Western Environmental Law Center

@westernlaw.org

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We use the power of the law to foster thriving, resilient Western lands, waters, wildlife, and communities in the face of a changing climate.

Lost Lake Roadless Area, Mt. Hood National Forest. Photo by USFS.
THE ANSWER IS DATA CENTERS TO MAKE AI WRONG ANSWER ROBOTS
Wolverine by Kalon Baughan
Read the full letter at westernlaw.org/news. Huge thanks to our partners in this work: AMIGOS BRAVOS • BADLANDS CONSERVATION ALLIANCE • BIRD ALLIANCE OF OR • CASCADIA WILDLANDS • CBD • CHC CLIMATE JUSTICE ALLIANCE • COALITION FOR CLEAN AFFORDABLE ENERGY • COLUMBIA RIVERKEEPER • COOK INLETKEEPER • DEVIL’S SPRING RANCH • DINÉ CARE • DOUGLAS COUNTY GLOBAL WARMING COALITION • EARTHWORKS • EPIC • FAMILIES FOR A LIVABLE CLIMATE • FRIENDS OF THE EARTH • FRIENDS OF THE INYO • FRIENDS OF THE SHASTA RIVER • FRIENDS OF THE WILD SWAN • GALLATIN WILDLIFE ASSOCIATION • GILA RESOURCES INFORMATION PROJECT • GREAT BASIN WATER NETWORK • GREEN LATINOS • GREEN LATINOS NM • HEALTHY CLIMATE NM • HIGH COUNTRY CONSERVATION ADVOCATES • KS WILD• LOS PADRES FORESTWATCH • MT ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION CENTER • MT HEALTH PROFESSIONALS FOR A HEALTHY CLIMATE • MOUNT SHASTA BIOREGIONAL ECOLOGY CENTER • NAEVA • NEW MEXICO ACEQUIA ASSOCIATION • NEW MEXICO INTERFAITH POWER AND LIGHT • NEW MEXICO VOICES FOR CHILDREN • NEW MEXICO WILD • NM CAFe – COMMUNITIES EN ACCIÓN Y DE FE • NM NATIVE VOTE • NORTH CASCADES CONSERVATION COUNCIL • NORTHEAST OREGON ECOSYSTEMS • NORTHWEST ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCATES • NUESTRA TIERRA CONSERVATION PROJECT • OLYMPIC PARK ADVOCATES • ORANGE COUNTY COASTKEEPER • OREGON WILD • PARK COUNTY ENVIRONMENTAL COUNCIL • PARTNERSHIP FOR EARTH SPIRTUALITY • PEOPLE AND POLLINATORS ACTION NETWORK • ROGUE RIVERKEEPER • SAN JUAN CITIZENS ALLIANCE • SAN LUIS VALLEY ECOSYSTEM COUNCIL • SIERRA CLUB – MONTANA CHAPTER • SODA MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS COUNCIL • Southeast Alaska Conservation Council • SPOKANE RIVERKEEPER • THE GLOBAL WARMING EXPRESS • CAREs • TUALATIN RIVERKEEPERS • UMPQUA NATURAL LEADERSHIP SCIENCE HUB • UMPQUA VALLEY AUDUBON SOCIETY • UMPQUA WATERSHEDS • WATER POLICY PATHWAYS • WELC • WORC • WESTERN SLOPE CONSERVATION CENTER • WWP • WHITE MOUNTAIN CONSERVATION LEAGUE • WILD CONNECTIONS ¨ WILDEARTH GUARDIANS • WILDERNESS WORKSHOP • WILLAMETTE RIVERKEEPER • Wyoming Wilderness Association
These changes would reduce environmental review to a paperwork exercise and limit judicial accountability to the point of meaninglessness. Proponents of permitting reform have also signaled strong interest in changing other bedrock environmental laws, including the clean water act, endangered species act, and national historical preservation act. These proposals effectively neutralize environmental and community protections to accelerate permit approvals for energy, technology, and other infrastructure--primarily climate-harming fossil fuels. We urge you to reject permitting reform for what it is: a reactive capitulation to energy and technology industry demands and the trump administration's deliberately engineered regulatory chaos. There is simply no precedent for what this administration has wrought, and permitting reform proposals under consideration--which scapegoat environmental laws--will only deepen the harm.
