Through our Sagesteppe Defense Program, ONDA implements rigorous, strategic and thoughtful enforcement of environmental laws to safeguard Oregon’s deserts. Employing the full range of legal tools, we work to hold federal land management agencies accountable, ensuring that Oregon’s desert lands and waterways receive the protection they deserve. Following the long tradition of success our legal efforts have achieved in protecting Oregon’s high desert, we once again won major victories in 2010. 

John Day River Basin

For a fourth successive year, federal court orders protected native steelhead trout in the John Day River basin. In June 2010, the district court agreed with ONDA that the Forest Service's grazing plan for public lands covering more than 300 miles of critical steelhead habitat violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Forest Management Act. In December, the court barred livestock grazing harmful to endangered steelhead on more than a quarter-million acres of public land on the Malheur National Forest. The court also ordered the Forest Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to reconsider the effects of the agencies' grazing plan on native steelhead streams before grazing can resume. 

Owyhee Canyonlands and Malheur River Basin

In 2008, ONDA achieved one of its most enduring legal victories in its 20-year history when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with ONDA that BLM wrongly refused to study impacts to wilderness values when it wrote a plan to manage 4.6 million acres of public land in southeast Oregon. In September 2010, the parties finalized a settlement to close this important case. Among other things, BLM will re-inventory these lands for wilderness characteristics. The agency’s work will include finally evaluating ONDA’s citizen wilderness report. Presented to BLM in 2004, the ONDA Report documents some of our nation’s most important roadless areas, including 1.3 million acres (beyond existing WSAs) found to possess wilderness character as defined by Congress in the Wilderness Act of 1964. The settlement also applies to another 3.2 million acres of land goverened by the Lakeview land use plan. 

In another victory for wilderness and wildlife, BLM in 2010 finally withdrew or replaced the last of several ill-conceived grazing, vegetation treatment, and range project decisions in the North Fork Malheur watershed. BLM’s decision follows several years of litigation in which ONDA has taken BLM to task for broad-scale grazing plans that failed to protect wilderness, relied on significant new fencing and water development projects to maintain unsustainably high grazing levels, and would have increased grazing pressure in key sage grouse strongholds.

Beginning in 2006, ONDA and our partner Western Watersheds Project filed two major lawsuits challenging BLM grazing plans for the 530,000-acre Louse Canyon Geographic Management Area (“GMA”) and the 237,000-acre North Fork Malheur GMA. BLM prepared the plans after it discovered significant violations of ecological standards in these watersheds.  Under its grazing regulations, BLM was required to make immediate changes to ensure “significant progress” toward achieving the failed standards.

Both plans relied on extensive networks of barbed-wire fences and water developments intended to lure cattle out of riparian areas, springs and remaining wet meadows. Neither reduced the overall amount of grazing. In its environmental analyses, BLM failed to properly study impacts to wilderness values and sagebrush habitat. This included refusing even to acknowledge ONDA’s 2004 citizen wilderness inventory report.

After filing our lawsuits, a couple important things happened. First, based on the strength of our legal claims, we achieved a series of stipulations with BLM under which the agency agreed not to build most of the planned rangeland projects. We renewed these stipulations each year through 2009. Through these agreements, we were able to stave off dozens of miles of fences and pipelines that would have sliced through what was otherwise roadless, largely unfragmented, wilderness-quality sagebrush habitat. (In early 2011, the district court agreed that these stipulations were important enough that they conferred "prevailing party" status on ONDA.)

Second, BLM in 2007 undertook a field inventory in the LCGMA to assess ONDA’s wilderness report. In 2008, BLM released a report documenting that it agreed with 112,000 of the 138,000 acres of wilderness-quality land ONDA identified. The agency has indicated it will revisit this issue in the NFMGMA as well.

In 2009 and 2010, BLM finally bowed to the ONDA legal pressure, withdrawing or replacing each of the several grazing and range project decisions that collectively made up the GMA plans. Although it is our litigation that has caused the agency to rethink its plans, BLM’s recent actions also reveal a calculated legal strategy. By pulling the challenged, legally vulnerable decisions, BLM moves the target, attempting to evade having a judge actually rule on the legality of the plans. 

