The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. Forest Service complied with NEPA and the NFMA when it approved a fuels reduction project in the Lewis and Clark National Forest. The project involves understory thinning and burning to mitigate the risk of wildfire in the Middle Fork Judith Wilderness Study Area...

The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. Forest Service's Angora Fire Restoration Project in the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit (LTBMU) complies with the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and NEPA. Environmental groups argued that the NMFA required the Forest Service to demonstrate at the project ...

A district court denied a group of companies' motion for summary judgment challenging the government's remedy for cleaning up PCB contamination in Wisconsin's Fox River. The companies argued that the administrative record is fatally incomplete due to the destruction of certain computer model data an...

The Tenth Circuit upheld the DOI Secretary's decision to rescind 77 oil and gas leases on federal land around national parks in Utah. BLM auctioned the oil and gas leases to energy companies in late 2008 during the last weeks of the George W. Bush administration. After the auction but before the lea...

The Seventh Circuit upheld a lower court's preliminary injunction compelling a PRP to complete the remediation work concerning PCB contamination at the Fox River in Wisconsin that was scheduled for this year. The PRP has performed a significant amount of cleanup at the site. But in 2011 it decided t...

The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. Forest Service's EIS for a forest thinning research project in the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest within the Deschutes National Forest complies with NEPA. The project allows logging and controlled burning on roughly 2,500 acres of the Forest to reduce the risk...

A district court held that a paper company that sold "broke," a byproduct of its manufacturing process, to paper recyclers was not an arranger under CERCLA for PCB contamination in a river. The company lacked knowledge that broke could be hazardous; it invested money and labor in treating, sorting, ...

A district court held that the U.S. Forest Service violated NEPA, but not the NFMA, in approving the use of herbicides to control invasive plant species in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest comprises 2.3 million acres in the northeast corner of Oregon and the w...

The Ninth Circuit upheld a jury's award of $28.8 million in intangible environmental damages for harm caused by a wildfire negligently caused by a construction company that burned roughly 18,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest in Southern California. The company did not contest its liabil...

A Minnesota appellate court reversed a lower court decision permanently enjoining the construction of a 450-foot wireless-communications tower outside of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), a 1.1 million-acre wilderness area composed of federal and state lands in northeastern Minn...