The court holds that some of an environmental group's challenges to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Endangered Species Act (ESA) take prohibition exemptions regarding salmon are not ripe, and that the NMFS was not arbitrary or capricious in promulgating the ESA §4(d) rule. The court fi...

The court holds that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not err when it refused to object to a county health district's issuance of a Clean Air Act (CAA) operating permit to a business. The court first holds that EPA did not err when it refused to object to the issuance of the operat...

The court holds that the Surface Transportation Board (Board) did not have to conduct an environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or the National Trails System Act (Trails Act) before issuing a certificate of interim trail use (CITU) for a rail line in Idaho under th...

The court affirms in part and vacates in part a lower court decision dismissing claims brought by the owner of several mill sites against the U.S. Forest Service for denying him use of his mining claims. In 1983 and 1984, the Forest Service authorized the owner to conduct operations at a site other ...

The Ninth Circuit upheld the criminal conviction of a Montana resident for violations of the CWA. The resident was sentenced to 18 months in prison and had to pay a $130,000 fine for digging ponds and diverting a creek onto his land in Montana and the neighboring Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest...

A district court held that the federal government must answer claims that it is liable for the cleanup of World War II-era hazardous waste from 12 oil refineries in seven states. Property owners brought a contribution claim against the U.S. government under CERCLA, claiming that the government exerc...

The Sixth Circuit held that the state of Ohio did not properly analyze the environmental harm of an eight-mile stretch of the Nexus natural gas pipeline or consider alternative routes to avoid the City of Green. The pipeline would run through a wetland that the city claimed would be irreparably harm...

A California appellate court held that a project to modify an oil refinery so it can unload the equivalent of 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day should not proceed until corrections can be made to its state environmental impact report (EIR). The project proposed transporting crude oil from the Bak...

A district court held that a Forest Service fire salvage restoration project could proceed despite its risk to protected species. The Cedar Fire began on August 16, 2016, and burned for three weeks over 29,000 acres of mixed conifer and white fir forest, most of which were in the Sequoia National Fo...

The Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court's grant of an injunction to halt a logging project in Oregon. A conservation group brought a citizen suit under the ESA challenging a logging project it claimed would result in the taking of the marbled murrelet, a seabird listed as a threatened species. The ...