Through our Sagesteppe Defense Program, ONDA implements rigorous, strategic, and thoughtful enforcement of environmental laws to safeguard Oregon’s deserts. Employing the full range of legal tools, we work to hold federal land management agencies accountable, ensuring that Oregon’s arid lands and waterways receive the protection they so richly deserve.

Our legal efforts have played an important role in protecting Oregon’s desert lands and rivers. In 1992, ONDA filed a lawsuit that forced the removal of livestock grazing from Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge. Free from the impacts grazing, Hart Mountain’s meadows and streams have shown a remarkable recovery, and the refuge’s pronghorn population has increased dramatically.

Additional ONDA lawsuits forced BLM to prohibit grazing along the Wild and Scenic Owyhee and Donner and Blitzen River corridors; required BLM to study the impacts to wilderness values of a land use plan governing management of 4.6 million acres of public land in southeast Oregon, as well as rangeland projects in places like Louse Canyon in the Owyhee Canyonlands, Beaty Butte and Juniper Mountain; halted grazing in key steelhead habitat in the John Day River basin; curtailed a widespread non-native seeding proposal near Jackies Butte in the Owyhee uplands; halted hundreds of oil and gas leases offered for sale without considering impacts to wilderness; and sped up BLM's assessment of rangeland conditions under the 1995 Federal Rangeland Health regulations. Time and again, our legal efforts have provided necessary protection for Oregon’s high desert gems.

For a summary of our major 2008 legal program accomplishments, click here. Previous years:  2007.