Today, Montana conservation organizations challenged the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) for dramatically weakening a core benchmark for grizzly bear conservation in Montana’s Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. The lawsuit targets the agencies’ approval of the Larabee Hat Vegetation Project—a large-scale logging and road-building project—for abandoning the science on grizzly bear conservation to obscure the project’s significant impacts to the species.
On behalf of Native Ecosystems Council, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and the Council on Wildlife and Fish, the Western Environmental Law Center filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana this morning.
The challenge centers on how the agencies define “secure habitat” for grizzly bears—areas free from roads and human development large enough for a bear to safely meet its daily foraging needs. For decades, science has established that secure habitat patches must provide an individual female grizzly adequate space to forage for 24-48 hours without crossing or nearing motorized routes. The scientific community agrees grizzly bears need thousands of acres to meet these daily needs.
USFS and USFWS followed the scientific consensus and used a 2,500-acre minimum secure habitat patch size when they approved the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest’s Forest Plan in 2021. But in April 2025, USFWS quietly reversed course, redefining “secure habitat” outside the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) grizzly recovery zone as patches of just one acre. USFS followed in May 2025, updating its internal guidance to match.
“There is no scientific support for one-acre ‘secure habitat’ patches,” said David Woodsmall, attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “The agencies simply redefined the problem away. A one-acre island of forest surrounded by roads isn’t secure habitat—it’s a death trap for a bear trying to survive there. Federal land managers must follow the law, even under the Trump administration, and pulling policy changes like this out of thin air is clearly outside the law.”
The stakes extend well beyond this single instance. The Larabee Hat project sits in the Divide Geographic Area, part of the only public lands corridor connecting the NCDE and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) grizzly bear recovery zones. Genetic exchange between these two isolated populations is considered essential to grizzly bear recovery in the contiguous U.S.
“The adverse cumulative impacts of this project would be devastating to wildlife and wildlife habitat, native plants, and aquatic species, which demonstrates why this project generates absolutely no net public benefit,” said Steve Kelly with Council on Wildlife and Fish. “It makes no ecological or financial sense to degrade irreplaceable, untrammeled native forest into failed tree plantations and marginal pastureland for subsidized livestock at great taxpayer expense.”
The project proposes logging on nearly 17,700 acres, including 1,266 acres of clearcuts, more than 1,850 acres of other timber harvest, and 16.8 miles of new temporary roads over the next 15 to 20 years.
Under the old 2,500-acre definition, the Divide Geographic Area contained approximately 41,531 acres of secure habitat. Under the new one-acre definition, that number jumps to 59,143 acres—an artificial increase of more than 17,000 acres that makes the landscape appear far healthier for bears than it actually is.
“We won a court case on a similar issue last year in which the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service tried to shrink the definition of secure habitat for grizzlies from 2,500 acres to 10 acres, which is ridiculous for these wide-ranging bears,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “The Judge said in the ruling: ‘In relying on a 10-acre patch size to define grizzly bear secure habitat in the absence of any scientific evidence showing that such acreage provides adequate habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Service failed to use the ‘best available science’ in violation of the Endangered Species Act,’ adding ‘grizzly bears in other ecosystems have been found to need upwards of 2,500 acres of secure habitat.’”
“Here, the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest secretly shrunk grizzly bear secure habitat to one acre in size without telling the public,” Garrity continued. “The Larabee Hat project area is in an important corridor for grizzlies from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem to connect with grizzlies from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. For grizzlies to be delisted, they once again have to have one connected population in the Northern Rockies with secure habitat.”
“Changing the parameters of what qualifies on paper as habitat doesn’t make more habitat,” said Sara Johnson Ph.D., a wildlife biologist for the Forest Service for 14 years. “It just makes it easier to approve more logging and more roads while ignoring the real consequences for grizzly bears. The law doesn’t allow it, and we will apparently have to be the people who say ‘no.’”
This case builds directly on a successful 2025 legal challenge, in which a federal court struck down a similar attempt to shrink grizzly bear secure habitat patch size on the Custer-Gallatin National Forest, finding the approach scientifically unjustified and harmful to bears in fragmented landscapes.
“The court already rejected this approach once,” said Woodsmall. “These agencies are trying the same thing again in a different forest. We intend to stop it again.”
Contacts:
David Woodsmall, Western Environmental Law Center, 971-285-3632, woodsmall@westernlaw.org
Mike Garrity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, 406-459-5936, wildrockies@gmail.com
Steve Kelly, Council on Wildlife and Fish, 406-920-1381, troutcheeks@yahoo.com
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