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Highlights & achievements
Below are some of the highlights in our work for public lands and many of our achievements. Our In the Media page contains an archive of news articles on these and other projects we have worked on over the years. Most references to our work cite the Western Land Exchange Project (WLXP), our name from 1997 to 2006.
1997
- The Western Lands Project (originally the Western Land Exchange Project) was founded after forest activist Janine Blaeloch became involved in challenging the Huckleberry Land Exchange between the U.S. Forest Service and Weyerhaeuser. As a member of Pilchuck Audubon Society (PAS) she did the initial work against that trade, wrote an administrative appeal, and assisted with the subsequent legal case. PAS, rather than the nascent WLXP, filed the suit and ultimately (in 1999) won in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals with co-plaintiffs the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. Janine delved further into the land exchange issue and found that 300 federal land trades were going through every year, most in the West. There was no organization dedicated to this complex and important issue. With founding board members Rachael Paschal Osborn, Bonnie Phillips, and Martin Rand, she founded a non-profit group devoted to research, outreach, and advocacy for the reform of federal land exchange policy.
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1998
- From September 27 to October 2, 1998, the Seattle Times published “Trading Away the West” an investigative series by Deborah Nelson, Jim Simon, Eric Nalder and Danny Westneat. This seminal series on federal land exchanges broke the issue into public (and media) consciousness. The series won several journalism awards, including the 1999 National Press Club award for environmental journalism.
- After filing a lawsuit with the Juniper Group of the Oregon Sierra Club and Central Oregon Forest Issues Council, we negotiated a settlement over the Forest Service’s Crown Pacific land exchange in Oregon. We were able to gain special protection for over 3,000 acres of old-growth forest traded to the corporation.
- In response to our request for investigation of a land exchange at the Cascade Reservoir in Idaho, the Department of Interior’s Inspector General (IG) audited the appraisal practices of the Bureau of Reclamation. The IG report confirmed system-wide problems that we had identified in the exchange, and the Cascade Reservoir trade was dropped.
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1999
- Our involvement in a lawsuit over Weyerhaeuser’s Huckleberry Land Exchange in our state (see 1997) resulted in a precedent-setting decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that has substantially affected Forest Service trades. Muckleshoot Indian Tribe v. U. S. Forest Service was an important legal victory for us and for all critics of federal land exchange policy. It established important legal precedent by requiring Forest Service and BLM offices in eight western states to conduct better analysis and disclosure of the environmental impacts of federal land trades.
- Prompted by controversy over some chapters’ support for land trades, a national committee of the Sierra Club consulted with us over several months to develop a set of land exchange guidelines aimed at creating a better-informed and more consistent response to land exchange proposals by Club chapters.
- The Interstate-90 Land Exchange between the Forest Service and Plum Creek Timber made front-page news in Northwest newspapers. After the Western Land Exchange Project had attempted to the year before stop the trade—which passed through Congress as a hidden “rider” on an appropriations bill—the timber company discovered an endangered bird on some public land it had received in the trade. As the company and agency scrambled to re-work the exchange, Western Land Exchange Project and a coalition of environmental groups and rural citizens mounted an aggressive campaign against the project, which would have had a devastating effect on the watershed of the town of Randle, in southwest Washington. After a series of dramatic events—including an intimidation lawsuit filed by Plum Creek against WLXP and other environmentalists—the exchange was ultimately altered to exclude lands near Randle, as well as critical old-growth forest areas in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
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2000
- WLXP published “Commons or Commodity? The Dilemma of Federal Land Exchanges,” co-written by historian George Draffan and Janine Blaeloch. The 104-page report outlines the history of land trades, the policies and laws that govern them, the flaws in the process, and suggestions for reform.
- Janine Blaeloch, representing WLXP and the Railroads & Clearcuts Campaign, presented a resolution to Weyerhaeuser shareholders to declassify the Board of Directors, a change that would ideally increase accountability and open up the board to new viewpoints. She used the Huckleberry Land Exchange to demonstrate the lack of accountability in the company. The resolution passed, although the company’s managers exercised their right not to implement it.
- In mid-July, the General Accounting Office (GAO) released an audit report on land trades requested by Rep. George Miller (D-CA). WLXP furnished the GAO with much of information needed to initiate the audit. GAO’s report was highly critical of the land exchange programs and received copious media attention, including both a front-page story and editorial in the Washington Post.
