Oregon Wild v. U.S. Forest Service

The federal district court for the District of Oregon upheld actions by the U.S. Forest and Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service authorizing continued livestock grazing on or around the Sycan River in Oregon. The area included recently designated critical habitat for the Klamath River bull trout, which had been designated as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Among the arguments rejected by the court was that the Forest Service’s analysis of potential impacts on the bull trout critical habitat in an informal biological assessment was inadequate because it did not fully analyze the cumulative effects of public land grazing with other activities taking place in the area or consider other factors such as climate change. The court said that the ESA imposed no duty on federal agencies to consider cumulative effects in informal consultation, and that the Forest Service therefore “had no obligation to consider cumulative effects at all, let alone in conjunction with the proposed action and climate change.”