28th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the
Desert Tortoise Council, February 21-23, 2003
Abstracts

Two Years After The CDCA Lawsuit Settlement: Interior Rolls-back Conservation and Forces New Litigation

Daniel R. Patterson
Desert Ecologist, Center for Biological Diversity, P.O. Box 710 Tucson Arizona 85702

In 1976, Congress designated a 25 million acre swath of Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin deserts stretching from the Mexican border north to Death Valley and the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains as the California Desert Conservation Area (CDCA). The CDCA includes some of the most scenic and biologically important areas in Imperial, San Diego, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Kern, Inyo and Mono counties. This Virginia-sized expanse was entrusted to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to be forever protected for wildlife, open space, sustainable use and human enjoyment.

BLM's 11 million acre share of the CDCA contains 3.4 million acres of habitat designated critical to the survival and recovery of the threatened desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) (1).

The CDCA also harbors 23 other federally protected threatened or endangered species including Peninsular Ranges bighorn sheep, Inyo California towhee, desert pupfish, Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard and rare plants such as Cushenberry oxytheca, Amargosa niterwort and Peirson's milkvetch.

These 24 species and the entire ecological health of the CDCA are jeopardized by new BLM plans which favor the historic status quo of mining, livestock grazing, road building, utility projects, and off-roading. Imperiled species, such as the desert tortoise, are declining as regional planning efforts dominated by anti-environmental politics short-change wildlife by not implementing recovery plans.

In late 2000 and early 2001, The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the Sierra Club, and five off-road groups settled a landmark lawsuit with BLM over its failure to follow the Endangered Species Act. In the settlement BLM agreed to: prohibit mining expansions or new mines on all designated or occupied T&E species habitat within the CDCA; reduce or prohibit livestock on 1.9 million acres; prohibit ORVs on 550,000 acres of sensitive habitat areas-including 49,310 acres of the Algodones Sand Dunes; route designation on 874,000 acres of the West Mojave; complete desert wide route designation by 2004; and other conservation and recovery measures. The CDCA settlement had BLM implementing on-the-ground recovery actions B but it did not require everything needed to recover species B and now its balanced management is abandoned as BLM rolls-back protections across millions of acres.

Aided by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) non-jeopardy biological opinions, BLM has now finalized its Northern and Eastern Colorado Desert Plan (NECO), Northern and Eastern Mojave Desert Plan (NEMO), Coachella Valley Plan, Western Colorado Desert Routes of Travel Plan (WECO), and Algodones (Imperial) Dunes Plan, but all these plans fall far short of species and habitat recovery needs. Species recovery plans are not implemented, despite a finding by GAO that the tortoise plan is based on sound science. With the Ft. Irwin expansion lurking, proposals for tank training on China Lake NAWS, and an aggressive anti-environmental administration, the abandonment the minimum species recovery shield provided by the CDCA settlement represents a dangerous roll-back in wildlife protection. The settlement remains in place within the West Mojave (WEMO) planning area until plan completion. The roll-back of conservation through these BLM plans forced new litigation against Interior, especially FWS.

The abandoned CDCA settlement offered management toward species recovery, but long-term results will come from new litigation, better cumulative effects planning and consultations, and more scrutiny.

¹U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, final rule (59-5820), Federal Register, 2/8/94.