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 have once again won major victories in 2008. 

Owyhee Canyonlands and Malheur River Basin

In July, ONDA achieved one of its most enduring legal victories in its 20-year history. After more than five years of litigation, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a landmark decision in our favor, ruling in ONDA v. BLM, 531 F.3d 1114 (2008), that BLM must rewrite its land use plan for southeast Oregon. Overturning a district court decision upholding the plan, the court agreed with us that BLM wrongly refused to evaluate impacts to wilderness values throughout the 4.6 million acres of public lands covered by the challenged plan. 

The ruling will have a profound impact—not just in southeast Oregon, but throughout the West—on BLM’s management of the public lands it is charged with protecting. The court specifically rejected BLM’s disavowal of “the very idea of wilderness” as one of many resources and values for which the agency must manage. According to the court, “the BLM misunderstood the role of wilderness characteristics in its land use planning decisions.”  

Finding that the law unmistakably requires BLM to study impacts to a landscape’s wilderness character, the court vacated the plan and ordered BLM prepare a new plan. In its revised environmental review, BLM must study “whether, and to what extent, wilderness values are present in the planning area outside of existing [Wilderness Study Areas] and, if so, how the Plan should treat land with such values.”

The plan, the Southeastern Oregon Resource Management Plan (“SEORMP”), governs BLM’s management of about 4.6 million acres of public land, mostly in vast Malheur County. It is to guide BLM’s management of some of the most treasured landscapes in Oregon, including the Owyhee Canyonlands, for the next 20 years. The bulk of the lands to be managed under the plan are comprised of fragile high desert and sagebrush steppe.

Within this remote, wild area lies some of our nation’s most important roadless areas, including 1.3 million acres (beyond existing WSAs) found to possess statutorily-defined wilderness character in ONDA’s 2004 citizen wilderness inventory. The court’s ruling validates ONDA’s position that the plan was strongly biased toward the continuation of widespread livestock grazing and motorized access over all other uses and resource values—particularly wilderness, a fragile and finite resource whose very existence BLM did not want to even acknowledge.

In addition to its wilderness ruling, the court agreed with ONDA that BLM had not considered reasonable alternatives for off-road vehicle use. Less than 0.5% of the area is closed to damaging ORV use. In its analysis leading up to the plan, BLM refused to consider closing more than 0.8% of the planning area to ORVs. In fact, every alternative BLM considered would have further reduced the area currently closed to ORVs. Similarly, less than 2% of the area is currently off-limits to livestock grazing.

This remarkable decision will impact every single one of our lawsuits and administrative actions aimed at protecting Oregon’s desert wilderness. We expect to successfully settle our nearly identical challenge to the Lakeview land use plan, which is also now before the Ninth Circuit. We also are working in district court to extend the Ninth Circuit’s holding and legal analysis to our challenge of the land use plan for Steens Mountain and surrounding areas. There, BLM took ONDA’s citizen-generated wilderness report and sweepingly rejected it in an internal, closed-door review that BLM never released to the public during the planning process.

Other site-specific challenges in places like the North Fork Malheur River, and Louse Canyon in the West Little Owyhee River country, also will benefit. In those places, BLM has attempted to implement large-scale range projects without properly studying the impacts of those projects on wilderness values ONDA has identified in our reports. In 2008, we entered into stipulations with BLM under which the agency agreed not to implement most of these planned range projects while our litigation proceeded.

John Day River Basin

In May, ONDA achieved a major court victory in its ongoing efforts in the upper John Day basin aimed at improving grazing management in areas where threatened steelhead and bull trout depend on the streams for spawning, rearing and migratory habitat. After more than five years of litigation against the Forest Service and National Marine Fisheries Service (“NMFS”), a federal district judge in this latest round of litigation issued a preliminary injunction barring grazing in key areas of steelhead stream and riparian habitat on two major grazing allotments in the basin.

The enjoined allotments cover over 120,000 acres of public land and contain 92 miles of steelhead-bearing streams that ONDA had identified as containing particularly badly-degraded aquatic habitat. By the end of a single season of rest from grazing, heavily damaged creeks had already begun showing remarkable signs of initial recovery.

In his opinion, Chief Judge Haggerty found that ONDA is likely to prevail on the merits of several of its Endangered Species Act claims. Our claims include evidence of serious violations of the limit of allowable destruction of steelhead habitat from cattle-caused bank damage, and a general failure of the Forest Service’s management program to provide concrete means to ensure that grazing would not harm steelhead and their critical habitat. As with the Ninth Circuit’s SEORMP decision, this court’s ruling validates ONDA’s long-standing position that chronic overgrazing in the John Day basin has and continues to degrade threatened steelhead populations and habitat.  

In 2009, the case will proceed to a decision on the merits of ONDA’s claims. Simultaneously, the parties will explore settlement possibilities with the federal agencies and the permit holders. 

Meanwhile, in September 2008 a magistrate judge ruled that ONDA may introduce evidence we have collected in the field in order to prove our Endangered Species Act claims. The government had argued that ONDA is limited to using the evidence in the administrative record produced by the agency, notwithstanding that our volunteers and scientific experts have collected field data and photographs, over a period of more than seven years, showing the degraded condition of steelhead habitat on the forest. 

Chief Judge Haggerty's January 2009 decision upholding the magistrate’s ruling helps solidify a plaintiff’s right to present its own field evidence to support claims under the Endangered Species Act—and not be limited to the inadequate, often biased or flawed, evidence the agencies put forward in the administrative record for the court to review. 

Steens Mountain

In April, the Department of the Interior's Board of Land Appeals ("IBLA") granted ONDA's stay request, partially enjoining BLM's Travel Management Plan for Steens Mountain. The IBLA agreed with ONDA that BLM's decision to allow motorized vehicles on so-called "Obscure Routes" on Steens Mountain is likely illegal and would cause irreparable harm to the environment. BLM's decision would have allowed vehicles to travel on "routes" that the agency itself couldn't even identify on the ground. The stay order helps ensure against the threat of cross-country travel in Wilderness Study Areas.

In October, ONDA challenged a BLM to cut and burn juniper on more than 180,000 acres on Steens Mountain. Although ONDA agrees in principal that some juniper management is appropriate to restore ecosystem balance on Steens Mountain and other places in Oregon's high desert, this project includes treatment methods within 6 existing Wilderness Study Areas and several of ONDA's citizen-proposed WSAs that could significantly impair wilderness values in these places.

Fremont National Forest

In December, ONDA won in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yet again. This time, the court held that ONDA properly challenged a discrete set of final agency actions and that the district court must hear ONDA's case on the merits. This case challenges Forest Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service decisions allowing continued overgrazing along threatened bull trout and sucker streams on the Fremont National Forest. The court decision further cements the public's right to participate in a key decision-making process by which the Forest Service authorizes livestock grazing on national forest lands.

Energy Projects

Finally, an emerging trend in eastern Oregon's high desert is the push for development of sources of renewable energy. In 2008, we began to review potential pumped storage hydropower facilities, wind power facilities, geothermal facilities and other energy transmission corridors. ONDA recognizes the United States' urgent need to quickly and drastically change is current mode of energy consumption and production. At the same time, however, those proposing such facilities must work with the environmental, local and regulatory communities to ensure these projects are properly sited and developed. ONDA will work to ensure these facilities are responsibly sited to avoid sensitive habitat areas and wilderness quality roadless areas.

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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 2009. If successful, our work will continue to improve management on millions of acres of public land and along hundreds of miles of desert streams.