The court of appeals reversed a district court’s award of summary judgment in part, affirmed in part, and remanded the action for further proceedings. The court held that plaintiffs who challenge whether an agency carried out a sufficient cumulative impacts analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act need only show the potential for such impacts rather than that the impacts actually would occur. The court held further that the Bureau of Land Management failed to take the necessary hard look at the cumulative impacts of an updated minerals exploration program where its environmental assessment simply employed a conclusory “analysis” that reasoned that all of the the impacts from the expanded exploration activities would be avoided or mitigated and that all existing, proposed, and reasonably foreseeable activities would avoid or mitigate all known and discovered resources.
Cortez Gold Mines, Inc. (Cortez) proposed to amend the plan of operations for an existing mineral exploration project known as the Horse Canyon/Cortez Unified Exploration Project (HC/CUEP), located in northeastern Nevada. As originally approved, the HC/CUEP was a phased exploration project in which Cortez could advance from one minerals exploratory stage to another depending on the results of its earlier explorations. Cortez proposed to update the plan (Amendment) so that it might disturb some 250 acres throughout the project area, or five times the 50 acres originally approved by the the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Under the Amendment, Cortez’s exploration would proceed according to the same phased operations as outlined in the original HC/CUEP plan of operations, and Cortez could not disturb more than 50 acres at any given time. Cortez estimated that the HC/CUEP as amended would last five years.
