Environment

Taralyn Romero's property dispute with her Colorado town earned her the title “The Wicked Witch of The West.” 

It can show up in your mail one day:...

When CODA won Best Picture at the 2022 Academy Awards, viewers were surprised. CODA is a quiet film about a deaf fishing family in Massachusetts. It stars an unknown lead actress and was made for under $10 million—a paltry budget, by Hollywood standards. Yet it beat out slick, star-studded movies like Dune, The Power of the Dog, and Don’t Look Up.

The morning after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mike and Chantell Sackett—Pacific Legal Foundation clients who battled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for 16 years over their half-acre property—NPR’s Morning Edition said the Sackett ruling seemed “different, more lasting” than other rulings.

Governments can behave in extreme ways when it comes to sacred animals. In Ancient Egypt, anyone who caused the death of a cat, even accidentally, was put to death.

Men and women who grew up under the world’s cruelest governments are different from the rest of us.

Mountain lions are solitary animals. They don’t move in packs; they prefer to be left alone. A mountain lion will stick to his territory. He’ll generally avoid human beings. But sometimes, hunters go looking for mountain lions. Here’s how a mountain lion hunt works in Montana: Tourists pay thousands of dollars to guides, who wait until a fresh snow blankets the ground. That makes the lion’s prints easy to track. Once the guides find a lion’s trail, they let loose a pack of hounds that chase the lion up a tree, pinning him in place.

The first spectator arrived at midnight. He brought a sleeping bag and an umbrella, then waited outside the Supreme Court all night while it drizzled on and offOther spectators arrived between 2 and 6 a.m. By the time I arrived at the Supreme Court around 9:00 a.m., there was a line of people down the block, waiting in the cold.

When environmentalists celebrate the 50-year impact of the Clean Water Act, they talk about what the law means for animals and plant life. The CWA, they say, has helped fish, birds, and turtles thrive in America’s waterways.

Last July, two climate activists glued their hands to the 540-year-old Botticelli painting Primavera at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. The painting, which depicts mythical figures in a green garden, is one of the most studied and praised in Western Civilization. It is thought to be an allegory about the abundance of nature.

In the late 1970s, two sociologists asked: Where had all the 1960s radical activists—the countercultural voices who clamored for a revolution—ended up in the seventies?

“Somebody must have slandered Josef K.,” Franz Kafka writes in the opening line of The Trial, “for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Josef K. spends the novel in a futile (and ultimately fatal) quest to learn from a mindless bureaucracy what his supposed crime is and how he can prove his innocence. At one point, a priest tells Josef K., “It is not necessary to accept everything as true. One must only accept it as necessary.” The Environmental Protection Agency has adopted this same stance in the case of Sackett v. EPA, which has now spanned 15 years and gone to the Supreme Court twice, most recently in October.

The 12 Gods of Ancient Greece were vengeful and petty.

We all have a slightly distorted idea about who we are and how other people see us.

Ask your average environmental activist about their impression of commercial sea fishing and you’re likely to hear about turtles caught in plastic soda can rings or dolphins trapped in drift nets.

But the Environmental Protection Agency says your small plot of land contains wetlands. Even though it’s in a subdivision surrounded by other houses, the EPA says you can’t continue construction—and they’re threatening to fine you tens of thousands of dollars a day.

In 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared Edward Poitevent’s Louisiana land—which had been in his family since the end of the Civil War—a critical habitat of the dusky gopher frog, a species that hadn’t been seen in Louisiana for 50 years.

Born and raised in New York, Gilbert Fornatora’s family often vacationed in Florida, offering them a warm escape from the brutal East Coast winters. It was during these cherished trips of his boyhood years that he became taken with the Miami-Dade County region. But his interest in the area wasn’t due only to its scenic landscapes and warm sunshine. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Gilbert had become an adult, the investment potential in the western part of the county was expected to boom.

Drive east of of Portland, Oregon, on Highway 84 for a few hours and most of the trip you’ll be alongside the Columbia River, where some centuries ago, steely men named Lewis and Clark risked life and livelihood to paddle into uncharted territory.

Ken Klemm is an American rancher who can talk proper land management techniques just as easily as Enlightenment theory and the importance of individual rights.

In 1994, Jack LaPant moved his wife and two young children from the San Francisco Bay Area to the country to pursue the independence of running his own farm.

In 2013, Andy Johnson built a stock pond on his Wyoming property to provide safer, more reliable access to water for his small herd of cattle. The pro-liberty public interest law movement was born out of a need to combat the escalating creep of government into people’s lives.

In politics, ambition is like water: you need some to survive, but too much and you’ll drown.

