Friends of the Clearwater Newsletter Collection

About the Collection

This digital collection was developed to provide online access to the semi-regular newsletters produced by Friends of the Clearwater (FOC), a non-profit organization headquartered in Moscow, Idaho. For several years, copies of the organization’s newsletter had been archived in the Library’s Day-Northwest publication collection, alongside newsletters and bulletins from many other Idaho nonprofits. FOC donated missing issues in 2026, making it possible to create a nearly complete digital archive of the organization’s publication. Together, the newsletters offer one perspective on the history and future of some of North Idaho’s most prominent watersheds.

U of I Library’s Special Collections and Archives preserves numerous records pertaining to Idaho’s environment, and especially the use and conservation of North Idaho’s landscape. To explore other archival holdings, visit our finding aids.

About the Clearwater Defender

Interpretive content contributed by Annette Bridges of Friends of the Clearwater in 2026.

The Clearwater Defender is published approximately three times a year. It is the newsletter of Friends of the Clearwater (FOC), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Moscow, Idaho that is dedicated to preserving, protecting, and defending the forests, waterways, and wildlife in the wild heart of north-central Idaho. The newsprint version is sent by mail to Friends of the Clearwater’s almost 500 members, and recent issues are available on FOC’s website at friendsoftheclearwater.org.

Each issue of The Clearwater Defender includes detailed reports by FOC’s policy director, for example on proposed logging projects or fire-related forest management activity in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests. The Defender also features updates on FOC’s current activities and initiatives, articles about particular species and specific wild areas, explanations of legislation or agency rules and regulations, profiles of influential activists and new staff or board members, information about upcoming events relevant to protection of Wild Clearwater Country, artwork, maps, photographs, book reviews, and more.

Originally – from 1994 through 1998 – the publication was called the Salmon Selway Defender: News and Reports from Idaho’s Big Wild and was published by the Cove/Mallard Coalition. This coalition formed in 1992 in response to the Forest Service’s plans to build 140 miles of roads in order to log 81 million board feet of timber in an intact, roadless area situated between Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot, Gospel Hump, and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Areas. The name was changed to Clearwater Defender to reflect FOC’s focus on the northern half of the “Big Wild,” meaning the region north of the Salmon River.

About Friends of the Clearwater

Friends of the Clearwater is a membership-based grassroots organization that seeks lasting protection of Idaho’s vast, intact Wild Clearwater Country (the Clearwater Basin and adjacent watersheds of north-central Idaho) in order to preserve the region’s unique and wild ecology and its flora, fauna, and fungi, and to contribute to climate stability. This area makes up the northern half of Idaho’s “Big Wild,” the largest wildlands complex in the lower 48, which contains 4.4 million acres of designated Wilderness and 6.3 million acres of unprotected roadless wildlands. The region is rich in biological diversity and is home to many rare species: bull trout, Chinook salmon, steelhead, Westslope cutthroat trout, fisher, marten, lynx, wolverine, gray wolf, northern goshawk, bald and golden eagle, boreal and flammulated owl, and more.

Friends of the Clearwater’s main tools are science and the law. FOC supports proposed visionary legislation such as NREPA (the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act), participates in public commenting processes, carries out forest watch activities, conducts public outreach, and, when necessary, engages in litigation.

In 2026, Friends of the Clearwater embarked on several initiatives aimed at increasing public knowledge about the Big Wild, with an ultimate goal of achieving formal protected status for the entire region. With these initiatives, FOC seeks to: 1) establish a wild salmon sanctuary, 2) designate carnivore corridors to ensure habitat connectivity for keystone and umbrella species, and 3) declare the largest biodiversity and climate preserve in the lower 48 and thereby make Idaho one of the first large states to meet the “30x30” conservation standard (30% of land protected by 2030).

Friends of the Clearwater was founded as an informal group to monitor Forest Service activities, such as roadbuilding and clearcutting, on the national forests of north central Idaho’s Clearwater Basin. FOC became a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in 1996 and has consistently had two to four employees since then. As of 2026, there are two full-time and two part-time employees, and both founder Steve Paulson and long-time Ecosystem Defense Director Gary Macfarlane continue to advise the group as members of its eleven-person board of directors.

For more information, see the Friends of the Clearwater website at https://www.friendsoftheclearwater.org/.

Digitization and metadata development by Special Collections and Archives intern Kacie Kay, 2026.