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ONDA has protected millions of acres of public land throughout Oregon as a result of winning or successfully settling more than 85 percent of our federal actions since 2001.
We hope this Q&A (interview conducted August 2018) helps you get to know Mac Lacy, our senior attorney, and to understand the important role he plays at ONDA. You’ll even find links to an original song and footage of Mac in the courtroom.
Badger
Badgers are generally nocturnal, but, in remote areas with no human encroachment, they are routinely observed foraging during the day. They prefer open areas with grasslands, which can include parklands, farms, and treeless areas with crumbly soil and a supply of rodent prey.
Badgers are born blind, furred, and helpless. Their eyes open at four to six weeks.
Latin name: Taxidea taxus
Bobcat
Found only in North America, where it is the most common wildcat, the bobcat takes its common name from its stubby, or “bobbed,” tail. The cats range in length from two to four feet and weigh 14 to 29 pounds. Bobcats mainly hunt rabbits and hares, but they will also eat rodents, birds, bats, and even adult deer.
Latin name: Lynx rufus fasciatus
Stewardship Fence Building Timelapse
As ONDA has grown, we’ve been able to cover more ground, both literally and figuratively. I spent a great deal of time early on trying to see as much of our field area as possible—exploring the Owyhee Canyonlands with then-wilderness coordinator Brent Fenty, the Malheur Wild and Scenic rivers with member Chris Christie, and Beaty Butte with founding board member Craig Miller. The ever-increasing breadth of our field-based work has been particularly impressive—from riparian restoration projects crucial to native trout recovery, to monitoring hundreds of thousands of acres of essential sagebrush habitat for the Greater sage-grouse. From our plucky but effective early days, to today’s well-organized but still nimble organization, I’ve been inspired by the power of ONDA’s grassroots enthusiasm and commitment.
I’m also deeply interested in issues of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in my country and my community—so I’m proud to be part of a newly-established committee at ONDA that is examining how our work for the desert can be enriched, and enriching to others, as we reach and involve a broader array of people and perspectives.
Legal action serves a number of purposes. When a neutral federal judge agrees that the government has not followed the law and something needs to be done about it, this legitimizes environmental complaints. When a hostile administration backs out of a treaty or guts an environmental regulation, legal action can roll back the rollbacks. Where government agencies are pressured by industry and other anti-conservation special interests, citizen enforcement is often the only meaningful enforcement. It can expose wrongdoing so that no one is above doing their part to keep our shared environment healthy for all. Whether you’re talking about protecting our environment or advocating for children and other vulnerable members of society, strategic legal action is very often the impetus for change.
One of my first cases for ONDA remains the Ninth Circuit’s leading decision on wilderness issues. In 2003, we challenged BLM’s refusal to consider whether its land use plans would affect wilderness values across eight million acres of public land from Fort Rock Valley to the Owyhee Canyonlands. The district court deferred to BLM, but, on appeal, the Ninth Circuit agreed with us. The court explained that because BLM has the authority to manage wilderness as part of its multiple-use mission, it has the obligation to study whether wilderness values are present and how a proposed plan or project should treat land with such values.
As a result, the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2012 issued a new wilderness manual, reinstating a formal inventory protocol for the first time since the George W. Bush Administration rescinded the 2001 manual in a back-room settlement with the State of Utah. BLM has since recognized literally millions of acres of wilderness-quality lands across the West—places like Oregon Butte, near the remote source of the West Little Owyhee River, where you can gaze across three states at once in a high-elevation, windswept, sagebrush landscape that seems to go on forever.
The current administration’s gutting of essential conservation policies and regulations is tremendously concerning. Just like it took us many years to undo the Bush Administration’s “no more wilderness” edict, it will take years to repair the damage currently being wrought by this administration.
By contrast, I’m more encouraged than ever by the willingness of citizens, including ONDA’s members and supporters, to get involved and make a difference. For example, hundreds and hundreds of hours of work went into the ONDA wilderness and road inventories that we’ve relied upon in the courtroom to secure an injunction that has prevented over 120 miles of non-existent routes from being turned into permanent new roads scarring Steens Mountain.
Even in the face of today’s threats to conserving our planet’s fragile and finite environment, a recent family visit to Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge was all I needed to re-charge and keep me inspired to continue this fight.
I listen to a lot of blues and jazz and rock, and a fair amount of hip-hop, R&B and soul. When it comes to guitar players and composers, I’ve always loved Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison. Some of the best live shows I’ve seen recently include Gary Clark, Jr., Omara Portuondo, Esperanza Spalding, SZA, and Kendrick Lamar.
My field area in Wisconsin happened to be the place Aldo Leopold wrote about in A Sand County Almanac. My research aimed to connect the Central Sands with similar wind-blown deposits in the upper Midwest where dunes have fluctuated between active and stabilized states as Earth’s climate changed over the course of the past fifteen-thousand years following the last ice age.
Certainly, the library research, field and lab work, and constant writing helped me along the path to practicing environmental law. Losing a complete first draft of my thesis into the cloud-less ether of pre-millennium computing taught me, if nothing else, a bit of perseverance and the utility of controlled breathing.
Two courses in particular at the University of Wisconsin really drew me into thinking more deeply about the relationship between people and the environment: Tom Vale’s course on how human activity shapes and changes patterns in vegetation and Bill Cronon’s ground-breaking course on American environmental history.
Get involved by volunteering and working with conservation groups and environmental lawyers. This will help you understand what kind of work you like doing and also build your network of public interest conservation connections.
As an undergrad, I worked in the law department at H.J. Heinz Company’s world headquarters in Pittsburgh. I split my time between Heinz’s sleek corporate offices on the 60th floor of the Steel Building downtown and a small law library in the company’s historic main plant in a neighborhood across the Allegheny River from the city. It was interesting, but I concluded by the end of that summer that patent, trademark, and corporate law was not for me!
While at Lewis & Clark Law School, I volunteered with ONDA and then won a stipend to work as ONDA’s law clerk the following summer. My experience working for Stephanie Parent, who represented ONDA at the time and was my first and most influential attorney mentor, set me up to hit the ground running when ONDA hired me after I graduated.
Volunteering in your areas of interest can help you find your way when school ends and life begins.
* A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
* The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration" by Isabel Wilkerson.
"I usually like to have one work of fiction and one of non-fiction going at any given time," says Mac.
From 2008 to 2017, ONDA and our partners worked tirelessly to communicate that Steens Mountain is an inappropriate place for industrial-scale energy development. We argued that the Interior Department had failed to adequately consider the effects on the Greater sage-grouse. In April 2017, the District Court vacated the project decision. Follow the link below to watch Mac present our case, ONDA vs. Sally Jewell.
Watch NowMac's article covering the intense and wide-ranging legal battles surrounding sage-grouse conservation for more than a decade appeared in the June-July 2018 issue of "The Federal Lawyer."
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