In this issue, we follow the rest of the money - examining who funds the organizations filing these lawsuits and what their donors may not know about the consequences.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule does not open designated Wilderness to logging, but it may open the door to restoring millions
Taking aim at the use of the Equal Access to Justice Act as a serial litigation tool. We Want to
In this issue, we follow the rest of the money - examining who funds the organizations filing these lawsuits and what their donors may not know about the consequences.
Part One in our series on serial litigation asked what happened after nine forest projects were challenged, delayed, reduced, or stopped - and why no one is required to count what followed. Part Two examined the use of the Equal Access to Justice Act as a tool for financing serial litigation. In this issue, we follow the rest of the money - examining who funds the organizations filing these lawsuits and what their donors may not know about the consequences.
The nine projects examined in this series involved different forests, states, litigating organizations, treatments, and wildfires. The lawsuits did not ignite the fires, and no forest treatment can prevent every ignition.
That is not the claim.
The question is:
What happened after planned forest treatments were challenged, delayed, reduced, or stopped - and why no independent institution is responsible for tracking what followed.
This file is a one-page comparison of the nine challenged projects, what followed, the public money identified so far, and the costs and consequences that remain uncounted.
Download the Nine-Project Chart (PDF)
This five-page supporting file presents each project individually and distinguishes documented facts from amounts, geographic overlaps, and consequences that still require verification.
Download After the Lawsuit (PDF)
Stopping a forest project is not free.
Long before a lawsuit reaches a courtroom, taxpayers have already paid Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management employees to study the landscape, conduct wildlife surveys, consult scientists, develop alternatives, collect public comments, prepare environmental documents, design treatment units, and arrange contracts.
When the project is challenged, the public begins paying again.
Agency employees must answer objections, prepare supplemental analysis, assemble the administrative record, assist government attorneys, participate in settlement negotiations, revise the project, and sometimes begin portions of the process again.
The Department of Justice provides the government’s legal defense. Agency employees and their time may be charged to different budgets, making the complete cost difficult to identify. That does not make the cost disappear.
It makes it harder to count.
If the litigating organization prevails or obtains a favorable settlement, taxpayers may also be required to pay its attorney fees.
Then, if the untreated landscape burns, the public pays again - this time for aircraft, firefighters, engines, evacuation centers, law enforcement, emergency assistance, rehabilitation, watershed protection, damaged roads and infrastructure, and, in some cases, rebuilding entire communities.
Planning → litigation → attorney fees → wildfire suppression → rehabilitation → rebuilding
Yet no one produces a single statement showing the total.
Who is counting the cost?
Attorney-fee awards under the principal federal-court provision of the Equal Access to Justice Act are paid from agency appropriations. Other environmental fee-shifting statutes and settlements may be paid through different federal mechanisms.
The statutory mechanism matters, and we will identify it where records allow. But the larger truth remains: it is all public money.
This does not mean every dollar paid to an attorney would otherwise have gone directly to a thinning crew. Federal budgets do not work that neatly.
But neither the Forest Service nor any other federal agency has an unlimited supply of money, foresters, wildlife biologists, contracting officers, or attorneys.
Every dollar and employee hour consumed by repetitive analysis and litigation is unavailable for another agency responsibility - forest treatment, wildfire mitigation, watershed restoration, road maintenance, recreation, rural employment, or preparation for the next fire.
The Forest Service may win the lawsuit and still lose years.
The agency may finally receive permission to proceed and discover that the forest has already burned.
In the cases examined so far, we found three recent payments:
The conservative total from these three matters is at least $171,000. If the higher Stonewall figure is correct, the total rises to approximately $194,500.
That is only what we have identified in three cases.
It does not include the government’s cost of defending them. It does not include the agency employees diverted from other work. It does not include additional analysis, project revisions, delayed contracts, lost employment, suppression, rehabilitation, or community damage.
It also does not include other attorney-fee awards received by these organizations in unrelated litigation.
The federal government’s own reporting has historically been too fragmented to provide the complete answer.
Again, who is counting the cost?
The organizations examined in this series are supported through overlapping streams of money:
Some organizations are small. Others control tens of millions of dollars.
Some voluntarily name major donors. Others reveal almost nothing beyond the total amount of annual contributions.
