Idaho public lands
Credit: The Idaho Statesman

A federal judge in Idaho has tossed out oil and gas leases on nearly a million acres of public land, lashing the Trump administration’s “arbitrary and capricious” policy of cutting off public input on environmental protections.

The federal Bureau of Land Management “jettisoned prior processes, practices, and norms in favor of changes that emphasized economic maximization — to the detriment, if not outright exclusion of … opportunities for the public to contribute to the decision-making process affecting the management of public lands,”  wrote U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush in his decision Thursday.

The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watershed Project on behalf of the greater sage grouse, which supports hundreds of other species across the West.

The ruling affects some $125 million worth of leases issued by the BLM in 2018 on more than 1,300 square miles of federal lands in Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. […]