Sierra Club v. Morton
"Sierra Club v. Morton" is a significant legal case from the early 1970s in which the Sierra Club, an environmental organization, sued the U.S. Forest Service to halt the approval of development permits for a resort in Mineral King Valley, California. This area was valued for its natural beauty and wilderness character. The Supreme Court's ruling focused on the issue of standing, determining whether the Sierra Club had the right to challenge the federal agency's decision. While the Court acknowledged that the proposed development could harm the valley's aesthetics and ecology, it ultimately ruled that the Sierra Club did not have standing because it failed to demonstrate that its members would be directly affected by the development.
This decision sparked ongoing discussions about the ability of organizations to represent environmental interests in court. Dissenting opinions highlighted the need for a broader interpretation of standing, suggesting that natural entities should have their own advocates in legal matters. The case ultimately influenced environmental litigation, establishing precedents that shaped how standing is determined in subsequent cases. It reflects the complex intersection of environmental protection, legal rights, and the role of advocacy groups in safeguarding natural resources.
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Sierra Club v. Morton
The Case: U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the principle of standing in U.S. environmental law
Date: Decided on April 19, 1972
Sierra Club v. Morton opened the federal courts to a wealth of environmental litigation because it settled the question about whether an injury to a noneconomic interest could provide the basis for a challenge to a federal agency decision.
During the early 1970’s the Sierra Club sued the U.S. Forest Service to prevent the agency from approving permits that would allow Walt Disney Enterprises to construct a $35 million complex of motels, restaurants, swimming pools, and ski trails in Mineral King Valley, a quasi-wilderness area located in the Sierra Nevada of California. Up to fourteen thousand visitors per day were expected to gain access to the resort by using a 32-kilometer (20-mile) highway to be built, in part, through Sequoia National Park. The federal district court granted an injunction, but the federal court of appeals reversed it. The Supreme Court did not consider whether the building of the proposed development would violate federal law; rather, its focus was on whether the Sierra Club, as an organization with a special interest in the preservation of national parks and forests, had standing to challenge a federal agency’s decision to issue the permits.
The Supreme Court had addressed the standing issue in Association of Data Processing Service Organizations v. Camp (1970), in which it had held that people who seek judicial review of a federal agency’s action under Section 10 of the Administrative Procedure Act have to claim that the agency caused them injury in fact and that the injury was a harm within the zone of interests protected or regulated by statutes the agency was said to have violated. In Sierra Club v. Morton, Justice Potter Stewart’s opinion for the Court addressed only the “injury in fact” element of the Data Processing test. The Court accepted the Sierra Club’s claim that noneconomic injury constitutes injury in fact, that the “change in the aesthetics and ecology” caused by Mineral King’s development “would destroy or otherwise adversely affect the scenery, natural and historic objects and wildlife of the park and would impair the enjoyment of the park for future generations.” However, the Court rejected the Sierra Club’s argument that it did not have to claim that its members would be adversely affected by the Mineral King development because the club’s long-standing concern for and expertise in environmental matters gave it standing as a “representative of the public.” In denying standing, the Court held that an organization’s sincere interest in an environmental problem, even if the interest is of long duration and the organization is highly qualified to speak on behalf of the public, is not enough to satisfy the “injury in fact” requirement. If it were, the Court feared, there would be “no objective basis on which to disallow a suit by any other bona-fide organization no matter how small or short-lived.”
Justice William O. Douglas, in an eloquent dissent, argued that the case should have been entitled Mineral King v. Morton and that the Court should have designed a standing rule that would have permitted the Sierra Club to litigate the Forest Service use permit on behalf of the valley. Drawing upon and citing Christopher Stone’s law review article “Should Trees Have Standing?,” Douglas proceeded to sketch the broad outlines of an imaginative redefinition of standing. The law, he said, indulges a fiction that inanimate objects such as ships and corporations are people and may, therefore, be parties to litigation. So should it be with valleys, such as Mineral King, and with lakes, rivers, and forests. Who should speak for these inanimate objects and defend their rights? Congress, he argued, is “too remote . . . and too ponderous.” Federal agencies, including the Forest Service, “are notoriously under the control of powerful interests.” Only those who have an intimate relationship with valleys, lakes, rivers, and forests, because they hike, fish, or “merely sit in solitude and wonderment,” may speak for the values that these natural objects represent.
Justice Harry Blackmun’s dissent was much more direct in its criticism of the Court’s “practical” decision. The Court’s “somewhat modernized” conception of standing, he argued, was not adequate to deal with the novel issues raised by the deteriorating state of the environment. He suggested two alternatives: Either approve the district court’s decision on the condition that the Sierra Club amend its complaint to comply with the Court’s standing rule or redefine standing, as Justice Douglas had, to permit any bona fide environmental organization, such as the Sierra Club, to litigate on behalf of Mineral King. He did not fear, as the majority on the Court did, that an expanded definition of standing would open a Pandora’s box of litigation, and he had much greater faith that appropriate restraints could be imposed on an “imaginative expansion” of standing.
Sierra Club v. Morton opened the federal courts to a wealth of environmental litigation because it settled the question left open by the Data Processing case about whether an injury to a noneconomic interest could provide the basis for a challenge to a federal agency decision. The Court further broadened its standing test in United States v. Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedures (1973) and Duke Power v. Carolina Environmental Study Group (1978) by allowing environmental groups to gain standing based on tenuous claims of causation between a proposed federal agency action and fairly speculative injuries. In Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation (1990), the Court tightened up standing and made it more difficult for environmental groups to gain access to federal courts and challenge federal programs by requiring them to allege that the specific lands involved were actually used by their members.
Bibliography
Buck, Susan J. Understanding Environmental Administration and Law. 3d ed. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2006.
Cox, Robert. “Public Participation in Environmental Decisions.” In Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. 2d ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2010.
Findley, Roger W., and Daniel A. Farber. Environmental Law in a Nutshell. 7th ed. St. Paul, Minn.: Thomson/West, 2008.
Hoban, Thomas, and Richard Brooks. Green Justice: The Environment and the Courts. 2d ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.
Stone, Christopher D. Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.