Chronology of Success 2024

‘Winning for the West’

January 2024

• New Drilling in Sage-Grouse Habitats Blocked: Advocates for the West won landmark victories
  in February 2020 and June 2021 in our sweeping case challenging thousands of Trump-era oil
  and gas leases in sage-grouse habitats. Our wins held unlawful more than one-quarter of all
  Trump BLM oil and gas leases issued in the lower 48 states, covering over a million and a half
  acres of sage-grouse habitats. In January 2024, we won a ruling denying an oil company’s request to drill new wells on one of the leases covered by our wins, and blocking BLM from approving new drilling on those leases through permit extensions.

May 2024

• Stibnite Mine Air Permit Reversed (ID): In May 2024, Staff Attorney Bryan Hurlbutt won an interim victory in our ongoing fight to stop Perpetua Resources’ proposed Stibnite Gold Mine on the edge of Idaho’s Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness and within the aboriginal homelands of the Nez Perce Tribe. The Idaho Board of Environmental Quality issued a decision invalidating Perpetua’s air pollution permit for the proposed mine, finding that the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) failed to follow Idaho air pollution rules designed to protect people from exposure to toxic and carcinogenic pollutants when it issued the permit. The permit is now remanded back to DEQ for further proceedings.
• “Lands Between” Oil and Gas Leases Vacated (UT): Located between Canyons of the Ancients and Bears Ears National Monuments, the “Lands Between” region in southern Utah is by far the densest archaeological area open to oil and gas leasing on public lands in the United States, home to tens of thousands of archaeological sites considered sacred to many Native American peoples. After our prior rounds of challenges forced BLM to suspend and reevaluate the leases, the agency issued a decision in May 2024 cancelling 25 of the 28 parcels, totaling more than 40,296 acres.

June 2024

• Snake River Clean Water Act Enforcement (ID): The Snake River in southern Idaho is threatened by ongoing agricultural pollution, including from Simplot Corporation’s Grand View feedlot. One of the largest feedlots in the country, with a capacity of up to 150,000 cattle and generating nearly 50,000 tons of manure each year, Simplot’s Grand View feedlot discharges livestock waste to the Snake River, yet Simplot lacks any Clean Water Act permit regulating its discharges. So we sued in May 2023 to require a permit. In June 2024, we won an initial victory when the federal court denied Simplot’s motion to dismiss and allowed our lawsuit to proceed.

July 2024

• US Supreme Court Upholds Suction Dredge Mining Victory: In July 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court denied anti-federal gold miner Shannon Poe’s petition to review our 2023 U.S. Court of Appeals victory holding that Poe violated the Clean Water Act when he dumped suction dredge mining waste into the South Fork Clearwater River without a required pollution permit, and requiring Poe to pay a $150,000 fine. Staff Attorney Bryan Hurlbutt led this litigation for Idaho Conservation League through victories in the district and appellate courts.

August 2024

• Sweeping Victory in Rangelands Pesticides Case: Our Oregon Staff Attorneys Andrew Missel, Hannah Goldblatt, and Lizzy Potter won a sweeping victory against the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) over the agency’s pesticide spraying on millions of acres in 17 western states to kill native grasshoppers and Mormon crickets. An Oregon federal court judge issued a decision siding with us on all claims that we pursued, holding that APHIS failed to adequately consider alternatives to the widespread use of pesticides. Greater sage-grouse, monarch butterflies, western bumblebees, and other species inhabiting western lands are already in steep decline and extremely vulnerable to harm from APHIS’s pesticide spraying.

September 2024

• Court Ruling Halts 5,000-well Converse County Oil and Gas Project: In a case led by Boise Staff Attorney Sarah Stellberg, we won a summary judgment ruling from the D.C. federal district court holding that BLM failed to assess likely groundwater impacts from a massive Wyoming oil/gas field development project, called Converse County, which would drill 5,000 new wells in the Powder River basin. The court halted further development of the project wells while the parties brief appropriate remedies.

October 2024

• Caldwell Canyon Mine Settlement Reached (ID): Our Staff Attorney Sarah Stellberg reached a major settlement agreement with mining company P4 that will result in millions of dollars in
  payments and other significant measures to benefit the conservation of sage-grouse and other wildlife. P4—a subsidiary of Bayer AG, formerly Monsanto—agrees to contribute more than $5 million to a trust fund for sage-grouse habitat restoration and conservation, more than $2.4 million to acquire land to protect wildlife habitat connectivity, and $300,000 for sage-grouse population surveys, along with operational restrictions of its Caldwell Canyon phosphate mine in southeast Idaho to minimize the mine’s impact on sage-grouse.

December 2024

• Settlement in West-wide BLM Grazing Management Lawsuit: In September 2023, led by Senior Attorney Laurie Rule, Advocates for the West filed a sweeping lawsuit in D.C. federal court, challenging the Bureau of Land Management for its widespread delinquency in assessing environmental conditions and addressing resource damage caused by overgrazing across vast stretches of the American West. A settlement was reached in December 2024 after the agency agreed to issue new policy guidance prioritizing environmental analysis on grazing allotments containing important natural and cultural resources and imperiled species, including sage-grouse habitat and allotments where domestic sheep and bighorns overlap.
• Big Creek Airstrips, Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness (ID): At more than 2.3 million acres, the Frank Church Wilderness is the largest contiguous Wilderness in the lower 48 states. In June 2023, we filed suit to challenge the Forest Service’s decisions to maintain four unlawful airstrips in the Big Creek drainage within the Wilderness, which are used by hobby pilots. The Big Creek area is popular for hikers, backpackers, and river rafters, and provides important habitat for a wide variety of native wildlife, all impacted by this aircraft intrusion in Wilderness. The Forest Service has documented that a person in the Big Creek area—and the wildlife there—can often encounter up to 30 low-flying airplanes in a single day. In December 2024, after argument presented by our new Staff Attorney Andrew Hursh, the U.S District Court rejected State of Idaho objections and approved our settlement with the Forest Service to close the airstrips to all but emergency use and monitor them moving forward.