The history of Sierra Club v Morton

Jotwell recently ran a review by Angela Fernandez of Daniel P. Selmi's Dawn at Mineral King Valley: The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law (U Chicago Press, 2022). Fernandez writes:

Sierra Club v. Morton [known to some as the "Should Trees Have Standing" case - DS] is a seminal 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case on standing, the essential procedural question of who has a legal right to initiate a lawsuit based on a plaintiff’s alleged injury traceable to a defendant’s unlawful conduct. Daniel Selmi’s new book provides a deep dive into the history and context of this famous case, showing that it was about much more than the majority decision’s denial of the Sierra Club’s standing. And it was not, as some have claimed, launched as a test case to establish standing for environmental groups or the entities themselves, the possibility William O. Douglas went into in his famous dissent dear to the hearts of those interested in the Rights of Nature.

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Despite the fact that Selmi seeks to de-center standing in his history of the case, or at least destabilize the understanding that standing was what Sierra Club v. Morton was always meant to be about, he presents an excellent and thorough discussion of the issue. Selmi explains that the Sierra Club insisted on its general interest in a case that would impact the environment of concern to its members rather than Club members’ actual use of the area, which the Supreme Court indicated it would have accepted. As Justice White reportedly put it: “Why didn’t the Sierra Club have one goddamn member walk through the park and then there would have been standing to sue.” (P. 204.)

However, the Club’s “loss” did nonetheless help establish that an aesthetic non-economic interest (specifically an environmental harm) could ground a lawsuit. (P. 199.) In subsequent lawsuits, relatively few environmental plaintiffs were denied standing. (P. 258.) Sierra Club v. Morton provided clear instruction: establish use and an individual harm, and the courtroom door would be open. Sierra Club’s lawyer Lee Selna’s resistance to “the use theory” comes across as stubborn and slightly irrational. However, Selmi points out that there was also a logic to it, given the fact that users, for example, fishers, campers, guides, would be likely to support development. (P. 206.) Users then, like the Forest Service itself, could not be trusted to keep the ecological interests of the area at the forefront. Hence the dissent’s suggestion that the case should be framed as Mineral King v. Morton, even if the Sierra Club was appointed or otherwise empowered to speak for Mineral King.

In trying to answer the question, who really speaks for Mineral King Valley, the Sierra Club asked: “Is there anybody who really believes that if Mineral King could answer, it would say: “Walt Disney Productions, Inc.’” (P. 226.) The answer to this question, which might have been yes from a trusting public in 1955 or 1965, became a hard no by the 1970s. In this way, Selmi’s book situates the rise of U.S. environmental law in the problem of public agency discretion run amuck in the face of effective lobbying by private interests. While establishing that the non-economic or aesthetic interest of the Sierra Club was one that could be legally vindicated, it was still the interest (general or use-based) of humans; not the non or other-than-human interests of plants, trees, nonhuman animals themselves. This dogged anthropocentrism must be one of the most important legacies of the case to the field of environmental law, which it helped to establish.