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

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.