ELR Citation: 45 ELR 20169
No(s). 14-35553 (9th Cir. Sep 11, 2015)

The Ninth Circuit upheld the Bureau of Indian Affairs' (BIA's) approval of a Native American tribe's plan to harvest 268 acres of timber in the Coquille Forest in southwest Oregon. An environmental group challenged the approval, arguing that BIA failed to adequately consider the cumulative environmental impact of the timber sale in light of a previously approved, but not yet complete, harvest on adjacent and overlapping land. The group alleged that BIA violated NEPA by aggregating the adjacent project as part of the environmental baseline against which the incremental impact of the timber plan was considered. The group claimed that while the cumulative impact of past actions may be aggregated, BIA may not aggregate reasonably foreseeable future actions. But the court disagreed, ruling that the aggregation of future projects can be permissible under NEPA. Agencies have discretion in deciding how to organize and present information in EAs, and the applicable regulations do not explicitly require individual discussion of the impacts of reasonably foreseeable projects. Absent such a requirement, it is not for the court to tell BIA how specifically to present such evidence in an EA. The court also held that the Coquille Restoration Act did not require that the project comply with FWS' recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, an endangered species living in the forest, rejecting the group's claims to the contrary.