Wilderness Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

This should not have been a hard case. For more than seventy years, “[t]he dominant wildlife and habitat management theme for the Kofa ... has been the preservation of the desert bighorn sheep species.” 1 For much of that period, the Fish and Wildlife Service (“Service”), together with the BLM and the Arizona Game and Fish Department (“AGFD”), has supplied water to bighorn herds in the Kofa. So it is no surprise that after observing a dramatic decline in the bighorn population in this region, the Service proposed a variety of non-mutually exclusive solutions, including redevelopment of the…