This past December, I had the privilege of attending Clif Merritt’s eighty-seventh birthday. Clif is a founder of American Wildlands and well-known amongst wildlands advocates as a pioneer of the wilderness movement. While driving to his home in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, I thought about this organization I had now been at the helm of for a little more than a year, and how it had evolved since Clif and his co-founders first established American Wildlands.

It occurred to me that in its almost thirty years of service to the wild west, while American Wildlands’ strategic forte had changed a few times, the primary focus of the organization was the same – [1] to work with people on-the-ground to ensure the long-term conservation of the big wildlands, healthy wild waters, and abundant wildlife of the west; and [2] to use the most cutting edge conservation tools available at the time.

When Clif and company first established American Wildlands, they were leaders in the new wilderness movement, and focused on establishing wilderness areas (as well as wild and scenic rivers) throughout the west and Alaska. In its infancy, the wilderness movement was driven by local folks, most of them volunteers, working together to inventory and propose wilderness lands and rivers for protection. Clif Merritt and AWL were leaders in this effort.

In the late 1980’s, American Wildlands’ primary focus shifted to a “forest watch” program, where staff watch-dogged logging and other resource extraction in the roadless areas of our public lands to ensure these projects were being managed appropriately. Again, working with local citizens was a major component of the work, and American Wildlands trained more than 1,400 citizens how to use the best federal and state laws to monitor, participate in, and positively influence development projects proposed for our roadless lands.

In the late 1990’s, American Wildlands’ strategic forte again shifted, as we became a leader in advancing the new concepts of habitat connectivity and wildlife movement corridors – both figuratively and literally putting wildlife corridors on the map here in the Northern Rockies. Today, AWL is most well-known for working to maintain the ecological connections between the string of pearls that are our core habitat areas – whether that be a wilderness areas AWL helped establish two decades ago, or a roadless area AWL helped keep roadless a decade ago. And as AWL has done all along, we work with as many people, organizations, and agencies as possible through our working group model of conservation action.

Whether American Wildlands is working with local citizens in the Ninemile Valley of western Montana, promoting safe passages for both wildlife and people on our major highways, or restoring stream systems for the benefit of native fish, this newsletter highlights some of the ways in which American Wildlands continues to work on-the-ground to protect our wildlands, wild waters, and wildlife. For me, it was oh so rewarding to meet Clif Merritt, one of the people who set this recipe for success in motion almost 30 years ago, and have him tell me he remains proud of the work American Wildlands continues to do today.