Chronology of Success 2025

‘Winning for the West’

January 2025

  • Ninth Circuit Confirms Trump BLM Issued Hundreds of Oil and Gas Leases Illegally: Just days before the second Trump administration began, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a sweeping decision in “Phase One” of our longstanding litigation challenging Trump BLM oil and gas leasing in sage-grouse habitats. The Court affirmed our district court victory holding that BLM wrongly shortened public comment periods and environmental reviews of oil and gas lease sales under Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda for public lands, and ordered the leases continue to be suspended pending BLM’s compliance with environmental laws. The decision affects 677 leases covering 900,070 acres of sage-grouse habitats sold by BLM in 2019 in Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah.
  • Landmark Agreement Reached to Protect Point Reyes National Seashore (CA): In January 2025, we signed a landmark settlement with the National Park Service (NPS), the Nature Conservancy (TNC), and numerous ranchers to phase out almost all commercial dairy and ranching operations on the Point Reyes National Seashore in northern California. The product of more than two years of intensive mediation led by our Staff Attorney Lizzy Potter, the settlement provided for NPS to adopt a revised management plan for the National Seashore that retires lands from commercial ranching as TNC conducts private transactions with the ranchers over the next year and a half to buy out their lease interests. Representing Marin-based Resource Renewal Institute along with Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project, Advocates for the West initially sued in 2016 to force NPS to conduct its first-ever environmental analysis of ranching on Point Reyes and come up with a long-term management plan to protect its recreation and natural resource values, as the law requires. We sued again in 2022 after NPS, under the dictates of the Trump administration, approved ranching to continue indefinitely, in violation of the Point Reyes National Seashore legislation. The settlement resolves that lawsuit.

February 2025

  • Crooked River Instream Flows (OR): Representing WaterWatch of Oregon, our Staff Attorney Andrew Missel successfully defended against ranchers’ attempt to invalidate a water right issued by the Oregon Water Resources Department (OWRD) to ensure that flows in the lower Crooked River—all the way from Bowman Dam to Lake Billy Chinook—are protected for fish and wildlife. A state district court rejected the ranchers’ argument that OWRD lacked authority to issue the water right, but sent the matter back to OWRD to address a procedural issue

May 2025

  • Bighorn Sheep/Wishbone (CO): Senior attorney Laurie Rule won a major victory for bighorn sheep conservation when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the U.S. Forest Service unlawfully disregarded scientific findings and arbitrarily altered the findings of its disease “Risk of Contact” modeling when it approved domestic sheep grazing on the Wishbone Allotment within the Rio Grande National Forest near Creede, Colorado in 2018.

July 2025

  • Upper Willamette Salmon and Steelhead (OR): In July 2025, we won a conclusive victory in our Oregon federal court case involving eight U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dams and reservoirs in the Upper Willamette River basin that cause severe harm to Chinook salmon and steelhead by cutting off upstream spawning habitat and impairing downstream water quality and quantity. The Court issued final judgment affirming that many of the changes and actions we and our partners pursued are now part of a new long-term plan issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service that will govern dam and reservoir operations for decades to come.

August 2025

  • Victory to Protect Pollinators and Western Public Lands (OR): Oregon federal court entered final judgment confirming the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s (APHIS) legal duty to consider preventative measures—rather than a “spray first, ask questions later” approach—in its pesticide spraying program on millions of acres in 17 western states to kill native grasshoppers.