The Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision denying an environmental group's request to preliminarily enjoin the U.S. Forest Service's approval of a timber sale in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The group argued that the Service failed to adequately evaluate the cumulative effects of the ...

The Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court decision dismissing a Japanese whaling research organization's piracy claims against an environmental activist group. The researchers hunt whales in the Southern Ocean pursuant to a permit issued under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whalin...

A district court dismissed with leave to amend environmental groups' lawsuit against EPA alleging that it violated the ESA by failing to undertake required consultations regarding the effects of 382 registered pesticides on endangered and threatened species. The groups seek a broad remedy—an injun...

A district court issued a permanent injunction ordering the state of Washington to repair or replace culverts under state-owned roads that that block fish passage to and from inland waters. The court agreed with Native American tribes' claim that the state has a treaty-based duty to preserve fish ru...

A district court held that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality violated ESA §9 by failing to properly manage freshwater inflows into the San Antonio and Guadalupe bays during the 2008-2009 winter, thereby causing an unlawful take of the world’s only self-sustaining, wild Whooping Crane ...

The D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court decision upholding FWS' listing of the polar bear as threatened under the ESA, in part due to the effects of global climate change. Below, a number of industry groups argued that the listing rule is arbitrary and capricious under the APA and that FWS' action s...

The Fourth Circuit vacated a biological opinion the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) prepared as part of EPA's reregistration process for three pesticides—chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion. The biological opinion concluded that the pesticides would jeopardize the viability of certain P...

A district court vacated FWS' final rule designating approximately 187,157 square miles in Alaska and adjacent territorial and U.S. waters as critical habitat for the polar bear, ruling that the designation "went too far and was too extensive." Although the final rule is valid in many respects, the ...

The Ninth Circuit upheld the U.S. Forest Service's adoption of the Idaho Roadless Rule, which creates different categories of land within Idaho's 9.3 million acres of inventoried roadless areas. The court affirmed and adopted as its own a lower court ruling that also approved the rule. FWS's biologi...

A California appellate court reversed a lower court decision granting lumber companies' petition to delist coho salmon from the California list of endangered species. The companies' petition sought to show that there was no basis for the California Fish & Game Commission's 1995 finding that coho...