The Conservation Alliance, a coalition of outdoor industry businesses working to fund conservation and recreation causes, announced its latest round of funding, six grants totaling $160,000 to organizations working to protect lands for habitat and recreation.

Grants include the following:

  • Appalachian Mountain Club (Boston): $28,000 for its continuing grassroots efforts to designate 113,000 acres of unprotected land in the White Mountain National Forest (WMNF) as Wilderness. The WMNF, home to moose, eastern brook trout, peregrine falcons and other wildlife, annually draws more visitors and recreationists than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks combined.
  • Cook Inlet Keeper (Homer, Alaska): $22,000 to expedite education and outreach to southcentral Alaska citizens on new and mounting efforts to promote extracting natural gas from coalbeds, potentially from private property and sensitive public lands. Keeper's project will focus on ensuring citizens are educated on the process and impacts on local wildlife, outdoor recreation and individual property rights.
  • Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center (Williams, Ore.): $30,000 for the Klamath-Siskiyou Wild Corridors Project, creating and implementing a comprehensive program of conservation and restoration of key wild habitat in southwest Oregon and northwest California. The project will focus on restoring fragmented habitat for such species as Coho salmon and Northern spotted owls as well as world-famous hiking trails and rafting waterways, including the Pacific Crest Trail.
  • Nevada Wilderness Project (Reno, Nev.): $30,000 to create the Nevada Wilderness Coalition, a volunteer corps of citizens from the eastern part of the state with a personal stake in the region's quality of life and recreation. Coalition members will receive training on field work and also coordinate communications with legislators and other government officials. The eastern Nevada region includes the Great Basin and Mojave Deserts and is home to the threatened Desert Tortoise, pronghorn antelope, high country elk and one of America's largest wildlife refuges.
  • Predator Conservation Alliance (Bozeman, Mont.): $20,000 to initiate grassroots efforts supporting wildlife and muscle-powered recreation in the Gallatin and Beaverhead/Deerlodge National Forests. These will represent first steps toward organization for Beaverhead/Deerlodge, while building on momentum in Gallatin, already the first national forest in the region to revise its travel management plan as part of the “Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.”
  • Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) (Salt Lake City): $30,000 to the third phase of SUWA's 2003-2004 Fossil Fuels Campaign building grassroots support to ensure appropriate recognition for and treatment of Utah lands congressionally-proposed for wilderness designation, with specific regard to plans for aggressive fossil fuel exploration and extraction on the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin. Funds will be dedicated primarily to grassroots organizing
    tools in support of the unique watersheds, ancient forests and
    delicate soil crusts home to the region's bighorn sheep, mountain
    lions, blue herons and other wildlife.