## Facts

- The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) adopted a resource management plan governing roughly 4.5 million acres of public land in southeastern Oregon for long-term multiple use, including livestock grazing and off-road vehicle (ORV) travel.
- Because adoption of a land-use plan is a major federal action, BLM prepared an environmental impact statement (EIS) and issued a record of decision approving the plan.
- Environmental organizations submitted comments asserting the plan would significantly affect lands with “wilderness characteristics” (roadless, natural areas with opportunities for solitude or primitive recreation), including lands not designated as wilderness study areas (WSAs).
- BLM limited its wilderness-focused analysis largely to existing WSAs and declined to conduct or consider an updated inventory of non-WSA lands with wilderness characteristics.
- After BLM rejected the administrative protest, the organizations conducted a field inventory and submitted information indicating over 1.3 million acres in the planning area possessed wilderness characteristics but were not WSAs.
- BLM did not revise the plan or supplement its NEPA analysis to address the submitted inventory.
- The organizations sued, alleging violations of NEPA and FLPMA; the district court upheld the plan and EIS, and the organizations appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether NEPA required BLM to analyze the plan’s impacts on lands with wilderness characteristics that were not designated as WSAs.
2. Whether BLM violated NEPA by relying on outdated or incomplete wilderness information and by disregarding credible new inventory information submitted before the plan was finalized.
3. Whether the EIS inadequately analyzed environmental impacts and reasonable alternatives for livestock grazing and ORV use.

## Decision

- The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court in relevant part and remanded.
- The court held the EIS failed NEPA’s “hard look” requirement by not analyzing the environmental significance and plan impacts of non-WSA lands with wilderness characteristics.
- The court held BLM’s refusal to meaningfully consider the newer, detailed inventory information was inconsistent with NEPA’s requirement for high-quality information and scientific integrity.
- The court held the EIS’s treatment of grazing and ORV management was inadequate, including its analysis of impacts and the range of reasonable alternatives.

## Legal Principles

- NEPA requires an agency to take a “hard look” at all significant environmental aspects of a proposed action and to disclose that analysis to the public.
- An EIS must analyze significant environmental resources affected by a plan even when another statute does not impose a separate, ongoing substantive designation program for those resources.
- NEPA requires agencies to use high-quality information and maintain scientific integrity; an agency must give a reasoned response to credible, timely new information relevant to environmental impacts.
- An EIS must analyze a reasonable range of alternatives and cannot give merely superficial treatment to options that would materially reduce major environmental effects.

## Conclusion

The Ninth Circuit required BLM to redo key parts of its NEPA analysis for the southeastern Oregon land-use plan because the EIS did not address non-WSA wilderness characteristics using current, credible information and did not adequately evaluate grazing and ORV impacts or reasonable alternatives.


Or. Nat. Desert Ass’n v. Bureau of Land Mgmt., 531 F.3d 1114 (9th Cir. 2008)