Monique Merrill

(CN) — The question of whether the expansion of cattle grazing on public lands near Yellowstone National Park will endanger grizzly bears took center stage in Montana federal court Tuesday.

The case centers on the Forest Service’s authorization and expansion of cattle grazing on public land to the north of Yellowstone National Park. The nonprofit conservation group Western Watersheds Project accuses the Forest Service of foregoing the necessary analysis required under federal environmental law.

“This is a special place and rugged landscape that remains largely wild,” Matthew Bishop, attorney for the group, said during an oral argument before U.S. Magistrate Judge Kathleen DeSoto on Tuesday morning. “It’s also an area very important for grizzly bear conservation.”

At issue are six allotments of land in the Custer-Gallatin National Forest’s Absaroka Mountains. Three of the allotments have been used for cattle grazing for over 100 years, but the decision authorizes additional acreage and a prolonged season. The other three are vacant currently, but the agency may permit future grazing.

In 2021, the Forest Service issued an environmental assessment as required under the National Environmental Protection Act, authorizing the expansion of the grazing allotments.

“At the time that decision was made there was and remains a significant escalation in human-caused grizzly mortality in the Greater Yellowstone, including from livestock grazing,” Bishop said.

The Forest Service pointed out that successful recovery efforts have increased the grizzly bear population.

“This increase in grizzly bear population and disbursement has caused conflict with livestock and humans to increase as well,” Krystal-Rose Perez, attorney for the federal defendants, said.

The Forest Service considered the increased risks of potential conflicts and concluded there wouldn’t be a significant impact when it issued the environmental assessment, Perez said.

Western Watersheds argued that the Forest Service neglected to take a “hard look” at the effects to grizzly bears and relied on an outdated standard ignoring the current conditions and cumulative effects of the decision.

The Forest Service argued the impacts were considered and the environmental assessment is intended to be brief to be understandable to the public, drawing questioning from the judge.

“How concise is too concise?” DeSoto asked, noting that she understands the intent of the document is to summarize agency decisions. “There’s a point at which an EA becomes so concise as to be devoid of any information, and when I read the cumulative effects section here, I’m concerned about that.”

The conservation group argued that ongoing activities in the area and other issues, like the disruption of bear connectivity, are absent from the document.

The Forest Service pushed back on that argument.

“While this is the first time they are doing NEPA analysis, the Forest Service has complied with substantive environmental laws for decades now,” Perez said.

Further, Perez argued, vacating the environmental assessment would mean the conservation measures outlined in the plan would also be vacated, such as invasive grass control and minimizing damage to streams.

“We certainly wouldn’t want to vacate any positive repairing restoration efforts,” Bishop said.

DeSoto asked the conservation group how the court should reckon with navigating a possible vacatur.

“What scalpel can I use, under your theory, to allow some of the benefits, including the invasive grass issues and things like that, but not allow the change?” DeSoto asked.

Bishop told the court the conservation group would request a partial vacatur limited to cattle grazing.

“We certainly feel like the significance of the errors, in terms of overlooking this potential effect, far outweighs any disruptive consequences,” Bishop said.

DeSoto did not indicate when she would rule.