Defending Public Land and Mineral Rights in California

Environmental organizations are seeking to block a federal plan to open up more than a million acres of public land and mineral rights in central California to drilling and fracking. Earthjustice filed the lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management in the Central District of California, Western Division, on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity and Los Padres ForestWatch.

The groups are suing BLM for approving a resource management plan that would allow oil and gas drilling and fracking on vast stretches of public land and mineral rights across California’s Central and San Joaquin valleys, the southern Sierra Nevada, and in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties along California’s central coast.

In 2013, a federal judge ruled BLM violated the law when it issued oil leases in Monterey County without considering the environmental risks of fracking.

This current lawsuit points out that BLM failed to consider a reasonable range of alternatives and failed to adequately analyze and disclose the impacts of fracking on air quality, water, and wildlife, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. BLM’s resource management plan opens federal land to fracking without any meaningful analysis of fracking-related risks, including the use of toxic chemicals and pollution threats to California’s precious water supplies during an historic drought.

According to a California Council on Science and Technology report (January 2015), oil companies frack about half of all new wells drilled in California. Fracking intensifies environmental damages already occurring from existing oil and gas production on federal land. The impacts of fracking range from destruction of wildlife habitat and degradation of air quality to the contamination of California’s water and contributions to global climate change.