The public record identifies hundreds of funders, but it also reveals where the trail disappears.
These figures do not prove that every identified foundation, business, or individual knowingly financed a particular lawsuit.
That is not what we are claiming.
General operating support helps sustain the organization as a whole. Some grants are designated for education, climate programs, wildlife work, or projects unrelated to forest litigation. Earth Island Institute and the Ecology Center also act as fiscal sponsors, making it especially important to determine which program received the money.
But other grants are more direct.
Conservation Congress received $35,000 from the Fund for Wild Nature for work that included preparing scientific materials and legal arguments concerning Endangered Species Act protections. Environment Now provided $30,000 for Northern California National Forest Defense.
Oregon Wild’s annual reports say it uses every available tool, including litigation. AWR identifies litigation as one of its principal methods and says donations are essential to bringing new cases.
The defensible conclusion is straightforward:
Foundations, businesses, individuals, and donor-advised accounts sustain organizations during periods in which administrative challenges and litigation are central program activities.
That does not prove a coordinated conspiracy.
It demonstrates an overlapping funding network.
Some funders openly select the organizations they support. Others are financial intermediaries that process grants recommended by donors whose identities may never be disclosed.
The money can be traced up to a point.
Then the trail disappears.
This two-page file identifies available foundations, businesses, named individuals, anonymous gifts, donor-advised funds, government grants, grant amounts, years, stated purposes, recurring funders, and source records for all 15 organizations in the funding chart.
Download Who Funds the Serial Litigators? (PDF)
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Federal law protects the privacy of many nonprofit donors, and in many circumstances, that protection is legitimate. But privacy should not be mistaken for accountability.
Donor-advised funds create an additional barrier between the money and the public. Tax records may identify Fidelity Charitable, DAFgiving360, ImpactAssets, Vanguard Charitable, or a community foundation as the grantmaking institution while concealing the individual or family who recommended the contribution.
Those institutions may not have chosen the organization or endorsed a particular lawsuit. They may simply have processed the donor’s instruction.
But the practical result remains: The public can see money entering an organization without knowing who directed it there.
The money is powerful enough to influence how public forests are managed, yet those directing it can remain invisible. That is power without accountability.
The Forest Service must disclose its analysis, scientific assumptions, alternatives, expenditures, public comments, and decisions. Taxpayers finance the planning, legal defense, attorney-fee payment, fire suppression, rehabilitation, and rebuilding.
Yet the people helping finance the effort to stop or restrict the project may never be identified.
If donors are proud of this work, why is so much of their financial involvement hidden?
Oregon Wild has publicly listed businesses among its supporters. Its 2019–2020 annual report included Columbia Sportswear, KEEN Footwear, Nike, Intel, Patagonia, and other companies.
Those historical relationships do not establish that each company remained a supporter during the 2023–2025 Grasshopper litigation. Current support must be verified before any business is connected to that period.
But businesses that lend their money and reputations to organizations using litigation as a central tool cannot celebrate the courtroom victories and wash their hands of everything that follows.
The issue is not whether a particular business caused a wildfire.
It did not.
The issue is whether businesses conduct meaningful due diligence before attaching their names and reputations to organizations that influence the management of public forests.
Accepting the environmental virtue attached to a donation is easy.
Following the results is stewardship.
There is another contradiction in this funding network that deserves attention.
Many businesses that have supported these organizations sell outdoor clothing, equipment, food, travel, and recreational products to urban consumers who want access to the forests, rivers, trails, mountains, and wildlife these lawsuits place at risk.
Their customers want to hike, camp, hunt, fish, ski, paddle, cycle, photograph wildlife, and escape into the landscapes surrounding rural communities.
Yet the people who live and work in those communities are often treated as though they are beneath urban consideration - politically inconvenient, economically expendable, and somehow less entitled to shape the future of the forests surrounding their homes.
The communities themselves can be ignored, but the landscapes must remain available for urban recreation.
Rural families are expected to absorb the smoke, fire danger, lost employment, declining tax base, damaged watersheds, closed roads, and destroyed infrastructure. Then, when the smoke clears, the same forests are expected to remain available as recreational backdrops for the customers buying products from businesses that helped finance the litigation.