The Trump administration and its enablers in Congress have demonstrated their hostility to environmental safeguards as well as indifference or ignorance of the public health and ecological effects of these changes by fundamentally eroding, incapacitating, planning to repeal, removing protections for, or fundamentally undermining as agencies the: Endangered Species Act Roadless Rule Endangerment finding on climate emissions Clean Water Act Clean Air Act Methane Rule Public Lands Rule Chaco Culture National Historical Park protection zone Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness protections Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) Powder River Basin coal leasing withdrawal U.S. Forest Service Environmental Protection Agency
JOINT LETTER How does "permit reform" legislation target NEPA? NEPA requires agencies to: (1) take a hard look at impacts to people, communities, and the environment and disclose those impacts to the public; (2) consider alternatives to avoid and mitigate harm; and (3) provide for public involvement. Sounds like a pretty good idea, right? (Yes, it is). But back in December, thanks to permit reform backers, the SPEED Act (H.R.4776) aimed to permanently dismantle those protections. It passed in the House then, and it's now pending in the Senate.
73 western groups to Senate leadership: No to permit reform false solutions
the modern oil and gas industry is actually worse than captain planet villains were in the show
Roosevelt elk on the shores of Cannon Beach, Oregon, with Haystack Rock in the background.
This bill is another attempt by the oil and gas industry to bypass sound science and protecting public health and the environment...And it will be heard in committee this saturday. It's time to speak up. Here's what we can do -->
Water advocacy action alert: HB207 would mandate discharge of "treated" oil and gas waste ("produced water") to our state's rivers, streams, and groundwater. This Saturday, we need to speak up and tell legislators to stop this bill. What's produced water? -->
Accountability. We cannot move forward absent a reckoning with those who have designed, led, and executed the regime’s agenda. This includes fair and transparent criminal and civil investigations into the regime’s transgressions. We must also reject the policy logic that gave rise to the security state ostensibly intended to shield the United States from foreign terrorism but that this regime has now weaponized against the people and communities who have made their home in this country. . National imagination. We must fight with an eye to the future—a day when this regime’s transgressions and atrocities have ceased—and we have an opportunity to rethink and revitalize American democracy. The institutions and systems that we once assumed would shield us from the rise of tyranny in the United States have proven fallible. These institutions and systems must therefore be rethought and revitalized and, in some instances such as ICE, dismantled altogether. In the domain of environmental law, we are doing just that with our Emergent Horizons campaign, an effort designed to spark society-wide climate and conservation action fit for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century and beyond.
The Trump regime gravely threatens our vision here at WELC of a thriving U.S. West, abundant with interconnected ecosystems, powered by renewables, and tended by communities united in an ecology of kinship. It is this threat -- to people, to country, to the world around us -- that compels us to urge society-wide public action. We therefore urge that each person -- based on their ability and capacity -- consider four categories of action to bring this promise to life: Resolute, peaceful protest. The regime seeks to inflame chaos as a pretext to oppress people and communities with paramilitary forces. We must peacefully stand with conviction in defiance of these actions, asserting our freedoms of speech and assembly and right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Courage is contagious. . Mutual aid and solidarity. Respect your neighbors. Stand with your neighbors. Provide aid to your neighbors. And do so regardless of whether they are a citizen or immigrant because we are all in this together. We say this in full light of the courage we have witnessed in Minnesotans over the past days and weeks. To provide immediate support, we recommend Stand with Minnesota, which provides a vetted directory of organizations and opportunities seeking donations. As demonstrated by Minnesota, building networks of mutual aid and solidarity in your community creates the conditions for collective resilience
That same day, the Associated Press reported that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, asserted the sweeping power to break into homes without a judicial warrant, contrary to the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and judicial precedent. On January 24th, the logic of this entire strategy further unspooled with the killing of Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis—a human being, we note, who cared deeply for his neighbors, stood against the regime’s oppressive tactics in Minneapolis, and shared our love for the natural world.
