In a scathing June 2007 decision, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Idaho ruled that BLM violated federal law in multiple ways when it issued new regulations governing livestock grazing on 160 million acres of public lands across the West; and he permanently enjoined BLM from ever implementing the unlawful regulations.

As reported in our Fall 2006 newsletter, these regulations were adopted by the Bush Administration at the insistence of the livestock industry and Western politicians, including Idaho Senator Larry Craig.

The regulations would have gutted ecological requirements to protect public lands from grazing harm, especially streams and other sensitive areas. They also would have given livestock operators new ownership and control over public lands resources, including water rights and range projects.

But we won preliminary injunctions last fall to stop BLM from putting the regulations into effect temporarily, while we presented our legal challenges in court. Over the past year, we filed extensive briefs before the court detailing the ways in which BLM violated federal laws in adopting the regulations.

The June 2007 decision expanded upon and makes permanent our prior victories. Voicing sharp criticism of BLM’s rulemaking, Judge Winmill held that the agency violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act when it adopted the new regulations without adequate analysis of their likely environmental impacts – and without disclosing to the public the true impacts that the regulations would have in preventing BLM from properly managing livestock grazing on public lands.

The court was particularly troubled by BLM’s efforts to exclude the public from grazing management decisions across the West. Judge Winmill emphasized that public input cannot “be jettisoned simply to reduce the agency’s workload.” He also held that the Administration wrongly suppressed the views of its own scientists, who warned that the new regulations would cripple BLM’s ability to protect vital wildlife habitat and water quality from grazing damage.

Another recent victory also underscores the fact that BLM is not able to manage livestock grazing on public lands according to range science and ecological principles – thus allowing unacceptable damage to streams, upland habitats, soils, and fish and wildlife populations.

This win involves the 75,000 acre Nickel Creek allotment, which is part of BLM’s Owyhee Resource Area in southwestern Idaho – and which has stunning canyons, large upland habitats, and a host of important species including bighorn sheep, sage grouse, and redband trout.

In response to an earlier court injunction requiring updated analysis of grazing impacts across the Owyhees, BLM studied conditions on the Nickel Creek allotment and found extensive grazing degradation of streams, native plants, soils, and sensitive species habitats. But under pressure from the livestock permittees and their sympathizers in the agency, BLM refused to change grazing levels in response to these findings.

WWP filed an administrative appeal of this decision, resulting in a 15 day trial before an Administrative Law Judge in the Department of Interior. Senior Staff Attorney Todd Tucci and Executive Director Laird Lucas handled the trial, putting on WWP experts Dr. John Carter and Katie Fite to testify about the harms that grazing has caused to the public lands and natural resources of the Nickel Creek allotment – and to explain the modern scientific principles relating to the ecology of the area and grazing management. We also grilled BLM staff and the ranchers on cross-examination, to refute their claims and further prove our case.

In a 125-page decision released in September, the Administrative Law Judge ruled for us on virtually every scientific point we raised, holding that BLM acted unreasonably and contrary to modern range science in refusing to change grazing management in order to protect the public lands and resources. The judge instructed BLM to implement much more restrictive grazing – or no grazing at all – in order to be consistent with prevailing ecological and range science principles, and to protect the public lands of the Nickel Creek allotment from further damage.

In yet another court victory, Advocates for the West’s Senior Staff Attorney Todd Tucci won a recent ruling from Judge Edward Lodge of the U.S. District Court in Idaho, holding that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acted arbitrarily and contrary to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) when it rejected a WWP petition to list the pygmy rabbit as endangered or threatened.

Judge Lodge is not known for his environmental leanings, and typically rules against conservation groups that are assigned him in their cases. But even he was troubled by the Service’s refusal to follow the ESA in evaluating whether the pygmy rabbit deserves protection.

Small enough that an adult can fit into your hand, the pygmy rabbit is an adorable creature – and one that is deeply in trouble. Pygmy rabbits are sagebrush-dependent species, and have suffered serious loss of populations and habitats as the sagebrush ecosystem of the Interior West has been degraded and fragmented over recent decades. Livestock grazing, in particular, harms pygmy rabbits – both through direct impacts, like trampling their burrows; and indirectly, by degrading sagebrush and native grasses.

WWP’s Biodiversity Director Katie Fite spent several months compiling all available data on the plight of the pygmy rabbit, and presented her findings to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in a petition that amply established the species deserves ESA protection. But the Service simply rejected the petition as not containing adequate information to suggest that ESA listing might be warranted.

The Service’s rejection of the pygmy rabbit listing petition is just one more example of this Administration’s systematic effort to preventing the ESA from being applied to protect deserving species. Fortunately, Judge Lodge agreed with us that the Service misapplied the ESA in rejecting the petition, and ordered the agency to make a new decision within 90 days.

Advocates for the West has a strong track record of success in our legal actions on behalf of the conservation community. We work closely as partners with our clients to identify priorities, develop facts and science, and bring cases with strong legal merit to the courts.

But we often push the boundaries of environmental law, and sometimes we are assigned unfriendly judges. These factors mean we will lose cases now and again.

One recent loss was delivered by Judge Lodge in Idaho – the same judge who ruled for us in the pygmy rabbit case, discussed above. In another ESA listing case, he rejected our arguments that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service misapplied the facts and law when it refused to consider listing the Interior Mountain Quail as endangered or threatened. This is despite the fact that Interior Mountain Quail have been virtually exterminated from Idaho and eastern Oregon. The judge apparently bought the Service’s argument that healthier quail populations in the western Cascades means they should not receive ESA protection. We intend to appeal this ruling.

Another recent loss came from U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill – the judge who ruled for us in the BLM grazing regulations case, and in many other environmental cases. In late September, Judge Winmill denied our request for an injunction to prevent BLM from conducting a “prescribed burn” over 3200 acres in the Castlehead Lambert allotment in the Owyhees. BLM determined to undertake this project without any environmental review whatsoever, and despite the fact that the 47,000 acre Tongue Complex wildfire had just scorched parts of the same area in the Owyhees weeks before.

We only learned of BLM’s intent to start the burn a few days earlier, and rushed to court seeking to prevent soil erosion and cheatgrass invasions that typically are seen after these fires. We presented photographs and expert testimony that the Castlehead fire, in connection with the Tongue Complex fire, would likely result in soil erosion and cheatgrass invasions, which BLM has refused to study – or even acknowledge – thus violating the National Environmental Policy Act.

But in light of BLM’s accelerated schedule to light the fire given changing weather conditions, Judge Winmill had very little time to review our claims, and expressed his concern about the lack of time. Because courts typically must defer to agency scientific expertise, he followed that path here.

This decision illustrates how heavy a burden we must carry in challenging federal agency actions in court. We will only win when we can show a court that an agency disregarded the facts, ignored relevant science, or misapplied the law.