Consider an End of Year Donation to WWP

Online Messenger #219

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2011 Year-End Call for Support

Friends,

If you really like what Western Watersheds Project is doing, please take a moment to make a generous tax-deductible end-of-the-year contribution to Western Watersheds Project. THANK YOU !

WWP Goes to Washington D.C.

Last month I announced Western Watersheds Project's support of a legislative effort to promote the Rural Economic Vitalization Act (REVA - H.R. 3432), a public land livestock grazing buy-out bill recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives !

The introduction of REVA in the House, the presence of the misnamed "Grazing Improvement Act" in the Senate and the threatened passage of a host of anti-environment legislative riders to the budget bill all combined to make necessary another visit to Washington D.C. to educate lawmakers about public land ranching.

On December 11 Mike Hudak of the Sierra Club Grazing Team, Josh Osher of the Buffalo Field Campaign, and myself (Brian Ertz, WWP) all convened on Washington D.C. and cruised the legislative environs in an early 1980s Oldsmobile (see photo at right).

It was a fruitful trip, congressional staff advising members of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and senior staff of the respective natural resource committees were eager to learn about the condition of public lands and wildlife on the ground and to consult with us about legislative strategies regarding REVA, the "Grazing Improvement Act" and several grazing-related anti-environmental riders to the budget bill.

We were able to pick up several additional co-sponsors to REVA in the U.S. House, many of which had never supported federal public land grazing buy-out legislation in the past.

Please take this opportunity to contact your representatives in Washington D.C. in support of REVA, encourage additional local and regional conservation groups of which you are a member to sign-on in support of the bill, and consider a year end contribution in support of Western Watersheds Project's efforts to protect and restore western watersheds and wildlife.

Brian Ertz
Media Director