Our efforts in Utah continue to produce positive results. Western Watersheds Project is collaborating with several local and regional environmental organizations in an effort to force the U.S. Forest Service to address the impacts of livestock on wildlife, watersheds and water quality.

Our current attention on national forests in Utah includes comments and appeals on livestock grazing permits, water developments for livestock, and prescribed fire or vegetation management projects that do not address the role of livestock in creating fire hazards and dysfunctional forests.

If forest supervisors are turning a blind eye to the livestock issue, the courts are not. WWP has won a number of recent appeals in Utah. They include:

Squaw Creek Waterline

This project would have developed a 6-mile pipeline and water developments for livestock in Ashley National Forest. The scheme would have dewatered a stream and caused more destruction to this steep, already damaged area adjacent to the Uinta Wilderness.

Cache Aspen/Mountain Brush Treatments

The plan here was to prescribe fire and timber harvest on 20,000 acres in the Logan and Ogden ranger districts to reverse the declining trend of aspen.

Aspen communities are second only to riparian areas in their importance to wildlife and benefit to water conservation. Livestock eat young aspen like kids devour licorice, causing a conversion to other vegetation types.

Our appeal, coordinated with the Utah Environmental Congress, succeeded in taking the project off the table. We've also discussed plans to meet with the appropriate forest supervisor and staff to address the aspen damage and the role of livestock in all the destruction.

Bear Hodges Vegetation Project

This project called for building roads and logging old­growth fir in northern Utah's Bear River Range, which provides essential habitat for Bonneville cutthroat trout, Canada lynx and Northern goshawk. Our lawsuit (filed under Willow Creek Ecology) forced authorities to abandon the project. Logan Canyon Coalition and the Utah chapter of the Sierra Club were partners in the effort.

West Fork Black's Fork Grazing Permit

I've surveyed many watersheds in the incredible Uinta Wilderness, setting up long-term monitoring stations at elevations up to 12,000 feet. Climbing steep valleys and covering watersheds comprising tens of thousands of acres of wilderness might be hard work, but the effort is paying dividends.

Our monitoring data caused the Forest Service to re­evaluate its analysis -- an analysis that would have left thousands of sheep to graze this sensitive basin. We collaborated with the High Uintas Preservation Council and Western Wildlife Conservancy to get people to public meetings and put pressure on the Forest Service to withdraw the project and prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. Mission accomplished.

We're working on similar efforts across Utah's six national forests as well as Caribou-Targhee National Forest in Idaho. Dozens of projects are proposed that will affect millions of acres of public land.

Our surveys, comments, appeals and partnerships with other environmental organizations are setting the stage for legal action with even greater impact in the future.

John Carter is WWP's director of Utah operations.