Sure it’s tilted to the right in recent years, with all the new, conservative appointments. But the Ninth Circuit showed today that it can still issue a controversial, pro-environmentalist ruling, the kind that has ticked off right-wing politicians and industry groups for decades.
In fact, it issued two rulings today that qualify as classic Ninth Circuit: one unanimous opinion (.pdf), authored by Senior Judge Dorothy Nelson, overturned a lower court’s ruling, and halted two Oregon timber sales on the grounds that the government didn’t properly consider the status of the red tree vole — a “secretive, nocturnal” rodent, according to the U.S. Forest Service, that, like several of the Ninth Circuit’s Carter appointees, subsists entirely on the needles of Douglas Firs.
The Bush Administration’s timber plan, Nelson wrote, didn’t take into account a 2000 government study that ”clearly stated that red tree voles require extensive additional research and protection before any conclusions regarding the impact of logging could be reached.”
Another unanimous Monday opinion (.pdf), by Senior Judge J. Clifford Wallace, offered a victory to a coalition of environmental groups and Indian tribes fighting a geothermal power plant in far-Northern California’s Medicine Lake.
“Medicine Lake and the highlands surrounding it are of great spiritual significance to the Pit River Tribe and to the other Native American tribes in the region. Although the highlands are within the Pit River Tribe’s ancestral homelands, they are not part of the tribe’s reservation. Tribe members, however, consider the region sacred and continue to use numerous important spiritual and cultural sites within the highlands,” Wallace wrote. The government, he said, didn’t adequately take into account those issues when it extended power company Calpine’s leases in 1998 to explore the possibility of building the plant.
“We conclude that the agencies did not take a “hard look” at the environmental consequences of the 1998 lease extensions,” Wallace wrote, overturning a lower court.
— Justin Scheck
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