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 district court vacated and remanded BLM's resource management plan and EIS for the Roan Plateau Planning Area in Colorado. BLM considered a number of alternatives in its NEPA analysis, but ultimately decided to permit the leasing of 100% of the plateau for oil and gas drilling subject to vario...
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...
The Ninth Circuit reversed in part and affirmed in part a lower court decision that U.S. Forest Service complied with NEPA and the APA when it amended the Sierra Nevada forest plan in 2004. In stark contrast to the 2001 EIS, which contained a 64-page detailed analysis of the environmental conseq...
The Fourth Circuit held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer violated NEPA when it issued a CWA §404 permit allowing a developer to build a mooring facility and boat ramp 3,000 feet from the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Corps' EA, issued contemporaneously w...
The D.C. Circuit vacated NRC rulemakings concerning the temporary storage and permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Four states, an Indian community, and a number of environmental groups filed a petition for review challenging NRC's "waste confidence decision" (WCD), which, among other thing...
A district court held that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) did not violate NEPA or the ESA when it accepted over 300 bids for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon disaster. An environmental group argued that the ag...
A district court ordered the California Department of Transportation to revise its EA for a proposal to widen a highway through a state park home to ancient redwoods as well as an abundance of wildlife, including the marbled murrelet and spotted owl. There are a number of discrepancies and omiss...
The Fourth Circuit held that the Federal Highway Administration and the North Carolina Department of Transportation violated NEPA when they approved the construction of a 20-mile toll road. In calculating the "no-build" baseline as part of their alternatives analysis, the agencies relied on data...