The Antiquities Act of 1906 grants presidents the authority to create and modify national monuments. In his last month in office, President Obama used this power to enact Proclamation 9564, which added 48,000 acres to the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument (“the Monument”). Scientific studies since 2000 had shown the Monument’s ecosystems required “habitat connectivity corridors for species migration and dispersal,” especially due to the increased frequency of “large-scale disturbance[s] . . . exacerbated by climate change.” This reservation included 39,852 acres from a 2.4-million-acre area in Western Oregon (“O&C Lands”). The Oregon and California Railroad and Coos Bay Wagon Road Grant Lands Act of 1937 (“O&C Act”) directs the governance of O&C timberlands in Western Oregon, including federal lands. A controversy arose as the expansion of the Monument effectively prohibited logging on these previously available lands. Murphy Timber Company and Murphy Timber Investments, LLC (collectively, “Murphy”) claimed injury to their business resulting from the President’s purported usurpation of Murphy’s “wood basket,” timberlands from which the BLM logs and then auctions wood to companies like Murphy. Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Oregon Wild, and Wilderness Society (collectively, “Soda Mountain”) intervened on the side of the government to argue in favor of upholding Proclamation 9564.
In Murphy Company v. Biden, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the O&C Act and the Antiquities Act did not conflict and that Proclamation 9564 was a proper use of presidential authority. The Ninth Circuit held that Proclamation 9564 was consistent with the O&C Act because the O&C Act grants “considerable discretion” to the Department of the Interior (“DOI”). The court should have found a lack of conflict due to the O&C Act’s allowance for Proclamation 9564 to reclassify the land in controversy as timberlands. Nonetheless, the court’s decision upheld a properly enacted presidential proclamation and will benefit the vital biodiversity of the area.
