Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

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The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a wilderness preservation organization in the United States based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with field offices in Washington, D.C., Moab, Utah, and La Verkin, Utah.

SUWA's primary campaign is to build public support for the America's Redrock Wilderness Act which was first introduced in Congress in 1988 by Utah Congressman Wayne Owens. The bill has been reintroduced in every session of Congress since, but has yet to be debated on the floor. In 1997 the first companion bill was introduced in the United States Senate by Dick Durbin. The America's Redrock Wilderness Act has not yet passed Congress, and though it gains occasional cosponsors with each session it has never gained sponsorship by any other member of the Utah delegation. SUWA works to win new cosponsors for the bill in the hope of it passing Congress.

SUWA also works to protect areas in Utah that it believes qualifies as Wilderness under the federal Wilderness Act of 1964 from uses incompatible with Wilderness as defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964, which would cause these areas to be disqualified from Wilderness consideration [1], such as off-road vehicle use, aircraft over flights, grazing, oil and gas development, and mining.

In the late 1990s, SUWA began building a large endowment from grants. The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Wyss Foundation were particularly generous. As of 2004, SUWA had amassed almost $5 million. Swiss-born billionaire Hansjorg Wyss joined the board of SUWA in 1996 and later financed a new $1.4 million Salt Lake City headquarters. Though SUWA has been able raise large sums of money over the last decade its membership numbers have declined 30% from a high of 20,000 to 14,000 [2].

[edit] References

1964 Wilderness Act [3]
Forest Service Management of the Wilderness Resource and Activities within Wilderness [4]
Jim Stiles, "SUWA, can you spare a dime?" Canyon Country Zephyr (April, 2006)