Grizzlies, lynx central to court fight over Montana logging project
Monique Merrill
(CN) — Environmentalists sparred with the federal government in court on Wednesday in a bid to stop a logging project in the Garnet Mountain Range east of Missoula, Montana.
“This project undermines the science by effectively pushing lynx out of the project area rather than conserving the remaining critical habitat within it,” said Alizabeth Bronsdon, attorney for the conservation groups.
The Bureau of Land Management authorized the Clark Fork Face Forest Health and Fuels Reduction Project in April 2024 to thin overgrown forests, reduce wildfire risk and allow opportunities for timber harvest where available over the next 10 to 15 years.
The Bureau of Land Management consulted with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the project’s effects on species and habitat in the area, but the conservationists claim both agencies neglected to consider the adverse impacts on lynx, grizzly bear and bull trout.
Roads through the project area are at the center of the dispute.
“Roads likely pose the most imminent threat to grizzly bear habitat today, and the management of roads is one of the most powerful tools available to balance the needs of people with the needs of grizzly bears,” Bronsdon told U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen, a Barack Obama appointee.
The Clark Fork Face Project area is within both the home range of grizzly bears and a connectivity corridor for bears traveling between the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and the Greater Yellowstone and Bitterroot ecosystems.
The conservation groups accused the agencies of improperly increasing road density without considering the impact on grizzly bears.
But the federal defendants argued that the conservation groups misunderstood the terminology. While the groups accused the agencies of opening roads to the public in violation of federal environmental laws, the agencies argued that the groups simply misunderstood the terminology.
“Open does not mean ‘passable,’ ‘open’ means that it is open for public use,” Justice Department attorney Emily Polachek said, explaining that the project will not be making any roads open for public use. “There is no change to the motorized status of any road in the system.”
Further, the federal agencies argued that the impact of temporary and haul roads on grizzly bears was included in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s analysis.
“Not all roads result in adverse effects, let alone even take,” Polachek said. She said that take only occurs when bears are using the area, which isn’t common in the project area.
The groups pushed back against this argument.
“We know that grizzly bears are using this area,” Bronsdon said. “To say, ‘There’s not going to be any effect because we have so many roads already,’ it effectively allows them to build these roads anywhere they want because they’re already saying it’s not being used. We just know that’s not true.”
And then there’s the issue of lynx and bull trout.
The conservation groups argued that the Bureau of Land Management promised to contribute to lynx conservation, “yet designed this project to bypass” those conservation measures.
The groups also accused the agencies of incorrectly determining that there are no bull trout in the project area.
“The agencies’ failure to engage in any consultation regarding the project's effects on bull trout is a violation of the [Endangered Species Act],” Bronsdon said.
But the agencies told the court that they had created a biological opinion and that the opinion found that the project was unlikely to impact bull trout. Part of the reason is that there is a 300-foot buffer zone around bull trout critical habitat, Polachek said.
As for lynx, the agencies said that the project only authorizes treatment on only 243 acres of the 4,322 acres of habitat capable of supporting lynx.
“Together, the project [environmental assessment] and the consultation documents it incorporates show that the agencies took a ‘hard look’ at impacts to lynx,” said Sean Duffy with the Justice Department.
The groups — Center for Biological Diversity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Council on Wildlife and Fish, Native Ecosystems Council and Yellowstone to Uintas Connection — sued in December, arguing that the project will block migration corridors for native wildlife in the Garnet Mountain Range, a scenic and heavily forested range excluded from the National Forest System and primarily owned by the Land Bureau.
Wednesday’s arguments followed a July ruling in which Christensen denied the conservation groups’ effort to stop one of the projects within the initiative, the Big River thinning project, finding that it was unlikely to harm grizzly bears and lynx.
Christensen did not indicate when he would rule on the latest challenge before the court.