A federal court in Denver has ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must reinstate a 2013 proposal to protect two imperiled wildflowers in Colorado and Utah.
The Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013 had proposed to list 100 square miles of federal land in Utah and Colorado as critical habitat for the Graham’s beardtongue and the White River beardtongue. The two plants thrive on oil-shale outcrops rich in calcium carbonate, a plant nutrient.
In 2014, however, the FWS reversed course and filed a withdrawal notice for its protection proposal, an action which was then challenged by several conservation groups that filed a federal lawsuit last year.
On Tuesday, the court vacated FWS’s decision to delist the threatened plants, and it reinstated the 2013 protection proposal, according to a news release from Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization.
Earthjustice represents several conservation groups in the lawsuit, including Rocky Mountain Wild, Center for Biological Diversity, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Utah Native Plant Society, Grand Canyon Trust, Western Resource Advocates, and Western Watersheds Project.
The FWS sought to reverse field and deny Endangered Species Act protections to the flowers after lobbying efforts by the energy industry, which seeks to drill and develop the oil shale formations of the Uinta Basin in which the plants thrive, Earthjustice said.
“This is a tremendous victory for these rare and beautiful wildflowers that are threatened by strip mining and drilling everywhere that they live,” said Robin Cooley, an Earthjustice attorney. “FWS must go back to the drawing board and make a decision based not on politics, but on science, as the law requires.”
U.S. District Judge William J. Martinez, in Tuesday’s ruling, ordered the parties involved in the case to meet in person to “discuss in good faith whether the Conservation Agreement may be modified such that Plaintiffs can agree that it will adequately protect the beardtongues for the foreseeable future.”
The meeting will be held no later than Feb. 21.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is reviewing the ruling and withheld comment, according to a spokesman on Wednesday.
The court will come to a final judgment in the case after the required meeting.
“The science here is clear, these wildflowers must be protected from strip mining and drilling,” said Megan Mueller, senior biologist with Rocky Mountain Wild. “We urge the Fish and Wildlife Service to get it right this time and provide protections under the Endangered Species Act.”
