Lawsuit delay becomes key issue in grizzly conservation dispute
Monique Merrill
(CN) — A coalition of conservation groups wants a federal judge in Montana to stop the government from going forward with timber sales that they say will negatively impact the area’s grizzly bear population, but the government accused them of waiting too long to file for relief.
“We believe a project-wide injunction is warranted at this time because of the risk to grizzly bears moving forward,” Oliver Wood, attorney representing the conservation groups, said in a Friday hearing.
The Alliance for the Wild Rockies — joined by the Native Ecosystems Council, the Council on Wildlife and Fish, and the Yellowstone to Uintas Connection — sued the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service in January over the authorization of a major logging project on the Flathead National Forest.
The agencies approved the project in April 2024, allowing logging on nearly 10,000 acres in areas where lynx and grizzly bears reside, in an area around 13 miles west of Whitefish, Montana. The groups say the decision violated environmental law by failing to consider the impacts the logging activities, which will see the construction of over 18 miles of permanent roads and over three miles of temporary roads, will have on wildlife and wildlife habitat.
Before U.S. District Judge Kathleen DeSoto on Friday, the conservation groups asked the court to intervene and stop the government from engaging in more timber sales.
“The plaintiffs are seeking to maintain the status quo in the majority of the project area and bring this injunction at this time before any other sales and their implementation begins,” Wood said.
Specifically, the conservation groups want the agencies to analyze the impact road density will have on secure grizzly bear habitat.
“Roads displace grizzly bears. There's a risk of mortality. There are any number of harms that come from more roads on the landscape,” Wood said.
DeSoto questioned the conservation groups about whether the service had an obligation to quantify the linear roads, even if the law doesn’t require the Forest Service to create new evidence when compiling its environmental reports.
To the conservation groups, looking into the impact would be as simple as sending an email to the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation asking for road data.
“We know that this data is going to exist. If the state agency is doing any kind of road building, they’re going to have that road data,” Wood said.
The government rejected the notion, arguing that the project is expected to improve grizzly bear habitat long-term.
As to the Forest Service’s cumulative effects analysis, Justice Department attorney Caitlyn Cook said the agency did the best it could with the information it had.
"Unfortunately, there are always going to be gaps when an agency is undertaking a scientific analysis,” Cook said. “The natural world is just unknowable in certain ways. We cannot know exactly where grizzly bears are walking, we cannot know exactly what lands they are using at any given time.”
Implementation of two sales under the project began a year ago, and two more sales are expected to be awarded before October.
If the project truly harmed the conservation groups, they would have filed the lawsuit earlier, argued Justice Department attorney Hayley Carpenter.
“ The delay becomes all the more important when paired with the conclusory and speculative alleged harms the plaintiff's raise here related to tree harvest,” Carpenter said. “These weak, disconnected assertions of harm cannot withstand the further debilitation of plaintiffs' delay and cannot support a preliminary injunction here.”
The American Forest Resource Council, which intervened as a defendant, echoed the argument.
“Plaintiffs' present motion was delayed by 14 months and is simply an 11th-hour motion to address an alleged emergency that only exists because plaintiffs failed to promptly file their complaint,” said Tyson McLean, attorney representing the council.
The conservation groups urged DeSoto to look past the filing delay and instead focus on the crux of the issue: grizzly bear protections. Specifically, Wood noted that the Endangered Species Act doesn’t require that a species face an extinction-level threat in order for an injunction to be issued.
“Is it your position that if there's any risk of any mortality to any single bear, then an injunction should be issued?” DeSoto asked, to which Wood assented.
“ It's not even just that one grizzly will be there, but any grizzly in the action area that is going to be close to these roads is going to have displacement,” Wood said. “We know that there's an elevated mortality risk.”