Thanks to Guardians and allies, what would have been perhaps the largest logging and road-building project in Wyoming’s history has been withdrawn.
The Medicine Bow Landscape Analysis Vegetation (LaVA) Project covered 850,000 acres and would have logged 360,000 of them, including 123,000 acres across 25 different Roadless Areas. It would also have included building 600 miles of temporary roads, which fragment habitat and destroy water quality.
The general public has stiffly opposed the project, which was proposed in 2017. Considering its unprecedented scale, lack of detail and environmental analysis, levels of road construction, loss of wildlife habitat, effects on Roadless Areas, and lack of analysis of climate change and economic impacts, it’s certainly a major victory that the Forest Service is taking a step back.
Read the press release.