## Facts

- Conservation organizations challenged Forest Service land and resource management plans for the Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests in northern Wisconsin.
- The plans authorized, at a programmatic level, timber harvesting, road construction or reconstruction, and creation of wildlife openings, and were accompanied by environmental impact statements (EISs).
- Plaintiffs alleged the Forest Service violated the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and NFMA’s implementing “diversity” regulations.
- Plaintiffs urged that modern conservation biology required preserving large, contiguous habitat blocks and managing “biological diversity” at an ecosystem scale.
- The Forest Service used management indicator species (MIS), monitoring, and population-viability-related techniques, and declined to adopt plaintiffs’ preferred conservation-biology framework.
- The district court found the claims justiciable but granted summary judgment to the Forest Service on the merits.

## Issues

1. Whether the plaintiffs had Article III standing and whether a plan-level challenge to forest-wide management plans (as opposed to site-specific projects) was ripe for review.
2. Whether NFMA and its implementing regulations required the Forest Service to manage for biological diversity using the conservation-biology approach urged by plaintiffs or to maintain specified old-growth forest communities.
3. Whether the EISs satisfied NEPA’s requirement to take a “hard look” at environmental effects and consider reasonable alternatives, including a conservation-biology-based alternative.
4. Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), how much deference courts owe to the Forest Service’s selection among competing scientific methodologies.

## Decision

- The court held plaintiffs had standing based on alleged recreational, aesthetic, and environmental injuries and that the plan-level claims were ripe because the diversity-related aspects of the plans were as concrete as they would become.
- The court affirmed summary judgment for the Forest Service, holding the challenged plans and EISs did not violate NFMA, NEPA, or implementing regulations.
- The court held NFMA’s diversity requirements and regulations did not mandate any single analytical method and did not require adoption of plaintiffs’ conservation-biology framework.
- The court held the Forest Service’s reliance on MIS and related tools, and its stated reasons for declining plaintiffs’ approach, were within its discretion and not arbitrary or capricious under the APA.
- The court rejected the argument that 36 C.F.R. § 219.27(g) imposed a specific substantive requirement to maintain old-growth in the amount or configuration plaintiffs demanded.

## Legal Principles

- Programmatic forest plans may be judicially reviewable when the asserted injury stems from the overall plan and the plan’s challenged provisions are sufficiently final and concrete.
- NFMA’s obligation to provide for diversity of plant and animal communities is a general standard that grants the Forest Service substantial discretion in method and implementation unless regulations impose specific duties.
- NFMA regulations requiring identification and monitoring of MIS do not compel a broader conservation-biology methodology when the regulatory text does not prescribe it.
- NEPA requires informed decisionmaking and disclosure through a “hard look,” not adoption of any particular scientific theory or the elevation of environmental considerations over other lawful management objectives.
- Under the APA, courts generally defer to agency technical judgments and will not select among reasonable competing scientific approaches absent arbitrariness or failure to provide a reasoned explanation.

## Conclusion

The Seventh Circuit upheld the Forest Service’s forest-wide management plans and EISs, concluding that plaintiffs could challenge the plans directly but that NFMA’s diversity provisions and NEPA did not require the agency to employ plaintiffs’ preferred conservation-biology methods or specific old-growth prescriptions, and that the agency’s scientific choices were adequately explained and lawful under deferential APA review.


Sierra Club v. Marita, 46 F.3d 606 (7th Cir. 1995)