It declined to investigate the ICE officer who perpetrated that horrific event, falsely claimed Renée Good was a “domestic terrorist,” threatened to invoke the 1792 Insurrection Act, opened transparently political federal investigations into Minnesota public officials including the governor, attorney general, and Minneapolis mayor, as well as Renée Good’s widow, and intensified its campaign of terror against the people of Minneapolis. This includes actions such as those on 1/21, when ICE agents took 5-year-old asylum seeker Liam Conejo Ramos after he arrived home from preschool, using him as bait to detain his father. Agents sent both far from home to a detention center in Texas despite lacking a deportation order (both entered the country legally at a U.S. port of entry) in yet another heartbreaking example of community members detained or deported by ICE with zero lawful authority to do so.
In March 2023, Donald Trump ominously proclaimed to his supporters that “I am your retribution,” revealing his intent to betray his oath of office and responsibility to the whole American public. A year into his second term, his regime has repeatedly laid siege to American cities with heavily armed paramilitary forces. On January 7th, as the New Year dawned, the regime’s provocations reached new levels in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent killed Renée Good, a 37-year mother, wife, poet, and American citizen.
The U.S. was forged by waves of immigrants from across the world and the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples. These complex demographics have inspired both conflict and cooperation channeled through a constitutional system grounded in the declaration of Independence's unequivocal, if aspirational, statement that "all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This founding declaration is now in peril and the constitutional system that grew from it at risk of collapse. None of this is a surprise.
Hope sits in the trenches, the last one standing, its teeth cracked, its knuckles bruised, its body broken; but its eyes are still gleaming with the light of a million lamps. Its heart is still beating Because even here, Even now, It knows that a better world Is worth fighting for. -Nikita Gill We are in the midst of a crisis that demands, above all, that the people rise to defend american freedoms and democracy -- that we embrace nikita gill's truth that a better world is worth fighting for.
Pecos River in NM
tell your house representative a vote for the "SPEED Act" is a vote for Project 2025. The SPEED Act would gut enviro protex nationwide, prioritize private profit over public health, silence the voices of frontline communities, and severely limit the public's right to legal recourse
A vote for the SPEED Act is a vote for Project 2025, unhinged deregulation, and more power in the hands of extractive industries. And after passing the House Natural Resources committee, it has an alarming chance to continue through the House. THE SPEED ACT IS GOING TO A VOTE THIS COMING MONDAY ON DECEMBER 8TH, SO WENEED TO SPEAK UP NOW. Call or email your representative at congress.gov/contact-us or dial (202) 224-3121 for the U.S. House switchboard operator to request your representative's office. SAMPLE CALL SCRIPT: "Hi, I'm [Namel calling from [Town]. I'm calling to ask Representative to oppose the SPEED Act, H.R. 4776. This bill would devastate opportunities for public participation in project development decisions, undermine scientific progress, contribute to widespread ecological harm, and steal more from Americans' already vulnerable public lands and environmental health safeguards."
REASON #3: AVOIDING ACCOUNTABILITY When communities and advocacy groups identify a project's potential threats, the SPEED act would make it for people to protect their rights and interests. It would do this in many ways, including 1) narrowing the window for filing lawsuits from 6 years to 150 days, and 2) prohibiting courts from enjoining federal agency decisions that violate the law, regardless of the harm that those decisions may cause. Put simply, rather than strengthen NEPA as a tool to improve permitting, it would do precisely what NEPA's critics argue: Turn NEPA into little more than a paperwork checklist that won't improve decisions but risks grave harm to people, communities, and the places we love.
