Today the court granted review in an environmental-law case, Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The star of Weyerhaeuser’s case is the dusky gopher frog, an endangered species that can only survive in a habitat that meets several specific criteria – including, for breeding, small temporary ponds in a forest where the tree tops are relatively widely spaced. The legal dispute now before the court arose when the FWS designated over 1500 acres of privately owned forest in Louisiana as a “critical habitat” for the frog, which would stand in the way of plans to develop the land, at a cost of up to $34 million. The sticking point is that the dusky gopher frog doesn’t live on the designated land, which doesn’t meet all of the criteria for its survival, and hasn’t been seen there in over 50 years. The landowners’ challenges to the designation failed in the lower federal courts, but now the Supreme Court has agreed to decide two questions presented by the landowners: whether the Endangered Species Act allows an agency like FWS to designate private land as a critical habitat when it is neither a habitat nor critical; and whether courts can review the agency’s decision not to exclude an area from the designation of a critical habitat because of the economic effects of designation....more
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