Western Watersheds Project’s hard work has been well-rewarded with two very important victories in the last few weeks. In early February Chief Judge B. Lynn Winmill of the U.S. District Court for Idaho ruled that the Sawtooth National Forest had violated both the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act in authorizing grazing by domestic sheep on over 150,000 acres of public lands north of Ketchum, Idaho mostly located within the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. Perhaps the most important part of Judge Winmill’s decision is to require the Forest Service to take a close look at the site-specific capability of lands to support livestock grazing when making such an authorization. Up to now the agency has effectively ignored that legal requirement in order to avoid upsetting politicians and ranchers. The court’s decision will benefit listed chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout as well as Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and wolves. It will also will have ramifications well beyond central Idaho on additional millions of acres of Forest Service lands permitted for livestock use. Many thanks are due WWP’s lead attorney for the case, Laurie Rule. Please be sure and read Laurie’s article about the case in this issue of the Watersheds Messenger.

The second and more recent victory came in a ruling by Judge James H. Heffernan, an administrative law judge in the Department of the Interior. Judge Heffernan reversed a grazing authorization covering almost 500,000 acres issued by the Elko, Nevada Field Office of the Bureau Of Land Management. The Judge reversed the decision for numerous violations of the National Environmental Policy Act including failures to consider reasonable alternatives to protect sage grouse and Lahontan cutthroat habitat as well as failing to consider the cumulative impacts of over 150 miles of additional fencing proposed on the three allotments. Ironically the decision does not affect any ranchers directly since the permittee for this huge landscape is the largest gold mining company in the world: Barrick Goldstrike. Barrick is in the “ranching” business to acquire water rights and to prevent ranchers from complaining of the dewatering of the northern Nevada landscape by Barrick’s giant open pit gold mines. WWP is asking for the immediate cessation of livestock use on these three huge allotments pending the BLM bringing its decision into compliance with the law. A huge thanks is due to WWP’s Director of biodiversity, Katie Fite, and WWP’s lead attorney, Todd Tucci of Advocates For The West’s Boise office for their resilience and persistence especially in enduring a two week hearing in Elko.

Jon Marvel is executive director of WWP. He lives in Hailey, Idaho.