Environmental groups filed two lawsuits against the Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday over the agency’s March oil and gas lease sale on Alaska’s North Slope, arguing the agency failed to comply with laws that require ecological protections.
In one lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth challenged the planned lease sale, which will offer around 5.5 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska — a massive expanse of federal land known as the NPR-A that environmentalists and some native groups have long pushed to protect. The groups filed their case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska.
In a second case, the Wilderness Society and Grandmothers Growing Goodness similarly challenged the oil and gas plans for the NPR-A in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
BLM plans to hold a lease sale for the area on March 18.
