Western Watersheds Project v. U.S. Bureau of Land Management

The federal district court for the District of Arizona found that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) failed to take the hard look required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it reviewed a resource management plan that allowed livestock grazing on portions of the Sonoran Desert National Monument. The court found that BLM arbitrarily relied on a “two-mile benchmark” to forecast where grazing would occur and failed to consider the impacts of fencing off certain areas. The court rejected other NEPA arguments, including the plaintiffs’ contention that BLM did not adequately analyze how climate change would exacerbate the impacts of grazing. The court said the plaintiffs cited no authority requiring specific disclosures regarding the impacts of drought on biological resources, that BLM’s environmental assessment acknowledged that climate change and drought could negatively impact Monument resources, and that no more was required of BLM at the programmatic level. The court also rejected a Federal Land Policy and Management Act claim as unripe and concluded that BLM had abided by the National Historic Preservation Act.

A lawsuit filed in the federal district court for the District of Arizona alleged that the environmental review for BLM’s revised livestock grazing analysis for the Sonoran Desert National Monument Resource Management Plan failed to address problems with prior analysis identified by the court in an earlier case. The plaintiffs alleged that BLM’s new decision violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the National Landscape Conservation System Act, NEPA, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Among the alleged shortcomings in the NEPA review was an alleged failure to analyze how proposed grazing, combined with the impacts of drought, climate change, and other factors would affect the Monument’s biological and cultural objects.