- WLXP was chosen by CounterPunch as one of the “top ten activist groups that make a difference.”
- A July 2000 court victory for WLXP under the Freedom of Information Act established that the agencies must release land-value information to the public. While land trades are to yield equal land value to the federal and non-federal parties, appraisal information had previously been withheld from public scrutiny.
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2001
- WLXP published the “Citizens’ Guide to Federal Land Exchanges,” which offers step-by-step advice for any citizen on how to work to improve or stop a land trade. The book offers an outline of applicable law, entry points into the process for activists, and comprehensive guidance for evaluating an exchange proposal.
- In early September 2001, WLXP joined the Center for Biological Diversity and the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management in Arizona for its decision to exchange land with the mining conglomerate ASARCO. The corporation sought the exchange in order to expand an open-pit copper mine. The BLM’s environmental analysis of the exchange was highly flawed and inconsistent with the Interior Solicitor’s interpretation of U.S. mining law. Plaintiffs are represented by the Western Mining Action Project.
- WLXP focused media and congressional attention upon a proposal by Rep. Jim Hansen (R-UT) to sell 900 acres of public land to the Mormon Church at a site in Wyoming called Martin’s Cove. An outcry by Wyoming citizens brought the proposal to a halt. Congress later ordered the BLM to issue a 25-year lease to the Church for the land, and in 2005, WLXP and others filed suit against the lease (see below).
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2002
- A legislative proposal floated by a conservative member of the House Resources Committee would have given away 110 acres in the Angeles National Forest to the Mt. Wilson Observatory, which has occupied part of the land for many years under a lease agreement with the Forest Service. The giveaway legislation was tainted by conflict of interest and political issues. WLXP gained coverage of the issue in the Los Angeles Times, and the proposal was dropped shortly thereafter.
- With the expert help of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) WLXP supported a Utah BLM whistleblower who charged that the agency was skewing appraisal numbers, resulting in a potential $100 million loss to U.S. taxpayers in the San Rafael Swell (Utah) exchange, a congressional proposal. The Inspector General of the Interior Department investigated the charges and the ensuing scandal led to a complete restructuring of the Interior Department’s appraisal division as well as cancellation of the San Rafael trade.
- A land exchange proposal for Steens Mountain in southern Oregon was dropped after residents of the town of Sisters protested the plan. The deal would have traded away a well-loved area of national forest along Squaw Creek near Sisters, Oregon to a local developer who had bought an inholding on Steens Mountain to use as “trade stock.” Citizens pressured the City Council to hold a hearing on the plan and 200 of the town’s 900 residents attended, the majority of whom were adamantly opposed to the loss of the Squaw Creek land. A week later, the City Council voted unanimously against the land exchange and Oregon Rep. Greg Walden stated publicly that he would not sponsor or support a bill for the trade.
- WLXP Staff Attorney Chris Krupp conducted a Freedom of Information Act campaign against the Nevada BLM offices in an effort to work out the details of several interwoven land deals in that state. Chris discovered that employees of a private land-trade proponent were working in the BLM office that was proposing an exchange with the company they worked for. WLXP gave information to the New York Times, and after the Times exposed the corruption the collusion was halted.
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2003
- In June 2003 the Los Angeles Times published a series of investigative stories on congressional family members’ cashing in on their political connections. “The Senator’s Sons: In Nevada the Name to Know is Reid,” exposed Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s relatives’ involvement in land deals and planning in the Las Vegas Valley. WLXP was the central informant on the Harry Reid story, working with lead reporter Chuck Neubauer for more than a year.
- With tireless citizen activists in central Arizona, we managed for the fourth year in a row to fend off congressional approval of the Yavapai Ranch Land Exchange in Arizona. At a “town hall” meeting called by Senator John McCain in Camp Verde, Arizona in December, Janine Blaeloch joined a core group of grassroots activists we have been working with since 1999. Our friends drew 600 people to the meeting in this tiny town, where citizens expressed overwhelming opposition to the trade.
- WLXP joined the American Civil Liberties Union, Natural Resources Defense Council, Jewish War Veterans of the USA, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) in opposing a proposed land swap inside Mojave National Preserve in California that would have privatized a half-acre of land upon which stands a Latin cross. Frank Buono, a non-stop volunteeer monitor of Park Service land deals, eventually won a court victory against the project.
