The Combat Biologist

Every afternoon, Sara Johnson sits down at her desk in Three Forks, Montana, and goes to work. She works from home. The Bridger, Madison, and Tobacco Root mountains define the horizon outside her window. The Jefferson River meanders in braided streams through a corridor of hundred-year-old cottonwoods. Migratory birds chirp, squawk, and sing, drawn by the thousands of Russian olive trees that Sara and her ex-partner planted on their property, years ago. “It’s peaceful,” she says.

What Sara does at that desk, three to four hours a day, seven days a week, is read logging proposals. She reads hundreds of them each year, issued by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) across national forests and public lands stretching from Montana and Idaho down into Utah and Nevada. She reads for problems. Threats to sage-grouse nesting territories, say, or to grizzly bear migration corridors, or mule deer habitat. When she finds problems, she writes comment letters explaining to the Forest Service and the BLM — and anyone else who cares to listen — how and why a given logging project would harm wildlife. Last year she wrote about fifty such letters. Some years she…