Grassroots organizing—bringing advocates together to take action for a cause—is hard. Grassroots environmental organizing is even harder. Still, history has shown that uniting a critical mass of individuals to speak with one voice has the power to influence society or even radically change the world.
One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of successful movements is that there’s no agreed-upon guidebook for organizers. Anyone who wants to launch a campaign tends to do their own thing in their own way, often with no knowledge of what’s worked in the past or what hasn’t, no clear guidelines for how to move forward, and no benchmarks for measuring success or failure. This tends to make things frustrating or even exhausting for organizers and unsatisfying or pointless for advocates.
But what if we could come up with a blueprint for how organizers and advocates might work together to build a powerful environmental campaign?
Unfortunately, it’s impossible, so don’t even bother trying…Kidding! Just so happens that Eco-Integrity Alliance, through decades of research and experience, trial and error, wins and losses, has come up with one. And we’re about to share it with you in hopes that the valiant grassroots environmental movement can finally start slowing, and then reversing, the eco crisis.
The top current issue/action across ten U.S. states from Eco-Integrity Alliance’s 11 State Advocates. Email eia@eco-integrityalliance.org to get involved in your state today!
Instead of the usual sky-is-falling rhetoric (often sadly necessary in our Ecological Unraveling), this piece focuses on a positive, proactive vision of what could be for our last functioning ecosystems and wildlife populations not just in the United States but around the world.
A post-logging “prescribed burn” overseen by the Boulder Ranger District of the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest in May 2025 near Gross Reservoir in Boulder County, Colorado got out of control (reportedly due to higher-than-expected winds), accidentally killing and damaging hundreds of trees up to an estimated 200 years old.
Over sixty photos recently taken within the 131-acre Unit 45 of the U.S. Forest Service’s Forsythe II logging project show many large, medium-sized, and small trees killed by the pile and broadcast burn last spring, their trunks scorched, vegetation dead or completely consumed. Flammable woody debris lies scattered throughout much of the unit from agency operations.
The federal project was undertaken under the auspices of reducing “hazardous fuels on National Forest lands that may contribute to the increased spread and intensity of wildfires,” despite Forest Service data proving that this mixed-conifer and lodgepole pine forest in the upper montane zone is well within its historic fire return interval of hundreds of years. This means forest density has not been altered by about eighty years of fire suppression (only truly effective once aircraft was employed after World War II) and categorizations of these forests as “overgrown” are false.
A new report, Sublette Antelope Migration Corridor: Land Use Analysis with Recommendations, highlights the urgent need to protect one of North America’s most significant wildlife migration routes. Authored by Dr. John Carter, the analysis underscores the ecological, cultural, and economic importance of the Sublette pronghorn migration corridor within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Leadership from “working lands” organizations Conservation Colorado, Western Resource Advocates, and The Nature Conservancy testified alongside industry and government logging interests to help axe a statehouse bill that would’ve routed a small portion of the state’s “wildfire mitigation” funding towards proven home hardening protections through grants to low-income residents, along with seniors and those with disabilities.
Yellowstone to Uintas Connection releases a new report on government agency failure to protect the threatened Canada lynx and its habitat. Read at YellowstoneUintas.org
“When you go to that land you have to take a look at how sacred it is, and the things that live there. And that’s part of understanding, knowing all the beings that live on that land, because each one of them–from the smallest ant to the biggest tree–all of them work together to help it survive. That’s the spirit of that land.”
–Calvin Hecocta(1941-2016), Owens Valley Northern Paiute Nation and former board member of Native Forest Council
The last intact ecosystems and wildlife populations in the United States/Turtle Island are under their greatest assault in history at the hands of industry, government, anti-environmental NGOs, and others who see nature as something from which to take and never give back.
We at Eco-Integrity Alliance believe it’s time to acknowledge that, despite its many valiant efforts and admirable achievements, the U.S. mainstream “conservation” movement has failed to achieve its goal of protecting the natural world from the worst abuses of humankind. To the contrary, things are only getting worse every day.
Therefore, the only chance we have of defending these lands, waters, and living creatures is by evolving our approach to environmentalism. And we feel one crucial effort is to integrate the input and traditional knowledge of indigenous cultures—cultures that adapted over millennia to coexist with the wild species and natural biomes from which we all come—into our advocacy.
Unfortunately, our federal, state, county, and municipal government agencies (U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, County Open Space, etc.) continue to degrade and destroy these lands, many of which were once inhabited, traversed, and/or revered by hundreds of Native American tribes. Adding insult to injury, these agencies falsely and disrespectfully claim that traditional indigenous practices which were light on the land and for purposes of survival (such as localized cultural burning) are the same as modern industrial land mismanagement with feller-bunchers, bulldozers, and logging trucks.
Eco-Integrity Alliance believes it’s crucial that the voices of indigenous people who believe in protecting and restoring nature be central to this revitalized movement. And that we must do all we can to help broadcast this Earth-centric message throughout the U.S. environmental community while supporting Native Americans’ struggle to safeguard ancestral lands from government and industry extraction (i.e. “Land Back”).
“We call upon the forests, the great trees racing strongly to the sky with earth in their roots and the heavens in their branches, the fir and the pine and the cedar, and we ask them to teach us, and show us the Way.”
[Below is a letter to the editor submitted to multiple Colorado newspapers that was never published. In recent months, Colorado’s corporate media outlets have rejected close to 100 percent of letters to the editors and opinion pieces from a variety of local residents critiquing public lands extraction while publishing many pieces promoting it.
Eco-Integrity Alliance 