Heartwood declares Supreme Court ruling will lead to more effective forest protection on public lands
by Steve Chaplin
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Forest protection advocates with Heartwood found much of merit in an otherwise adverse, but narrowly interpreted, ruling by the US Supreme Court Tuesday, in a case regarding a citizen's right to comment on controversial government projects.
"This ruling will do nothing to keep us from continuing our work to stop bad projects that sell off our forests to corporations and that damage the environment through herbicide spraying, burning, road-building, mining and other poorly conceived management schemes," said Heartwood Forest Watch coordinator Jim Bensman. "If anything, it will lead to us doing our jobs better."
Heartwood (heartland + hardwood) is the cooperative network of grassroots groups, individuals, and local businesses working to protect and sustain healthy forests and vital human communities in the nation's heartland, from the Appalachian Mountains to the river valleys of the Great Plains, and from the Great Lakes to the Deep South. In the past 18 years Heartwood has protected hundreds of thousands of acres from clear-cutting, strip mining, oil and gas drilling, road-building and off-road vehicle abuse.
The case, Summers v. Earth Island Institute, Heartwood, Sierra Club, Sierra Forest Keeper and Center for Biological Diversity, centered around the U.S. Forest Service's decision in 2003 to not seek public comment on projects the agency deemed to have little environmental impact. Heartwood and the other groups won in federal district and appeals courts on their challenge to the agency's decision to suspend citizen notification and comment on the projects.
But in a 5-4 decision released Tuesday, March 3, and written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court found that Heartwood and the other groups did not have the requisite standing, or the ability to show actual injury, required to bring the lawsuit because the specific project – a 238-acre salvage logging project called the Burnt River project – had been settled out of court. Scalia also wrote that Bensman, who said he would be damaged because he intended to visit the forest in the future, was too general in declaring how he would be affected.
"This vague desire to return (to the forest) is insufficient to satisfy the requirement of imminent injury," Scalia said.
Heartwood council chairman Ernie Reed said that if Justice Scalia and the Forest Service need to know Bensman's vacation plans or exactly when he would visit a forest and subsequently be damaged, forest protection advocates can prepare a declaration suitable to overcome that narrow obstacle.
"This ruling does nothing toward creating requirements we cannot meet in future lawsuits, and in the meantime the injunction the lower courts have granted us over these years has stopped a lot of mischief in our forests," Reed said. "We basically got a lesson in how to craft better declarations."
And four of the Supreme Court justices, according to the dissents of Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer, agreed with Reed and Heartwood.
"A threat of future harm may be realistic even where the plaintiff cannot specify precise times, dates and GPS coordinates," Stevens wrote.
And Breyer, arguing against Scalia's notion that Bensman's declaration wasn't thorough enough, used this analogy: "To know, virtually for certain, that snow will fall in New England this winter is not to know the name of each particular town where it is bound to arrive. The law of standing does not require the latter kind of specificity."
Bensman and Reed agreed that Heartwood would now step up its volunteer and donor recruiting efforts in anticipation of the injunction being lifted and a possible subsequent increase in Forest Service projects. The organization also said it would prepare a formal request to President Barack Obama asking his administration to review the rulemaking changes that occurred during the Bush administration that allowed Forest Service projects to avoid public scrutiny and environmental review.
"In the long run, and with the changing sentiments in Washington and around the country with respect to environmental security, we expect the results of this ruling to eventually lead to very positive changes about how these treasures, our national forests, are managed," Reed said.