How your gift protects our wild Northwest
Conservation Northwest / Dec 18, 2019 / Connecting Habitat, Members, Protecting Wildlands, Restoring Wildlife
This holiday season, we hope you and your family and friends have a chance to enjoy our incredible, wild Northwest that you have worked so hard with us to protect and restore!
By Matthew Brouwer, Development Director
There are still plenty of opportunities to get outside this time of year, such as exploring old-growth forests, home to recently-reintroduced fishers in the foothills of the North Cascades, watching birds, elk and mule deer in central Washington’s sagelands, or snowshoeing in wolf and moose habitat in the Methow Valley.
We also invite you, if you haven’t done so already, to help us act on urgent needs and exciting opportunities for our wildlife and wildlands through a year-end gift. There are so many ways your support makes a difference and creates a wilder, more resilient Northwest.
Last month we heard exciting news that the Skagit Headwaters in British Columbia have been permanently protected from logging. Our International Programs Director and partners in Canada have long worked on this issue, and their success shows the power of your advocacy to create lasting change. Your support will allow us to continue the fight to stop a new industrial mine just over the U.S.-Canada border so that the Skagit’s waters will always flow cold and clean for salmon, orcas and downstream communities.
Facing the looming crisis of climate change, your gift protects ancient forests and promotes the regrowth of healthy, mature trees, so important for capturing and storing carbon. Your support also increases resiliency in our fragile sagelands by connecting critical habitat, building wildlife crossings, and removing derelict fencing so that wildlife like pronghorn and sage grouse can safely roam and find refuge as temperatures rise.
Your gift restores the health of our degraded national forests, helping us to decommission old roads, repair damage to meadows from unauthorized motorized-vehicle use, plant native shrubs and trees, and improve the quality of watersheds as we’re doing in the Central Cascades near I-90 and Mount Rainier.
You also create a wilder Northwest by helping us to reintroduce fishers to the North Cascades, promote coexistence with wolves so that they can thrive throughout Washington, bring Canada lynx back to the Kettle River Range, monitor the health of wolverines, and recover vulnerable grizzly bear populations in southern British Columbia.
This is just some of what your gift accomplishes when you support Conservation Northwest.
With both on-the-ground projects and behind-the-scenes dialogue with agencies, elected leaders and policymakers, we put your gift to work addressing both urgent needs and long-term challenges facing our wildlife and wildlands. All the while, we do this through a model that seeks collaboration, bridges divides, finds win-win solutions, and brings together people of diverse backgrounds from ranchers to backpackers to First Nations partners who all have a common stake in the health of our land.
This holiday, we hope you take a moment to reflect on the incredible gift of our wildlife and wildlands, and also give back so that these gifts can continue to be enjoyed for generations to come!