ELR Citation: ELR 20127
No(s). 03-35461 (9th Cir. Oct 28, 2004)

The Ninth Circuit held that the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM's) environmental assessments (EAs) for two timbers sales in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The EAs do not sufficiently identify or discuss the incremental impact that can be expected from each successive timber sale, or how those individual impacts might combine or synergistically interact with each other to affect the surrounding environment. In addition, the EAs cannot be tiered to a regional management plan without specific information about the cumulative effects, nor can they be tiered to a non-NEPA watershed analysis. Yet, whether the impacts were cumulative and similar was an open question; therefore, the court declined to require BLM to evaluate each individual timber project in a single EA.