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ByMike Garrity
|July 16, 2023 12:00 AM

Thanks to a successful court challenge by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, over 10,000 acres of grizzly bear habitat in northwestern Montana will not be decimated by commercial logging.

In late June, our lawsuit in a federal district court in Montana halted a large-scale logging project in endangered grizzly bear habitat to protect the small, isolated and imperiled Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population from further harm.

The Ripley logging project authorized almost 17 square miles of commercial logging (10,854 acres) on publicly-owned national forest lands, including roughly 5 square miles of clearcuts (3,223 acres). By the Forest Service’s own estimate, the project would cost federal taxpayers $643,000 to implement since receipts from the commercial timber sales do not cover the cost of the post-logging ecological remediation.

The court ruled the project is illegal because the government did not analyze the…