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 arid lands and waterways receive the protection they so richly deserve.

Our legal efforts have played an important role in protecting Oregon’s desert lands and rivers. Significant ONDA legal victories over the years include:

Successfully removing livestock grazing from the Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge (1992), and the Donner and Blitzen (1997)and Owyhee (1999) Wild and Scenic River corridors.

Winning a precedent-setting case requiring BLM to study a land use plan's impacts to wilderness values across a 4.6 million acre landscape in the Owyhee country of southeast Oregon (2008).

Protecting against range projects that would impair wilderness values in places like Steens Mountain (2009), Juniper Mountain (2006, 2007), Louse Canyon in the Owyhee Canyonlands (2006), and Beaty Butte (2006). 

Protecting key steelhead habitat from chronic overgrazing in the John Day River basin (2008, 2009).

Curtailing a proposal to plant more than 60,000 acres of sagebrush steppe with non-native seed near Jackies Butte in the Owyhee uplands (2002). 

Halting hundreds of oil and gas leases offered for sale without considering impacts to wilderness (2007).

Speeding up BLM's assessment of rangeland conditions under the 1995 Federal Rangeland Health regulations (2005). 

Time and again, our legal efforts have provided necessary protection for Oregon’s high desert gems.

For a summary of our major 2009 legal program accomplishments, click here. Previous years: 2008, 2007.