Five environmental entities are challenging a federal district court decision that allows for a 2017 lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to stand, on grounds that it threatens some of the most ecologically significant areas of the Arctic.
“The fact is that BLM (Bureau of Land Management) has been shirking its responsibility to take a close look at the impacts of its decision before it gives away our public lands to the oil and gas industry,” said Suzanne Bostrom, an attorney for Trustees for Alaska, the non-profit Anchorage based public interest law firm representing the plaintiffs. “We’re appealing the decision because the court failed to recognize BLM’s obligation under the law to look at the full range of impacts of oil and gas activities on wildlife, subsistence and other resources.”
“The next step will be for us and the opposing parties to file briefs with the Ninth Circuit,” said Dawnell Smith, a spokesperson for Trustees.
The challenge comes from the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Alaska Wilderness League Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society.
Trustees anticipates that the judges on the Ninth Circuit will set out a briefing schedule soon, although with the current partial federal government shutdown, it is not certain when that schedule is likely to be completed.
“There will be arguments before the Ninth, but again the timing of it is set by the court, so we don’t know when that will be,” Smith said. “There is no set time frame in which the court has to decide the appeal.”
The decision of the federal district court of Alaska, released just days before the December 2018 lease sale said that the federal Bureau of Land Management was not required to conduct an environmental analysis to consider either the site-specific impacts of its leasing decision or new information indicating that the impacts to fish, wildlife and subsistence would likely be greater than originally anticipated.
Most of the leases involved are owned by ConocoPhillips.
The original lawsuit, filed in early 2018, contends that the BLM violated the law when it failed to perform any environmental analysis prior to the lease sale, and that the BLM failed to look at site-specific and cumulative impacts to natural resources and other values in the western Arctic. The plaintiffs also contend that the BLM failed to preserve its ability to say “no” to later development proposals, even if those proposals would have a huge impact on the environment, like disrupting animal migration routes, disturbing nesting birds, reducing or eliminating the availability and access to wild foods and devastating wildlife habitat.
The appeal was filed in early January.
President Donald Trump’s administration in 2017 offered over 10 million acres of land for lease, the largest ever offered in the Western Arctic. The land in question includes sensitive wildlife habitat around the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, one of the largest and most ecologically significant wetland areas of the world, plaintiffs contend.
