The Ninth Circuit held that the Forest Service’s substantial reduction of a forest thinning project between the Draft and Final EAs did not require repeating the public comment process or considering new alternatives under NEPA. However, it found the Forest Service violated NEPA by failing to adequately analyze cumulative impacts in conjunction with a related project. North Cascades Conservation Council v. U.S. Forest Service, 136 F.4th 816 (9th Cir. 2025).
The Forest Service developed the Twisp Restoration Project (TRP) to reduce wildfire, insect, and disease risk through thinning and prescribed burns. Between the Draft EA (2020) and Final EA (2022), wildfire in the project area forced a 69% reduction in scope, activities, and timeline, and led to the creation of a separately analyzed “Midnight Restoration Project” for the fire-damaged area. The Final EA was issued without recirculation for comment.
An environmental group challenged approval of the TRP, arguing it violated NEPA. First, it claimed the reduction in the Project’s geographic scope, activities, and timeline constituted substantial changes requiring reopening of public comment. The court disagreed, holding the changes reduced environmental impacts, raised no new issues beyond those addressed in the Draft EA, and left prior comments relevant to the revised project.
Second, plaintiff argued that the Final EA was deficient because the Forest Service’s statement of purpose and need engaged in “circular logic” and was impermissibly narrow. The court rejected these claims, finding that this critique challenged the merits of the TRP itself rather than the adequacy of the statement under NEPA. The court held that the statement of purpose and need was sufficiently broad to satisfy NEPA’s requirements.
The court also rejected plaintiff’s third claim—that the Final EA failed to consider a reasonable range of project alternatives—concluding that the alternatives proposed by the plaintiff, including the “natural succession” alternative, were not sufficiently detailed or feasible to warrant consideration by the Forest Service. As such, the Forest Service did not violate NEPA by declining to analyze them in depth.
Lastly, Plaintiff argued that the Forest Service inadequately addressed direct, indirect, and cumulative effects by (1) relying on condition-based management and maximum effects analysis and (2) failing to address the related Midnight Restoration Project. The court upheld the first approach as adequate for an EA, given the TRP’s scale and the level of detail provided. However, the court agreed with plaintiff that the Forest Service failed to analyze cumulative impacts under NEPA because it did not consider the reasonably foreseeable effects of the related Midnight Restoration Project, despite having sufficient information about it.
The Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded, instructing the district court to order the Forest Service to address the deficiency in its cumulative impacts analysis in the EA and to determine whether an EIS was necessary considering the revised analysis.
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