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Dear Guardian,
It’s another big win for public lands and climate!
This month, a federal court overturned the Trump administration’s illegal sale of public lands for fracking in Montana.
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in 2018 by WildEarth Guardians, three landowners, and our partners with the Montana Environmental Information Center. We targeted the sale of nearly 150,000 acres—more than 230 square miles—of public lands to the oil and gas industry.
The lands involved spanned Montana and included areas next to the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, along the Beartooth Mountains Front, in the Tongue River Valley, and many other places.
While normally our staff attorneys take on these cases, attorneys with the Western Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice graciously offered legal representation in this particular case.
Before filing suit, we toiled on the frontlines to build the legal record against the Trump administration’s oil and gas giveaway.
Guardians’ Climate and Energy Program Attorney, Becca Fischer, led the charge to draft and ultimately file hundreds of pages of comments and exhibits exposing how Trump’s Bureau of Land Management was illegally turning its back on climate science.
On May 1, we got the word that the federal judge not only agreed with us, but also agreed that the sale of public lands should be completely undone.
In other words, we completely undid the damage done by the Trump administration.
This isn’t just a big win for Montana, it’s another big win for the climate and for defending the American West from the oil and gas industry.
And it comes on the heels of a slew of court victories we’ve scored in the past few years that have protected public lands and climate from the fossil fuel industry.
We couldn’t do this without you. Thank you. Without your support, this win never would have happened. We hope you take as much credit for this latest victory as we do. Onward!
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