On Friday June 8, 2007 Chief Judge B. Lynn Winmill of the Federal Court for the District of Idaho awarded Western Watersheds Project a stunning victory in an Order overturning the Bush Administrationís grazing regulations for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) affecting over 160,000,000 acres of public lands in eleven western states.

Judge Winmill’s 52-page ruling said the BLM’s rule revisions would have loosened restrictions on grazing on millions of acres of public land nationwide, limited the amount of public comment the BLM had to consider and diluted the BLM’s authority to sanction ranchers for grazing violations.

“While the BLM justifies the changes as making it more efficient, the BLM was not their originator — it was the grazing industry and its supporters that first proposed them,” Winmill wrote.

“Past BLM regulations imposed restrictions on grazing and increased the opportunities for public input to reverse decades of grazing damage to public lands,” Winmill wrote. “Without any showing of improvement, the new BLM regulations loosen restrictions on grazing.”

“They limit public input from the non-ranching public, offer ranchers more rights on BLM land, restrict the BLM’s monitoring of grazing damage, extend the deadlines for corrective action, and dilute the BLM’s authority to sanction ranchers for grazing violations.”

Many of the revisions in the BLM’s grazing rules were contrary to the findings of a team of BLM scientists who reviewed the environmental impact of the rules. The scientists found that the new regulations would have a slow but long-term negative effect on wildlife and biological diversity and that they would harm upland and riparian habitats.

The scientists concluded that the changes would have a “very long-lasting adverse effect to the wildlife of the public lands of the West.”

The grazing regulations that have now been found illegal in this Court decision under three major federal statutes (NEPA, FLPMA and the Endangered Species Act) would have effectively returned the management of public lands managed by the BLM to the days before the Bruce Babbitt regulatory changes of 1995 that finally broke open the stranglehold of good-old-boy ranchers on public lands.

Thanks are due to the very hard work on this critically important case to WWPís Utah Director Dr. John Carter and WWP’s Biodiversity Director Katie Fite who were directly quoted in Judge Winmill’s Order.

WWP also received the best possible legal representation in the case from our legal counsel Laird Lucas, the executive director of Advocates For The West in Boise and Advocates attorneys Laurie Rule and Todd Tucci.

For a more thorough review of the this great win, please visit the WWP web site page

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