Environmental Groups Out on a Limb? The Supreme Court justices on Wednesday seemed receptive to government arguments that a coalition of environmental groups lacked standing to bring a challenge to U.S. Forest Service regulations because their claims were not tied to a specific site or project. In the Forest Service case, Summers v. Earth Island Institute, the environmental organizations challenged regulations under the Forest Service's Appeals Reform Act that exempted certain projects from notice, comment and appeal requirements. The challenge initially involved the Burnt Ridge Project in Sequoia National Forest, but after the project was withdrawn and the parties settled the case, the environmental groups continued to pursue a facial challenge to the regulations. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court's injunction against the implementation of the regulations nationwide. Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler argued on behalf of the government that the environmental groups could only establish standing to challenge the regulations "by showing an imminent injury by virtue of harm to a site-specific activity." Matt Kenna of the Western Environmental Law Center, who represented the environmental groups, told the justices that the facial challenge to the regulations "could have been brought outside the context of the Burnt Ridge Project, as long as we had shown that it had been applied to a project and continued to be applied to the plaintiffs on an ongoing basis." But Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said the environmental groups had not pointed to any other concrete action implicated by the regulations....