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|  Conservation Easements  |  Sample letter to Congress  |  Talking Points and Writing Letters  |

Help keep the Front the way it is now! Increasingly, important habitat along the Rocky Mountain Front is under pressure from the subdivision of private land for residential development. Conservation easements have proven to be a valuable tool for protecting wildlife and a traditional way of life by leaving land in private ownership. However, in order to capitalize on the gains already made, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is in need of renewed funding to purchase additional conservation easements in the coming years. Learn how you can help this important program>>

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Travel Plan for the Rocky Mountain Front Released!
The Coalition applauded the Forest Service for its plan that protects wildlife while emphasizing traditional uses on the Front. On October 1st, the Lewis and Clark released a final Travel Plan for the lower two-thirds of the Rocky Mountain Front covering roughly 390,000 acres, excluding the Badger-Two Medicine area. The Plan will guide all travel, recreation, and other uses on the Front for the next two decades, specifying routes for hikers and horseback riders, snowmobiles and off-road vehicles (ORVs) ...more>

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Dear (Representative Rehberg, Senator Burns or Senator Baucus):

Thank you for looking out for the interests of Montanans to develop reasonable and balanced natural resource policy. I am writing to encourage you to take a leadership role in protecting one of Montana’s most cherished places. As you know, the Rocky Mountain Front is blanketed with old leases that continue to provoke controversy. The good news is that there is a homegrown solution.

Through the hard work of regular Montanans and private financing, we have an opportunity to retire existing federal oil and gas leases on the Front, which would resolve long-standing land-use controversies. Voluntary agreements with energy companies to relinquish their interest in the Front would protect these lands for future generations, stimulate local economic development, protect some of the nation’s finest habitat and hunter access to these lands and safeguard a century-old conservation investment. These agreements, however, can only succeed if Congress acts to continue the current policy of no new leasing on the Front.

Your leadership on this issue will help free a national treasure from the threat of energy development. Even if the Front’s leases were developed, their production would not lessen our dependency on foreign oil. I recognize your commitment to Montana’s natural resource base as a source of economic opportunity. But wouldn’t a better way to promote Montana’s energy production be to direct development where the land is less sensitive and there are more promising prospects for finding extractable quantities of gas? This is what retiring the Front’s leases will help accomplish. As the past has shown, legal fights and public protest will keep drill rigs out of the Front for years at an enormous expense to both the taxpayers and to leaseholders.

In closing, you can promote good government and land stewardship in the spirit of bipartisanship by working with our entire delegation to retire the Front’s leases and ensure they are not re-issued at a later date. I look forward to hearing from you on what actions you plan to take on resolving the issue of leases on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front.

Sincerely,

Your name and address