February 14, 2013 — U.S. Magistrate Judge Ron Bush ruled in our favor on all 4 challenged decisions allowing the U.S. Forest Service to forgo conducting environmental analysis on 43 grazing allotments in Idaho, Wyoming and Utah.
In 2010, Region 4 of the Forest Service renewed grazing permits for hundreds of allotments without conducting any environmental analysis despite harm from grazing to many special resources.
This case originally challenged ten decisions for allotments in Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming within the Greater Yellowstone, Wind River Mountains, and southern Utah desert ecosystems. Grazing on these allotments proved to be harmful to imperiled species such as grizzly bears, wolves, lynx, bighorn sheep, great gray owls, sage-grouse, pygmy rabbits, Columbia spotted frogs, boreal toads, and yellowstone cutthroat trout, as well as the beautiful and highly used Wind River and High Uinta Wilderness areas of Wyoming and Utah. Yet the Forest Service continued to allow grazing to occur without conducting a thorough environmental analysis.
This case is a companion to our similar winning case in California challenging grazing decisions from Region 5 that the Forest Service has excluded from any environmental analysis. To read more about that case, go to Western Watersheds Project et al. v. U.S. Forest Service, case no. 08-1460-PJH.