The SPEED Act allows federal agencies to ignore science and all impacts from a project. In a notably terrible move, the bill tells agencies that they don't need to consider new research or gather the information needed to make a reasonable decision once a developer submits a permit application. It also radically scales back the scope of analysis, allowing federal agencies to disregard the exponential harms caused by multiple projects.
3 REASONS TO OPPOSE THE SPEED ACT REASON #1: DISMANTLING THE NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACT (NEPA) NEPA is America's foundational, community-focused environmental law. It provides people with a voice in the decision-making processes that affect their lives and values, serving as a counter to entrenched development interests with insider access to politicians and decisionmakers. This is particularly critical for communities already harmed by higher pollution rates and accelerated climate risks due to environmental racism or limited access to resources. By condemning NEPA as "purely procedural," the SPEED Act prevents NEPA from improving key infrastructure development decisions, such as building new renewables without compromising ecological and community values. REASON #2 —
Do you love Project 2025, unhinged deregulation, and more pollution in your neighborhood? No? Okay, then here's 3 REASONS TO OPPOSE THE SPEED ACT The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (or SPEED) Act (H.R. 4776) is yet another attempt to push the Trump administration's so-called "energy dominance" agenda, which seeks to bulldoze over community concerns in support of fossil fuel and Big Tech's power and wealth. Masquerading as a solution to faster energy development, the SPEED Act would actually accomplish core deregulation goals outlined in Project 2025, including... REASON #1-
Take action today: Call or email your house rep. Tell your house rep: A vote for the speed act is a vote for project 2025. The speed act would gut environmental protex nationwide, prioritize private profit over public health, silence the voices of frontline communities, severely limit the public's right to legal recourse
The Roadless Rule is an extremely popular, science-based provision limiting commercial logging and associated road construction on some of the wildest and most undisturbed public lands in the country. One of the best American ideas of this century, the Roadless Rule protects 58.5 million acres of intact national forest lands. Yet now the Trump administration intends to rescind the Roadless Rule to allow the private logging, mining, and fossil fuel industries to profit at great generational cost to the American people and the natural world. We have vowed to fight for the Roadless Rule—and for the wild places it protects and preserves. WELC led a coalition of groups that successfully petitioned the BLM to create its 2024 Public Lands Rule. The landmark rule recognizes that conservation in public lands management is equal to extractive uses such as fossil fuel production and mining. This rule improves the balance of the agency’s multiple-use mission across 245 million acres of public lands. The Trump administration plans to eliminate the rule. We will defend the rule, which at last operationalizes the BLM’s longstanding conservation authority and responsibility under the law. NEPA: The Trump administration and some members of Congress are hellbent on eviscerating the country’s environmental “Magna Carta,” NEPA. New procedures severely limit NEPA’s application and the public’s right to participate in decisions affecting their communities. Worse still, Congress is considering several bills to further limit NEPA, including a blatant effort at wholesale deregulation under a pretense of "permit reform." The SPEED Act would silence communities, limit env reviews, exclude science, and impose excessive barriers to judicial review—all for private profit. This bill has a dangerous level of support because the issue has been misleadingly framed. We are using our expertise to defend NEPA for all people.
