Suit says grazing, drilling rules threaten bird

Conservationists say federal rules that allow livestock grazing and oil and gas development across 25 million acres of public land in the West are illegal because they fail to acknowledge the harm being done to sage grouse. A lawsuit recently filed in federal court accuses the Bureau of Land Management of violating two major environmental laws and its own regulations by allowing commercial activities to continue on those lands in California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Utah. But in a switch in strategy, the environmentalists aren't asking a judge to immediately halt those operations. They want to talk, and they think they may have a willing listener in the new Obama administration. "What we are after is finding a way to do things differently than in the past and better manage these public lands into the future," said Laird Lucas, a lawyer for the Western Watersheds Project, which filed the suit. Since taking office, President Obama has distanced himself from several Bush administration policies on the environment and suspended some administrative orders Bush signed in the waning days of his term that could lead to the easing of protections for threatened wildlife on federal land. The change in administrations prompted the new approach from the Idaho-based environmental group that has spent much of the past eight years in court battling land-use rules adopted by the BLM and Forest Service...AP