- WLXP worked with Peggy Titus, a newly minted public lands activist who lives off the grid near Mayer, Arizona. In the spring of 2002, Peggy learned that the BLM was planning to trade to a developer some 17,000 acres of federal land in her area, including a parcel of 9,000 contiguous acres in the watershed of the Agua Fria River. Peggy educated and activated scores of people in her area to stop the BLM from jettisoning the land. Peggy, her cohorts, and WLXP all worked intensively to persuade the BLM to keep the land in public ownership. In the face of massive public opposition, the BLM withdrew the trade proposal. Long overdue, the BLM then also initiated a new Land Use Plan (LUP) to replace the 1988 LUP which had identified the lands as being designated for disposal. The BLM is still drafting the new LUP. It remains to be seen whether the BLM will remove the land from its disposal list, but the agency now knows that locals are ready to fight to protect it.
- In the wake of the San Rafael land exchange debacle (see 2002), the issue of corrupt appraisal practices in the BLM erupted again when the quasi-governmental Appraisal Foundation released a report lambasting the BLM for its malfeasance. In response, the agency formed a Work Group to formulate structural and procedural changes that might alleviate these problems. Despite being barred from the group’s meetings, WLXP submitted information to the Group and worked to keep the issue in the headlines. In late May 2003, the Work Group issued recommendations for reform.
Almost contemporaneously, Interior’s Office of the Inspector General confirmed that the appraisal process within the entire Interior Department was contaminated by politics. Interior Secretary Gale Norton admitted that land exchange documents presented to Congress on the San Rafael exchange had been falsified and formally withdrew from the agreement to make a trade with the State of Utah.
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2004
- WLXP and 36 other groups formed a coalition to oppose the Owyhee Initiative in Idaho, one of a series of recent proposals that link Wilderness designation with the disposal of public lands elsewhere. The Owyhee project is part of a trend toward omnibus land-use legislation that links development and land giveaways with wilderness.
- The Federal District Court in Reno found in favor of WLXP in its challenge of the Lincoln County Land Act, legislation passed in 2000 that had authorized the BLM to sell a total of 13,000 acres of federal land in Lincoln County, Nevada. In its ruling, the Court supported the WLXP case that the BLM had violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The agency had neglected to analyze the impact of pulling water from nearby basins to supply development of the 13,000 acres of federal land and also had ignored the cumulative impacts of the sale. Ultimately the suit was bypassed by passage of the Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation and Development Act, in which Congress ordered the sale of the land despite our suit.
- The Forest Service completed a land exchange in Utah’s Dixie National Forest that WLXP had been working on since 1999. This trade between the agency and the Garkane Power Company was aimed at privatizing land where the company was operating a power plant under a special use permit. Through correspondence, Freedom of Information Act requests, and work with local citizens, we were able to achieve substantial improvement in the proposal. The exchange had started as a congressional deal, but complaints about the bill were heeded, and it was "re-proposed" as an agency trade. Rather than staying with the original plan to trade 179 acres of federal land for 40 acres of private land (which would have given Garkane 139 more acres than it needed to take ownership of its power plant), the trade was pared down to 40 acres for 40 acres. In addition, the Forest Service committed to choosing a non-grazing management allocation for the land it got from Garkane, 38 acres of which are riparian/wetland habitat.
- Along with the Greer Coalition and the Center for Biological Diversity, we filed an administrative appeal on the Black River land exchange, proposed by a "rancher" in Greer, Arizona. The proposed action would have exchanged 337.2 acres of USFS land in the small, rural community for three historic ranches located inside the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. On December 10, the USFS reversed the decision to approve the exchange made by the Albuquerque Regional office, based on an internal review that determined that the environmental analysis was "flawed”.
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2005
- The Umpqua land exchange proposal in Oregon, which WLXP had been monitoring and criticizing since 1998, was dropped. The trade, which would have involved potentially 675,000 acres of Forest Service, BLM, and timber industry lands in southern Oregon, was the brainchild of timber companies and lobbyists as a way to trade timber company lands in sensitive habitat that could not be logged for federal land with accessible trees. Proponents had managed to gain a $5 million congressional appropriation to develop a computer modeling program that would create a landscape-wide plan for a series of land trades in the Umpqua watershed.
