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CONNECTING LANDSCAPES, CONNECTING WILDLIFE, CONNECTING PEOPLE
Memo To: Friends of Vital Ground
From: Gary Wolfe, Executive Director
Regarding: $150,000 Strength of Connections Matching Gift Challeng
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The Vital Ground Foundation’s Board of Trustees has directed me to send you this urgent letter outlining a plan to raise $150,000 to protect and enhance
habitat crucial to grizzly bear and other threatened and endangered species.
For the second year in a row, the Cinnabar Foundation, Oberweiler Foundation, Wiancko Charitable Foundation, and an anonymous
family foundation have pledged to make your gift go twice as far. Through the end of the year, your contributions to Vital Ground will be matched
dollar-for-dollar up to $75,000!
These foundations have a strong connection to the grizzly, the landscapes it roams, and to Vital Ground—the only organization in North America
working exclusively to increase the pace, quality and permanence of conservation in areas critical to the grizzly bear.
We hope that you will strengthen your connection to Vital Ground this year by sending your most generous gift ever.
THE GRIZZLY: PAST AND PRESENT
Only 200 years ago, an estimated 100,000 grizzlies ranged the entire western half of the continent from the Mississippi to the Pacific; from deep in
Mexico to the far northern reaches of Canada and Alaska.
With the Gold Rush beginning in the late 1840s, people began to establish settlements throughout the ranges of the grizzly bear. People routinely killed the
bears because they were seen as a threat to humans. Further contact between bears and settlers increased with western expansion and, by 1870, grizzly
bears were getting scarce ...
Today, the grizzly numbers only around 1,300 in the lower 48 and their populations are cut off from each other in separate, isolated
ecosystems, representing less than 2% of their original range.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE GRIZZLY
Because of the huge home ranges of grizzly bears, the diversity of their complex dietary requirements, and their solitary nature, the needs of a grizzly are
far greater than most other large mammals of North America. As such, grizzly bears are considered by the scientific community to be an indicator species.
When the grizzly bear population in an ecosystem is strong and healthy, it indicates that the land and other wildlife therein is faring much the same.
Grizzlies are also considered an umbrella species—much like the indicator species—meaning if we take care of the grizzly habitat, we are
generally going to be taking care of the requirements of the majority of other fl ora and fauna found within the ecosystem. Alternately,
if we lose the grizzly, many other species will be at risk.
Sadly, this is the direction things are heading and why we urgently need your financial support!
A GRAVE SITUATION
Landscapes that sustain our wildlife, clean our air and water places that fill us with wonder and respect
for the natural world—are quickly disappearing. Private wildlands and open spaces in the United States
are disappearing at an astonishing pace. Roughly 5,000 acres are lost to development each day according
to one estimate—that’s nearly two million acres each year!
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Subdivision, commercial development, resource extraction, and growing human population demands
continue to speed destruction of the last vital acres of habitat needed for the grizzly and other wildlife to
disperse, migrate, forage, and have the elbow room they need to adapt to climate change.
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We are not only losing land, we are losing the connectivity between landscapes critical to the survival of
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wildlife. In fragmented landscapes, biodiversity is often dependent on habitat connectivity because
without it, the exchange of genes is constrained and small, isolated populations become at greater of risk
of extinction.
Connectivity Lost: Habitat Vs. Housing
Loss of connectivity is among the most severe threats to the survival of the grizzly bear and other wildlife.
RECONNECTING VITAL LANDSCAPES
The northern Rockies encompass the last great expanse of native biodiversity in the lower 48 states. This region—often called
“America’s Serengeti”—is the last stronghold of the grizzly bear. Although the habitat making up the region is greatly fragmented, the
northern Rockies still possess all the species present at the time of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, including free-roaming populations
of bison, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, wolves, mountain lions, and hundreds of others.
But roads, resource extraction, and residential development are daily choking off wildlife populations from each other, genetically isolating them and
threatening ecological collapse.
Recognizing Vital Ground as a pioneering wildlife conservation group working in the northern Rockies, the leadership of the
Canmore, Alberta-based Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) recently asked us to be their U.S. partner in helping to ensure
that the most timely and effective conservation practices are put in place in the region.
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