(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Second lawsuit challenges USFS fuels and logging project near Yellowstone National Park – Daily Montanan [1] ['Blair Miller', 'More From Author', '- December'] Date: 2023-12-19 A second group of conservation organizations sued the federal government this week seeking to block a project that would clear cut and commercially log 12,000 acres of forest and build more than 50 miles of temporary roads in Montana and Idaho near Yellowstone National Park. The lawsuit was filed Monday by attorneys with the Western Environmental Law Center on behalf of the Gallatin Wildlife Association, Native Ecosystems Council and WildEarth Guardians. It claims the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act by approving the South Plateau Landscape Area Treatment Project in threatened grizzly bear habitat. “It is time for resource management agencies to adhere to the best available and most recent science when it comes to the management of grizzly bears,” Gallatin Wildlife Association President Clint Nagel said in a statement. “Current guidelines used in their protection are outdated, actually worsening habitat fragmentation rather than aiding in bear habitat protection.” The project would take place over 15 years just southwest of West Yellowstone and involves clearcutting 5,551 unspecified acres of forest, including mature trees; commercial thinning of 6,500 acres of forest; 2,500 acres of non-commercial thinning; 1,800 acres of fuels treatment; and up to 56.8 miles of temporary roads. But the plan did not specify where the logging will occur or where the roads will be placed, and the environmental assessment says the precise location and size will be determined through project design features that will follow. WildEarth Guardians had sent a letter to the Forest Service in May along with the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Alliance for the Wild Rockies giving notice of its plans to sue over the project if it were approved. After the final decision was made on the project in August, in which the district ranger found there would be no significant impact to the environment or to threatened species, the latter three groups challenged the approval in a lawsuit filed in September, saying the project would destroy habitat used by grizzlies and lynx and that the Forest Service violated NEPA by not doing a thorough enough environmental impact statement. On Dec. 4, the plaintiffs in that case and the federal government came to a stipulated agreement in which the USFS agreed not to start any timber, fuels or road work on the project before summary judgment briefing in the case is complete, which is currently scheduled for June 21 of next year. The USFS also agreed to provide the plaintiffs 30 days’ notice before any of that work begins while the case is pending, and the plaintiffs agreed not to ask for a preliminary injunction before receiving a notice that project work would be starting. The new lawsuit filed by the other organizations makes similar claims as the first. The attorneys for the groups say the federal agencies violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not taking a “hard look” at potential environmental consequences of the project, as NEPA requires, and the Endangered Species Act’s protections for grizzly bears. They also contend that the Forest Service used outdated habitat conditions in its evaluation, which failed to account for changes over the past 25 years – including pine beetle kill, a loss of food sources, climate change and a jump in mortality recently – in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and grizzly bear recovery zone. Finally, the lawsuit says the USFS is violating President Joe Biden’s executive order that requires the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to conserve mature and old-growth forests on federal land for carbon storage purposes. The groups say the area where the project is slated to occur is already considered to be a population sink, where grizzly deaths exceed births, and to be relatively dense with human activity – which cause “adverse effects” to grizzly bears. “But despite this fact, the Forest Service is proposing more logging, more roads, and more human disturbance and development in this already precarious setting for grizzly bears,” the lawsuit says. “The South Plateau project will thus make an already bad situation for grizzly bears in this part of the GYE much worse.” The lawsuit notes that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommended the USFS to prepare a NEPA review that included a site-specific analysis and public comment period for individual portions of the project. The Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service used a 1998 baseline level to define “secure habitat” for grizzlies as a contiguous area of at least 10 acres that is more than 500 meters, about one-third of a mile, from a road. But the lawsuit said that baseline “conflicts with the best available science” on secure habitat for grizzlies, and that the logging and roads at that baseline would create more risk for the bears. “Using a minimum of 10 acres in size for secure habitat is insufficient to provide security for grizzly bears,” the suit says. “Using a minimum of 10 acres in size for secure habitat creates high mortalities risks and populations sinks for grizzly bears (like the project area).” It says the decline over the past two-plus decades in whitebark pine seeds, caused by pine beetles, and loss of cutthroat trout is not accounted for by using the 1998 baseline, nor is the population growth in the area, all of which have affected the ecosystem and grizzly habitat and should have led to a deeper evaluation. “The location of the project in some of the most deficient grizzly bear areas in the region is troubling,” said Matthew Bishop, one of the attorneys who filed the suit. “This area is already considered a population sink for bears – where grizzly bear mortality is already too high and habitat security too low. This project will make an already bad situation worse.” A spokesperson for the Custer Gallatin National Forest did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and federal agencies typically do not comment on pending litigation. But the final decision and environmental assessment say the Forest Service would like to move forward with the project to increase long-term resilience of lodgepole pines, improve the longterm yield of timber up to 83 million board feet, and decrease the risk of wildfire in that part of the forest. The new lawsuit asks a judge to find that the federal agencies violated the ESA and NEPA, vacate authorization of the project and environmental assessment, and order the agencies to comply with NEPA and the ESA. 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