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GREAT FALLS, Mont.— Conservation groups sued the Bureau of Land Management today to challenge its final plans governing greater sage grouse management across 71 million acres of federal public lands in nine Western states.
Today’s lawsuit covers the dwindling species’ habitat in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming.
The Trump administration finalized the plans in December, stripping protections approved in 2015 by Western states and federal officials to prevent the need to list greater sage grouse as endangered. Those 2015 plans have failed to protect the imperiled greater sage grouse and its disappearing habitat.
“The Trump administration’s destructive, illegal plans could nail the coffin shut on our country’s incredible dancing birds unless the courts intervene,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s no scientific support for claims that these plans will save sage grouse, and no public support for them either.”
Today’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Montana, says the plans violate several federal laws by disregarding the best available science showing that expanded oil and gas and other development cause sage grouse populations to decline.
Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey found that most greater sage grouse breeding sites have a 50% chance of disappearing over roughly the next six decades if conditions remain unchanged. The changes to the sage grouse plans will make sagebrush habitat conditions worse.
Greater sage grouse were deemed eligible for protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2010 because of steep population declines.
Western Watersheds Project news release
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