Cascadia Wildlands v. U.S. Bureau of Land Management

The federal district court for the District of Oregon vacated the environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM’s) Blue and Gold Harvest Plan, which identified 2,625 acres for silvicultural treatment in Douglas County, Oregon. The court also vacated the decision record for associated timber sales. The court found that BLM violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act by failing to demonstrate compliance with a binding directive in the applicable Resource Management Plan (RMP) to retain certain old-growth trees. The court also found that BLM failed to take a hard look at the Blue and Gold Harvest Plan’s effects on protected old-growth trees in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and that BLM failed to provide “a convincing statement of reasons” as to why the potential effects were insignificant. The court rejected, however, the plaintiffs’ contention that BLM failed to take a hard look at effects on carbon storage and climate change. The court found that BLM’s tiering of the analysis of these issues to the 2016 final environmental impact statement for the RMP was sufficient.

Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Oregon challenging the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM’s) Blue and Gold Harvest Plan, which the organizations alleged would include “up to eight years of logging on approximately 3,237 acres of BLM-administered lands” in Douglas County, Oregon. The organizations alleged that the project area included “large, contiguous, unlogged, mature and old-growth forest.” The plaintiffs asserted that logging would irreparably damage these “incredibly rare” forests by converting them into “plantations designed to be logged in perpetuity,” which would “eliminate carbon stores and exacerbate wildfire risk and hazards in the region.” They asserted claims under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). The plaintiffs claimed that BLM failed to ensure the project was consistent with the governing resource management plan’s directions regarding old-growth forests and endangered species. The plaintiffs also claimed that an environmental impact statement should have been prepared and that BLM failed to take a hard look at the project’s effects, including impacts on carbon storage, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change. The also alleged that BLM did not account for federal policy directives to calculate and disclose the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions associated with agency action and to conserve mature and oil-growth forests.

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