MT is one of only a handful of states that recognizes a constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, including a stable climate. For decades, the state of MT has promoted, incentivized, and deregulated the fossil fuel industry, knowingly worsening climate change. Beginning in 2020, we represented 16 young people in a challenge to the state of Montana’s fossil fuel permitting practices that threaten the state’s atmosphere, forests, rivers, lakes, fish, and wildlife. Elected officials’ climate denial and fealty to the fossil fuel industry have harmed these young people’s way of life and constitutional rights to pursue liberty and happiness through the enjoyment of a clean and healthful environment. We took on this case to hold MT’s government accountable and defend these youths’ constitutional rights. Alongside our partners at Our Children’s Trust and McGarvey Law, in 2023, we brought our clients’ powerful stories and climate science into the courtroom in the first ever U.S. climate trial in history. The youth plaintiffs ranged in age from 2-18 when we first filed the lawsuit. They represent unique landscapes and geographies from across the state of Montana and its Tribal lands. During this landmark trial, the youth plaintiffs bravely testified about how climate change has harmed their health, livelihoods, cultural practices, psychological well-being, and the state they call home. World-renowned climate experts testified that Montana’s promotion of fossil fuels and suppression of renewable energy development have aggravated drought, fueled megafires, and depleted natural resources. We were ecstatic when the court ruled in the youth plaintiffs’ favor in 2023, recognizing that the right to a clean and healthful environment is meaningless without a livable climate. One expert called this “the strongest decision on climate change ever issued by any court.” Ever defiant, the state appealed our landmark decision to the Montana Supreme Court. Read more online
Industrial dairies that confine hundreds or thousands of cows in cramped lots create enormous amounts of manure. This waste contains phosphorus and nitrogen, which can cause serious water quality problems. The Washington Department of Ecology must ensure such facilities control these nutrients before they run off into nearby surface waters or leach into groundwater. Yet, Ecology has consistently failed to do so, endangering Washington’s waters, including Puget Sound and communities’ drinking water. In 2021, we won our case against the department's weak pollution discharge permits. Unfortunately, Ecology responded by writing new permits that were still too permissive, leaving communities at risk. We challenged those permits, winning our case this year and forcing Ecology back to the drawing board. Our victory will require new permits that include public review of each factory farm’s pollution control plan, site-specific studies to protect nearby waters, groundwater monitoring for every facility, and improved manure storage systems.
Early this year, our legal advocacy resulted in vital improvements to a federal logging plan in important lynx habitat in the Kettle River Mountains of northeast Washington. Our legal agreement with the U.S. Forest Service protects this habitat in the Colville National Forest and modifies the project to protect lynx habitat and other key ecological values in the area. The federal government is required to protect and recover imperiled species such as the Canada lynx, and to “look before it leaps” when authorizing actions that may impede their recovery. When the Service proposed this logging, the agency failed to meet either requirement. Our legal agreement not only benefits threatened lynx, in part by reestablishing protective lynx analysis unit boundaries—it also protects vital national forest parcels and maintains 40% or more forest canopy in riparian areas critical for lynx forage, travel, seclusion, and breeding habitat.
Protecting grizzly bears across the west: significant wins and ongoing advocacy
Oregon’s 2025 legislative session united Beaver Believers and water advocates toward a common goal: restoring over 106,000 miles of struggling rivers and streams. The Beaver State has the most miles of impaired waterways nationwide due to sedimentation, high water temperatures, and low dissolved oxygen. Expensive solutions for analysis and remediation have proven impossible to implement at the scale demanded. Fortunately, decades of scientific evidence show the effectiveness of beaver dam complexes in addressing these challenges. Championed by WELC, HB 3932 proposed the affordable, low-tech strategy of supporting natural recovery solutions by closing beaver hunting and trapping in impaired waterways on public lands. The main idea? Give beavers space and time to use their ecosystem engineering talents in places that need it most. In partnership with the Oregon Wildlife Coalition, partner groups, and scientific experts, HB 3932 is now state law—an innovative, encouraging win for Oregon beavers, waterways, and communities.
At an August 12 commission meeting, something highly unusual happened: Five cabinet secretaries sat as commissioners—a first in the commission’s 58-year history—displacing experienced agency staff. Emails show the governor’s office orchestrated “WATRgate,” replacing science on the commission with politics. These commissioners all did the governor’s bidding, rejecting motions to stick with the rule that protects clean water.
Environment Department Sec. James Kenney directed agency scientists—charged with making sure New Mexico waters are protected—to stand on the sidelines for the new rulemaking after years working successfully to prohibit fracking waste discharge. Never in the commission’s history has the Environment Department failed to appear in a rulemaking for a rule it would implement.
In a little-known corner of state government lies the Water Quality Control Commission. It’s supposed to protect clean water, but the governor is directing certain members of the commission to approve a plan written by Big Oil to allow the state’s biggest polluters to discharge treated fracking waste into New Mexico’s water supply. It’s an enormous gift to the oil and gas industry—and a reckless gamble on technology that doesn’t yet exist.