When Peter Douglas, longtime chair of the California Coastal Commission (CCC), died in 2012, the accolades flowed like wine. Though a state-level official, he was prestigious enough to land a New York Times obituary lauding him as a “sentry of California’s coast.” The same obit quoted a colleague who dubbed Douglas “the world’s greatest bureaucratic street fighter.” That was intended as a compliment, but the description also suggested something less savory about Douglas’ approach: Like a street fighter, he was willing to fight dirty if he thought it was the way to win.

For many Americans, the cornerstone of “the American dream” is the possibility to someday own a slice of a beach paradise. But as you’ve read throughout this issue, when it comes to beaches—or any land along our coasts— government agencies have declared open season on private property rights.

America is blessed with an abundance of natural beauty. Our country boasts a greater diversity of climates and landscapes than most, from tropical beaches and sandy deserts to wind-swept farmland and snowcapped peaks. This bountiful earth has provided a fertile birthplace for the Great American Experiment. Imagine yourself atop Pike’s Peak, among the first of the Rocky Mountains that American settlers encountered on their journey west. From up there, vast plains stretch out to the east, and rugged mountains dot the landscape to the west. Down below, the city’s buildings look like tiny specks, barely noticeable amid the landscape’s grandeur. No wonder this vista inspired Katharine Lee Bates to pen the verses for “America the Beautiful.”

When government regulations for America’s coastline go too far, there are real consequences. As you’ve read, many beach homeowners can be forced to give up their property or acquiesce to absurd bureaucratic rules.

The first round of nerves really bubbled up when I finally made it to Philmont’s base camp. I’d been to Boy Scout camps and countless campouts before but this was the big one: This was Philmont. No amount of merit badges on a khaki uniform could prepare me for those visceral feelings of uncertainty, awe, and excitement for the adventure I was about to experience.

The concepts of property rights and conservation are unfortunately, and mistakenly, pitted against each other on a regular basis. But what happens when people are forced to fight for their property rights in order to conserve their land?

Federal Laws can be valuable tools for protecting the environment. But as a result, environmental laws also limit the ability of property owners to protect public resources.

A healthy environment is critical to human flourishing. Without clean water, air, and soil, people cannot achieve their full potential. But too often, overzealous government bureaucrats and misguided activists have twisted well-meaning environmental laws. The result has been the violation of property rights and other liberties. Two related aspects of modern-day environmental law make this situation worse: it’s politicized, and it’s out of date. Take the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—the premier federal wildlife protection statute. The ESA establishes a two-tiered framework for the protection of wildlife: “endangered” status for the most imperiled species and “threatened” status for those less in danger of extinction. The law prohibits—on pain of significant civil and criminal penalties—the injuring or harming of any endangered species, but it gives federal agencies the discretion to decide how much to protect threatened species.

Several years ago, local officials in the small town of Marquette, Michigan, planned to build a road so that large industrial mining trucks would bypass busy city streets and schools. By providing a shorter, more efficient route, the new road would assist local industry, make city streets safer, and decrease pollution by saving more than 450,000 gallons of fuel yearly.

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major victory for PLF client Edward Poitevent on November 27 in the case of Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the infamous “phan- tom frog” case, involving the feds’ abuse of the Endangered Species Act through critical habitat designations. But the decision is more than just a win for one client; it’s a big win for private property rights and government accountability.

When most people think about environmental laws, they think about holding bad actors responsible for polluting air or water or destroying public lands. This makes sense: the government has a legitimate role in prohibiting noxious activities that infringe on the rights of others.

Whoever coined the saying “you can’t beat something with nothing” understood why it isn’t enough to highlight where environmental regulation falls short, whether by failing to achieve environmental goals or failing to honor fundamental fairness. We also need to identify solutions that do better.

From the California coast to the Florida Keys, Americans treasure our nation’s beaches for their breathtaking beauty. But in the name of public access, and sometimes in the name of conservation, many local, state, and federal government agencies go too far in dictating how that beauty is protected.

Developing effective public policy is tough, thoughtful work. There is so much to consider: What is the problem? What can be done about it? Who is best equipped (and legally

If any one characteristic could define PLF, it would be our perseverance. Our unwavering belief in the Constitution, and the individual liberty it protects, steels us even when we face the longest odds. When we defended the Sacketts’ right to challenge outrageous government threats and bullying, it did not matter that every court had denied similar property owners their day in court. We knew that justice would win out. We were rewarded for our stubborn belief in the Constitution with a unanimous Supreme Court victory in 2012.

What is nature's beauty worth? How can you put a price on a pristine beachfront or a secluded coastal alcove? Are some worth more than others? Are some worth preserving more than others?

A unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22 vindicated 11 PLF clients like John Duarte and Kevin Pierce who simply wanted to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency in federal court. PLF’s victory ensures that future challengers to the Clean Water Act and regulatory malfeasance will have plenty of time to take the EPA to court.