BOISE, Idaho – A judge has refused to dismiss and break apart a sweeping lawsuit accusing federal land managers of giving livestock grazing and energy development priority over protecting sage grouse habitat across millions of acres of public land in six western states.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge B. Linn Winmill marks an initial victory for the Idaho-based Western Watershed Project in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land management. The conservation group is challenging 18 BLM land use plans covering more than 25 million acres in Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Montana and northern California.
In a lawsuit filed last year in Boise, the group accused the agency of violating environmental laws and its own policies in the management plans. Specifically, the lawsuit claims that at the direction of the Bush administration, federal managers failed to consider a no-grazing option and or the cumulative effects of grazing and climate change on sage grouse and its dwindling habitat.
Last month government lawyers, joined by members of the Wyoming livestock and petroleum industry, asked Winmill to dismiss the lawsuit or split it apart to be argued separately in federal courts in each state.
Government lawyers argued that the court in Boise lacks jurisdiction over challenges of policy developed in other states and that keeping case consolidated undermines the local public input used to craft each of the 20-year plans.
Winmill dismissed that notion he lacked jurisdiction to settle environmental claims in other states, citing a recent example of how a federal judge in Montana has handled lawsuits over delisting wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
“Resolution of environmental actions often affects areas far outside the judicial district of the resolving court,” Winmill wrote.
The judge did dismiss challenges to two BLM plans, one for the Pocatello District in southeast Idaho and the other in the Kemmerer District in southwest Wyoming. Neither plan has been officially approved, so legal challenges to them are premature, Winmill ruled.
The case is one of several filed in recent years by Western Watershed on behalf of the sage grouse, a chicken-sized bird whose numbers across the West have dwindled significantly in recent decades.
“I think this shows the judge recognizing that the BLM needs to look at the sage grouse on a West-wide basis,” said Laird Lucas, a lawyer for the group. “This is a big-picture lawsuit that tries to force the BLM to take a big-picture view.”
Government scientists say as many as 16 million sage grouse lived in western states in the early 1800s, thriving in sagebrush stands stretching from Kansas to Nevada and northward into Canada.
Conservationists and biologists attribute the population drop to loss of habitat from urban and energy development, wildfires, the spread of invasive weeds, global warming and livestock grazing.