- The national office of the ACLU, representing WLXP and four individual plaintiffs, including two descendents of Mormon pioneers, filed suit against the Department of Interior and BLM. The premise of the case is that Interior abdicated their management responsibilities at Martin's Cove, a national historic site in Wyoming (see 2001). At the instruction of Congress, Interior had entered into a 25-year lease that effectively ceded management of the site, which is federal land, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The Church has been given virtually unfettered control of the site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Plaintiffs believe this violates the First Amendment's prohibition on government establishment of any religion. Our involvement in the suit is also based on the virtual privatization of this public land through the Church’s control of activities there.
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2006
- In June 2006, we settled our Martin’s Cove case (see 2005), in which Western Lands and co-plaintiffs were represented by the ACLU. At issue were such problems as signage that co-mingled the Mormon Church’s logo with that of the Bureau of Land Management—making it appear the public land was Church-owned and/or managed—and proselytizing by church members. Resolution of the case included:
- Creation of visitation guidelines that must be posted on the site and on the BLM’s website.
- Clearly marked public parking and public access that is separate from access to the neighboring Mormon Handcart Visitors Center.
- Elimination of the co-mingling of BLM and LDS logos on signs at the site.
- In June, Western Lands gained coverage of federal land issues on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and in November on Morning Edition (both are archived on our In the Media page). Reporter Jeff Brady covered the issues of federal land sales designed to benefit local interests and Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s special land deals for his home state.
- In late August, Western Lands staff attorney Chris Krupp filed suit on behalf of Nevada Outdoor Recreation Association and Western Lands on an illegal land trade in Nevada. At issue is a development called Coyote Springs. In a 1988 congressional land trade, manufacturer Aerojet acquired 42,000 acres of public land in Coyote Spring Valley north of Las Vegas to build a rocket testing facility. 14,000 acres in the middle of the property was set aside as protected desert tortoise habitat under a lease with the BLM. Aerojet subsequently decided against building and sold 28,000 acres of the non-leased land to Harvey Whittemore. In 2005, to accommodate Whittemore, the BLM issued a “corrective patent” to completely relocate 10,000 acres of the leased land so that he would have a contiguous piece of property. (A patent is an instrument conveying public land).
The BLM has stated that the new lease configuration would benefit the threatened desert tortoise, but the original configuration was designed under the same rationale. BLM did not prepare an environmental assessment before changing the boundaries, nor an appraisal to determine whether Whittemore was taking more valuable land. The land exchange violates the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Federal Land Policy & Management Act (FLPMA).
- Western Lands Project was a leading opponent of several ill-conceived public land bills that combined wilderness designation with public land trades, sell-offs, and even giveaways. Working with other grassroots groups, we spread the word about the harmful implications of these bills among politicians and in the media. Western Lands helped bring together 88 organizations across the country in a collective call for a moratorium on omnibus public land bills pending a possible change in Congress — a change that did, in fact, occur in the subsequent November election. Ultimately, three of the four worst bills failed to pass in the 109th Congress in the Republican majority’s last weeks. The bills may be re-introduced in the 110th Congress. You can read a summary of the bills as they read at the end of the 109th Congress by clicking here (PDF).
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2007
We monitored and submitted testimony on several controversial land exchange proposals in the U.S. Congress, including:
- a land-use bill for Mt. Hood that included an extremely inequitable land exchange;
- an Arizona land exchange proposal that would trade to a mining conglomerate an area of National Forest specially protected under an Executive Order issued by President Eisenhower.
As members of a “roundtable” assisting the Council on Environmental Quality (the environmental office of the Executive Branch), we helped develop a primer on the National Environmental Policy Act entitled, “A Citizen’s Guide to NEPA: Having Your Voice Heard,” issued by CEQ in December 2007.
Western Lands and fellow activists were successful in persuading the National Park Service to commit to a full environmental impact statement for a land exchange proposed in the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Canal National Historical Park in Washington, D.C. Georgetown University covets a site in the canal for construction of a huge boathouse. Citizen activists and more than 20 environmental organizations have been working together to get the needed environmental analysis and to force consideration of alternative sites.
Working with colleagues from Western Watersheds, Friends of the Clearwater, Wild Wilderness and Wilderness Watch, we have developed a new coalition called Voices for Public Lands, whose purpose is to reinvigorate the public lands movement. The coalition, which currently has 43 member groups, is founded in a set of Principles for Public Lands, which can be viewed at voicesforpubliclands.org.
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