Yesterday, as a result of our lawsuit, a federal court in Idaho suspended new drilling and fracking on 605 federal oil and gas leases spanning 403,820 acres of greater sage-grouse habitat in Wyoming and Montana.
Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush ruled that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) violated federal law by failing to justify its refusal to defer leasing in priority greater sage-grouse habitat, failing to provide baseline data about the bird’s populations in the lease areas and failing to analyze site-specific and cumulative impacts to the bird.
Wednesday’s order is the second ruling flowing from a 2018 lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s failure to rigorously evaluate potential harms to greater sage grouse from oil and gas leasing and extraction. The bird’s population has declined precipitously and has become the focus of nationwide conservation efforts. A 2020 order from the same suit voided 1 million acres of leases and rejected a policy slashing public participation in leasing decisions.
Some of the Wyoming leases sold were in the nation’s highest-density sage grouse concentration areas, including the “Golden Triangle” in the Upper Green River Valley and the northern Red Desert. Some of the leases also would have authorized gas field development across the recently discovered Red Desert to Hoback mule deer migration corridor, considered the longest land mammal migration in the lower 48 states.
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