The Bureau of Land Management’s recently withdrew their plans to log and burn 5,397 acres of pinyon-juniper scrublands in the Elkhorn Wildlife Management Area in southwest Montana. Although the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council had to take the lawless Trump administration to court, the preliminary injunction the court recently issued to stop the habitat destruction is important for several reasons.

1. Legal precedent

This ruling is now the legal precedent the BLM must follow in future projects. As a result, all pinyon-juniper shrublands now have stronger protection from the BLM’s longstanding practice of converting native wildlife habitat into grasslands for privately-owned cows.

2. Upholds the Constitution’s checks and balances

Federal judge Susan Watters’ Court Order halted the Iron Mask project last year because the BLM failed to analyze the project’s cumulative impacts on wildlife. But instead of following the court’s order, the BLM simply issued a new decision that once again failed to analyze the project’s impacts on wildlife.

It’s obvious no one should have to sue a government agency to force compliance with a federal court order.

But Donald Trump’s agencies, following the president’s disdain for the law, openly ignored the court’s mandate in favor of allowing private profit from public resources instead of sustainable stewardship and national legacy of our public lands.

3. Most pinyon-juniper habitat saved

The BLM, told reporters that: “Most of the prescribed burning had already concluded by the time of the judge’s decision.” The truth, however, is that once again the BLM was imitating the serial liar in the Oval Office and fed a Montana reporter “alternative facts.” Most of the burning for this year had concluded — but for the project as a whole, less than 1,000 acres out of the 5,397 acre project were actually cut and burned.

4. Junipers are valuable

A single juniper tree can produce up to 20,000 berries that provide high-energy food for elk and deer as well as migratory birds, wild turkeys and upland game birds throughout fall and winter regardless of deep snow. Junipers in the Intermountain West also provide breeding habitat for at least 43 species of birds — including many that have been identified by Montana as Species of Concern.

Preserving the nation’s native juniper habitat is vitally essential when you consider the number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent, over the past half-century, mostly due to loss of habitat and increased use of pesticides.

What happens next?

Ten years ago, the BLM spent taxpayers’ money to the project area to keep “critical winter range” for elk and bighorn sheep from being subdivided and developed — not to be turned into public grazing for privately-owned cattle.

Although the 2019 court order halted agency plans to open up the area to cattle grazing, the BLM ignored that, too, and went forward with grazing while our second lawsuit was filed to stop the burning and logging. Since the Preliminary Injunction only halted the logging and burning portion of the project, by going ahead with cattle grazing this lawless federal agency is once again ignoring the court’s original order to analyze the cumulative impacts of grazing on wildlife.

Unfortunately, the only way to ensure Trump’s agencies follow the law is for watchdog groups like ours to take the BLM to court yet again — and that’s just exactly what we will do.

Mike Garrity is the executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.