how the Forest Service is paying collaborators.)

We need your help stopping the perverse waste of your tax dollars trying to replace ecologically beneficial backcountry forest fires with subsidized, ecologically destructive logging!

Click here to Donate Now and your contribution to our work will be doubled by Cinnabar Foundation!

Thank you!