That is not respect for rural communities. It is consumption disguised as conservation.
If these companies are willing to help fund the organizations challenging forest treatment, they should also be willing to ask what happened afterward.
Your company uses images of these forests to sell its products. Why would you fund organizations whose lawsuits prevent the people who live there from caring for them?
Rural communities are not scenery. They are not recreational service stations for urban visitors.
Rural communities are home to the first stewards of the landscapes your company uses to sell its products. Their knowledge, livelihoods, safety, and futures deserve to count.
We don’t back down when the mission is daunting; we’re in until the fire is out.
If these organizations believe the complete record vindicates their methods, they should be eager to publish it.
Their silence suggests the scattered details serve them better than the assembled truth.
To every foundation, business, and anonymous donor supporting these organizations:
You helped give the organizations you funded the capacity to challenge these forest projects.
Funding without scrutiny is not stewardship.
It is permission to obstruct without ethical restraint and walk away from the consequences.
The Forest Service must account for nearly every tree it proposes to cut.
The litigating organization is not required to account for a single acre that burns after the project is stopped.
They can declare victory when the judge rules and leave everyone else to deal with the consequences.
That is not accountability.
It is a one-sided game masquerading as accountability - one in which the Forest Service must answer for every proposed action, while litigants never have to answer for the consequences of stopping it.
The Forest Service cannot serve as the independent outside evaluator needed to fill this accountability gap. It must document and defend the treatments it proposes, but disputes involving its own projects require outside review. Agency scientists must also follow standards intended to protect their work from institutional bias. Yet no single outside institution has been assigned responsibility for conducting that long-term review.
The result is a critical gap: no one consistently follows these projects to document what happens afterward.
Congress should require the Forest Service, Department of the Interior, and Department of Justice to maintain a shared, publicly searchable record for every litigated forest-health and wildfire-mitigation project.
The nonprofit organizations bringing these challenges should also be required to track and publicly report every long-term outcome - not only the rulings they celebrate, but also the treatment delays, project changes, attorney-fee payments, subsequent wildfires, habitat effects, suppression and rehabilitation costs, community losses, and any other consequences that follow.
Every project should receive a permanent identifier connecting environmental analysis, administrative objections, court litigation, injunctions, settlements, attorney-fee payments, project modifications, acres proposed and treated, years of delay, subsequent wildfire overlap, fire severity, public expenditures, human casualties, habitat outcomes, watershed effects, carbon emissions, and future sequestration.
The record should not close when the courtroom does.
Nonprofits should be required to continue reporting for as long as the effects of the challenge remain relevant. They should not be allowed to announce the legal victory, collect the attorney-fee payment, and close their file while the agency, forest, taxpayers, and nearby communities continue living with the consequences.
This is not an attempt to deny anyone access to the courts.
It is an attempt to ensure that access to the courts is accompanied by access to the complete truth about what happened afterward.
Sources, Methodology, Definitions, Limitations, and Publication Safeguards
This three-page file explains the definition of a challenged project, the difference between litigation and administrative objections, the treatment of EAJA and other attorney-fee statutes, donor-reporting limitations, wildfire-mapping standards, unresolved questions, and the sources used for material claims.
Download How We Built the Record (PDF)
The devil is in the details - but the most important details are scattered among courthouse files, agency budgets, nonprofit tax returns, fire reports, and blackened landscapes.
These organizations benefit when the details remain scattered and the consequences remain uncounted. As long as no one connects the lawsuit, delay, attorney-fee payment, wildfire, and public cost, they can declare victory and move on.
The forests do not have that option, nor do the communities left behind.
The forests are burning. Wildlife habitat is being destroyed. Firefighters are being placed in danger. Families are losing homes and livelihoods. Taxpayers are paying for litigation, attorney fees, suppression, rehabilitation, and rebuilding.
Mike Garrity counts lawsuits filed, lawsuits won, projects stopped, and acres allegedly protected.
What he does not count is precisely what the public most needs to know: what happened to those forests, wildlife, watersheds, and communities afterward.
So, who is Mike Garrity counting on?
He is counting on donors to keep writing checks, corporations to avoid asking difficult questions, and the public never to look beyond his carefully selected numbers.
It is time the rest of us count what Mike Garrity leaves out.
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