While we have been highly successful in so far protecting against plans that were bad for sage grouse and bad for wilderness, we also recognize that the battle is far from over. ONDA and WWP will be watching closely in 2011 as BLM unveils new plans for these important landscapes.

Steens Mountain

BLM agrees to close illegal roads on Steens Mountain

BLM agreed in August 2010 to close and rehabilitate the 28 miles of roads it had illegally constructed and maintained during the summer of 2009 in fragile, largely unfragmented sagebrush habitat on a protected area on Steens Mountain. ONDA had filed suit in July 2009 after discovering that BLM had widened and built roads, ripped ancient juniper trees out by the roots and bulldozed native plants and sagebrush habitat in this congressionally protected area in southeast Oregon. The federal judge assigned to the case adopted the parties’ interim agreement.

ONDA field surveys showed that this was one of the most serious instances of purposeful damage to wilderness and ecological values on public lands ONDA has ever seen in Oregon’s high desert. BLM’s actions threaten to establish illegal driving on the iconic desert mountain, destroy proposed and existing wilderness areas, fragment critical wildlife habitat and open the mountain to weed infestations. In fact, the damage was so severe, and violations of law so astounding, that BLM itself called in an outside team to investigate what went wrong on the Burns District.

The BLM project, undertaken without any environmental study or public involvement, widened and built roads on 28 miles of primitive or previously non-existent routes on Steens Mountain. The routes travel through the Blitzen River Wilderness Study Area (WSA) and a citizen-proposed wilderness area. BLM even extended some roads into the protected Steens Mountain Wilderness Area and the Donner und Blitzen Wild and Scenic River corridor.

BLM pushed over live juniper trees with bulldozers, pulling them out of the ground by their roots where the trees were in the way of the new route. BLM bulldozed large amounts of rocks and soil to the sides of the new route, including into the WSA. Most of the routes were doubled in width and converted from primitive two-track paths to bladed, contoured roads.

In its own fact-finding report, BLM documented that in addition to not providing any public notice of the project, it failed to prepare any road design plans or specific protective stipulations for the project. Neither did BLM evaluate whether each of the 35 “Best Management Practices” established in the land use plan for travel management were implemented. And BLM did not evaluate whether the road work was consistent with the maintenance level assigned by the land use plan and Travel Management Plan (TMP) to the routes at issue. Earlier this year, ONDA filed a separate lawsuit challenging BLM’s unlawful TMP (a case it later won, in April 2011).

The construction violates a federal law passed by Congress in 2000 prohibiting building new vehicle routes within a 428,000 acre protected area on Steens Mountain, as well as provisions under at least seven other federal laws intended to protect Wilderness areas, Wilderness Study Areas and wild and scenic rivers, and requiring environmental study and public involvement prior to any ground-disturbing project.
Under the interim agreement, BLM also agreed to cancel plans to develop a natural spring near the Wilderness area, and to delay still other plans for more extensive spring developments and fencing within the Wilderness Study Area. Those projects would require extensive road upgrades similar to the construction at issue here.

The Northern Great Basin

Greater Hart-Sheldon Conservation Fund Established

In July 2010, ONDA signed an agreement with Ruby Pipeline LLC that will fund protection for species and habitat in the vast area around the Hart Mountain and Sheldon National Wildlife Refuges. It is one of two agreements under which the natural gas pipeline company will donate more than $20 million over the next decade to preserve lands and wildlife habitat and retire grazing permits near the pipeline’s route. The Greater Hart-Sheldon Conservation Fund will create restoration and conservation opportunities in critical sage grouse and pronghorn habitat in the 5 million acres within and surrounding the two Refuges.

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Through these and other cases, our Legal Defense Program will build on our recent success and we will continue to expand our litigation efforts in 2011. If successful, our work will continue to improve management on millions of acres of public land and along hundreds of miles of desert streams.