The summer of 2001 I worked as an outreach intern for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (AWR). The Alliance goals of ecosystem protection, endangered species recovery, and preservation of our last remaining wildlands paralleled my own environmental ethic. I worked in the office, on pamphlets and publicity and got to see the innerworkings of a non-profit environmental organization. I was most interested in AWR's bill on the hill, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA). NREPA is an effort to link major wilderness, roadless areas and national parks within the northern rockies bioregion with wildlife corridors.
Also during the summer of 2001 I interned with the Great Grizzly Search (GGS). The GGS is sponsored by several organization including AWR and the Great Bear Foundation. The goal of the search was to catalog any resident Grizzly Bears in the Selway/Bitterroot Ecosystem. After hair gathering on rub trees and self designed "traps" in different study areas in the backcountry we sent the samples to a lab in Idaho for DNA testing. If we were to identify a pre-existing in the Selway/Bitterroot it would prevent the introduction of a population of "non-essential/experimental" bears that would make all bears in the ecosystem exempt from Endangered Species Act protections.
pictures from the GGS