Groups push to block road access in Montana grizzly, trout habitat

Monique Merrill

(CN) — Environmental groups on Thursday urged a federal judge to toss the U.S. Forest Service’s amendment to a forest plan which they claim allows the agency an unconstrained ability to construct roads through grizzly bear and bull trout habitat.

“There is no question that forest roads harm grizzly bears and bull trout,” argued Patton Dycus, Earthjustice attorney representing the plaintiffs.

The Forest Service approved a programmatic amendment to the Bitterroot Forest Plan in 2023, removing a 1987 standard restricting road density and motorized access. The Bitterroot National Forest spans over 1.5 million acres of public land in west-central Montana and east-central Idaho. It encompasses the Sapphire and Bitterroot Mountains.

The plaintiffs are five environmental groups — Friends of the Bitterroot, Friends Of The Clearwater, Native Ecosystems Council, Wildearth Guardians and Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment — that sued the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service in 2024, accusing the agencies of violating environmental laws by failing to consider how road use would impact the two threatened species.

“With Amendment 40, the guardrails are off. There is nothing in the plan preventing the Forest Service from opening new roads and thus increasing the road-related harms to grizzly bears and bull trout,” Dycus said.

Specifically, the groups argued the agencies failed to consider the best available science, failed to consider the impact of roads on grizzly bears in and outside of their secure habitat and relied on a flawed biological opinion to conclude the amendment would not jeopardize grizzly bears.

The groups also argued the Forest Service violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to consult with Fish and Wildlife Service about threats to bull trout and bull trout critical habitat. Both grizzlies and bull trout are listed as threatened species under the act.

Prior to the amendment, the forest plan required the Forest Service to limit open road densities to less than one mile per square mile or two miles per square mile in areas with headwater streams.

The federal defendants argued the amendment should stand and pointed out that the amendment was made to a portion of the plan focused on elk habitat standards. That standard was originally intended to manage roads towards a certain percentage of elk habitat effectiveness in certain stream areas.

“The standard was based on outdated elk science,” argued Erika Furlong with the Justice Department. “We’ve heard a lot about grizzlies and a lot about bull trout today, but this was an elk standard.”

Plus, the agencies argued the standard was never workable in the first place, she said.

“Plaintiffs made an analogy that it was like a guardrail; well, defendants’ position is that far from a guardrail, it was actually sort of a pile of cones in the middle of the road that served as quite an obstruction to projects that would actually benefit the environment and reduce the number of roads,” Furlong argued.

The agencies also contended that the environmental groups had no evidence that removing the road density standard would result in an increase in open roads, arguing that changes to roads within the forest remain constrained by a number of factors.

The environmental groups responded that, regardless of the Forest Service’s reasoning behind removing the road density standard, the amendment still allows the agency to create new open roads. Roads displace grizzlies from their habitat and deliver sediment to bull trout streams, the groups argued.

Again, the federal agencies pushed back on the premise that the amendment will necessarily lead to more open roads and encouraged U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen, a Barack Obama appointee, to reject that premise.

“This is a chain of speculation that is not supported by the record,” Furlong said.

“The event which triggers the chain of events was Amendment 40, right?” Christensen asked.

The defendants responded that the amendment only concerns open roads and there is only a limited set of circumstances in which it could be applied.

Christensen did not indicate when he would rule.