News

Advocates for the West filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to compel Mountain Home Air Force Base to release public records as required by law. The records relate to the Air Force’s proposal to expand and intensify military aircraft trainings over the Owyhee Canyonlands of southwestern Idaho, southeastern Oregon, and northern Nevada….

Advocates for the West filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for its failure to abide by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act to determine the prioritization and timing of environmental analyses for livestock grazing allotments on public lands. This has resulted in…

Mining company Perpetua Resources will pay the Nez Perce Tribe $5 million as part of a settlement agreement reached over ongoing pollution discharges into the headwaters of the East Fork South Fork Salmon River. The settlement resolves a 2019 Clean Water Act (CWA) lawsuit filed by Advocates for the West and the Tribe’s Office of Legal Counsel challenging the illegal discharge of arsenic,…

Advocates for the West won a lawsuit stopping livestock grazing authorizations in the Sonoran Desert National Monument. We represented Western Watersheds Project and the Sierra Club-Grand Canyon Chapter in the case. This is the second time a judge has determined that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) relied on faulty information to justify livestock grazing…

Advocates for the West filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service challenging the agency’s unlawful decisions to improve and expand four locations in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness for aircraft landings and to permit hobby pilots to use these sites for motorized recreation. We’re representing Wilderness Watch, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Friends of…

Advocates for the West filed a settlement agreement in federal court requiring the Forest Service to address the threat that domestic sheep grazing poses to nearly half of the wild bighorn sheep in Washington state from disease outbreaks. The settlement resolves litigation filed in November 2020 by Western Watersheds Project and WildEarth Guardians over the agency’s failure to…

Advocates for the West and our partners won another major victory to protect sage-grouse in southeastern Idaho. On June 2, a federal judge fully vacated a set of approvals by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) authorizing development of the Caldwell Canyon phosphate mine. Phosphate from the mine was slated to be used by Bayer…

Advocates for the West filed a lawsuit against the J.R. Simplot Company and Simplot Livestock Company for years of unlawful pollution discharges from the Grand View Feedlot into the Snake River in violation of the Clean Water Act (CWA).  Simplot’s Grand View Feedlot, located in the Snake River canyon about a one-hour-drive south of Boise, is one of…

Advocates for the West won a significant victory in defense of a pristine corner of Arizona’s Tonto National Forest just below the scenic Mogollon Rim. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Forest Service made “serious errors” in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in approving a plan to expand grazing…

This week, a federal judge ruled that in approving the Caldwell Canyon phosphate mine in southeast Idaho, the Bureau of Land Management failed to adequately assess environmental harms, including harms to vital habitat for the imperiled sage-grouse. The ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho determined that the agency violated the…