The last, best wild places. Imagine Oregon's forests as a pizza. The logging industry, over the last several decades, got to eat all but one of the slices of pizza. We're being asked what is a fair way to share the last slice of pizza with them.
Dear Chief Schultz, We, the undersigned groups representing millions of members, urge you not to rescind the Roadless Conservation Area Rule (Roadless Rule) but instead to keep the Rule in place to protect the wildest parts of our public forests. The plan to rescind this rule jeopardizes nearly 45 million acres of heritage forestland managed by the U.S. Forest Service, comprising nearly a quarter of the territory in our national forest system. Wild forests protected by Inventoried Roadless Area status provide the following benefits to the American public. ● Vital Habitat for Imperiled Species: The lands in question include diverse forests, wetlands, canyons and other undeveloped lands that are critical to our nation's ecological health. Because of their intact nature, these Roadless Areas provide habitat for many imperiled species such as California condors, grizzly bears and wolves in the Yellowstone area, native salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest, migratory songbirds in the Appalachian hardwoods and more. They also sustain wild salmon in Southeast Alaska, where they are the lifeblood for both the fishing industry and traditional subsistence practices of Indigenous communities. ● Important for Protecting Migration Corridors and Game Habitat: Protected roadless areas help ensure that migratory game corridors for species such as elk and mule deer remain intact and protected from roads and the industrial development roads enable. ● Vital for America’s Drinking Water: The US National Forests are the headwaters of many of our great rivers and one of the largest sources of municipal water supply in the nation, serving over 60 million people in 3,400 communities in 33 states. Roads are a major cause of water pollution. Because it provides significant protection for upper watersheds, the Roadless Rule is vital for maintaining clean drinking water for communities across the country. Major U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Portland, Denver and Atlanta receive a signi…
“Democrats must not—especially with the Trump administration in power for three more years—surrender America’s bedrock community and environmental protections to the fossil fuel and extractive industries, intent on looting public resources for profit without regard for the consequences,” said Marlyn Twitchell, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “The provisions in the SPEED Act are so extreme, with no benefit for renewable energy, it defies logic and reason that any Democrat would consider supporting this industry assault on the public. Under no circumstances should anyone concerned with climate or public lands entertain the idea of opening the floodgates of fossil fuel development during the Trump administration. Given the administration’s war on renewable energy projects, this bill would do little but SPEED the climate crisis and the fires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, and oppressive heat that have already killed so many Americans and so severely damaged our homes, public lands, and economy. Congress must protect the public interest. It must not surrender the health and safety of our communities and the nation’s natural heritage to private industry.”
Let's see who's behind abundance once and for all. It's Koch, Peter Thiel, Big Oil, big tech, elon musk, facebook, AI, climate deniers, and hedge funds
We are ranchers in Rio Arriba County. This is a place where land is heritage, where the native grass roots run deep into the soil, and community roots run just as deep. It’s where our family and neighbors raise livestock, grow crops, and live by the principles of care, conservation and reciprocity. None of it is possible without clean, dependable water. But that water is at risk.
light blue background and colorful illustration featuring beavers building a dam on the whole world.
We defend wildlife habitat: We're going to challenge the trump administration's redefinition of harm under the endangered species act so it does not apply to wildlife habitat because habitat is the core of the law.
alex trembath of the breakthrough institute claims to be a democrat, but he is really just a republican lying to try to infiltrate democratic circles
- Black graphic with text that says: BEATING THE BOSS. This budget reconciliation bill is a real Bowser, and it just squeaked through the house in a vote last night. But it hasn't passed the Senate yet, and there’s still time to kill it. We can start now by relentlessly calling and emailing Senators to say this is NOT okay. Dial (202) 224-3121 to reach the Senate switchboard or find additional contact information at bit.ly/StopPaytoPollute