ONDA's litigation program is a key element in our ability to hold federal agencies accountable for managing public lands in accordance with the environmental laws meant to protect these special landscapes. In 2007, ONDA's legal program once again achieved great success.

Louse Canyon, West Little Owyhee Canyonlands

In February, as a result of legal pressure from ONDA, BLM agreed to halt 2007 rangeland project construction activities (including the 6-mile long Sacramento Hills Pipeline), within the Louse Canyon Geographic Management Area. The agency also agreed not to use of a number of such projects that already had been constructed the previous fall, until the merits of ONDA's lawsuit could be heard by the federal district court. The case was stayed during the remainder of 2007 while BLM went back and evaluated ONDA's wilderness inventory report for this half-million acre area in southeast Oregon. The LCGMA includes the West Little Owyhee Wild and Scenic River, vast expanses of important sagebrush steppe habitat, and tens of thousands of acres ONDA has recommended be protected as wilderness.

(Click map to view larger version.)

John Day and Malheur River Basins

On April 17, 2007, ONDA prevailed in the District of Oregon on almost every claim we raised in our challenge of the National Marine Fisheries Service's and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's 2006 biological opinions (“BiOps”) concerning grazing in threatened steelhead and bull trout habitat on the Malheur National Forest. Key rulings include:

o   The Court rejected the NMFS BiOps’ conclusion that steelhead critical habitat will not be adversely modified, finding NMFS “failed to evaluate whether short-term habitat degradation caused each grazing season will reduce the steelhead’s ability to survive and recover.” The Court also noted that Forest Service did almost no monitoring, and that it is not clear whether the agencies will enforce the grazing standards.

o   The Court rejected the NMFS BiOps’ conclusion that steelhead’s survival will not be jeopardized, finding that NMFS failed to consider any effects of grazing on the status of the species. 

o   The Court rejected the NMFS BiOps’ statement quantifying “take” (or damage to steelhead) for arbitrarily finding there is no take from grazing’s indirect impacts to habitat. 

o   The Court rejected as improperly toothless the FWS BiOp’s statement quantifying bull trout take.

This decision will have significant value in continuing to reign in excessive overgrazing that has long been the norm in key watersheds on the Malheur National Forest. In 2008, ONDA will continue to hold the Forest Service as well as NMFS and FWS accountable, in our challenge of the Forest Service’s 2007–11 grazing decisions and NMFS’s and FWS’s consultation documents concerning those new 5-year decisions.

Steens Mountain

In June 2007, the District of Oregon ruled in ONDA’s favor on our transportation plan claim in our Andrews-Steens Resource Management Plan (“RMP”) case. The court agreed that BLM’s 8-page appendix in the RMP did not satisfy the Steens Act’s requirement that BLM prepare a “comprehensive,” “integral” transportation plan for Steens Mountain’s “Cooperative Management and Protection Area.” Among other flaws, the plan failed to conduct basic route inventories and failed to consider or plan for non-motorized trails and recreation.

In 2008, ONDA already has challenged BLM’s new “Travel Management Plan,” which still fails to account for non-motorized uses, leaves nearly all of the 600 miles of routes on Steens Mountain open to motorized use, and would even designate as open new routes that cannot be identified on the ground, in existing Wilderness Study Areas. The district court’s June decision will help ONDA address this flawed transportation plan and encourage BLM to prepare a truly comprehensive plan that takes into account non-motorized uses, and closes obsolete, redundant, non-existent and resource damaging routes on the Steens.

Juniper Mountain-Hart Mountain-Beaty Butte

In June and July 2007, ONDA won two preliminary injunctions before the Department of the Interior’s Office of Hearings and Appeals, concerning BLM-proposed rangeland projects slated to occur within areas (East-West Gulches on Beaty Butte, and Juniper Mountain) ONDA has inventoried and found to possess outstanding wilderness values. Because BLM failed to properly consider the impacts of the projects on wilderness values, and because the agency offered no evidence to rebut the scores of photographs, GIS maps and other inventory information provided by ONDA, the Administrative Law Judge found that BLM likely violated NEPA. The decisions relied heavily on ONDA's success in 2006 in federal district court concerning an earlier permutation of the East-West Gulch Projects on Beaty Butte. These rulings further cement the fact that BLM must evaluate the impacts of its actions on wilderness values on the public lands, regardless of whether a given project is slated to occur within an existing Wilderness Study Area.

In Dec. 2007, ONDA successfully settled the East-West Gulch Projects appeal, with BLM agreeing to vacate its decision and prepare a new environmental analysis of the impacts of these projects on wilderness values. The agency also agreed not to undertake any road maintenance activities in ONDA's proposed WSAs until a new decision is issued.  

Through these and other cases, our Legal Defense Program will continue to build on our recent success in 2008. If successful, our work will improve management on millions of acres of public land, and along hundreds of miles of desert streams.