A Louisiana court held that the state erred in issuing a coastal use permit to a natural gas storage and transport company that was needed to create two new natural gas storage caverns in the Jefferson Island salt dome underneath Lake Peigneur. The state's natural resource department violated the st...

A district court dismissed a lawsuit challenging EPA's initiation of CWA §404(c) proceedings for the proposed Pebble Mine project, a large copper and gold mine in the Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska. Alaska, which owns the land, as well as the company that owns the underlying mineral ri...

A district court upheld EPA's revocation of a CWA §404 permit allowing a mining company to discharge fill material from its West Virginia mountaintop coal mine into two nearby streams. EPA withdrew the permit's designation of the streams as disposal sites after determining that the discharges would...

A district court upheld the National Park Service's (NPS') plan to allow off-road vehicle (ORV) use on designated trails in the "addition lands" of Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve. In 1988, Congress authorized the acquisition of what is referred to as the "addition lands," consisting of appr...

A district court upheld DOI's decision to withdraw more than one million acres of federal land adjacent to the Grand Canyon National Park from uranium mining. The withdrawal will close these lands to the exploration and development of uranium mining claims for 20 years, although mining of a few exis...