Word: sierras
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wilderness enthusiasts of the Sierra Club, the Disney plan was an outrage. They filed suit to stop it and carried their fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court-only to be faced with a blunt legal question: What right did the club have...
Traditionally, a lawsuit claims damage or injury to the plaintiff. In rejecting the Sierra Club's action last week. Justice Potter Stewart, writing for the 4-to-3 majority, observed that the group had failed to argue that it or any of its members would be "significantly affected." Instead, they had tried to do "no more than vindicate their own value preferences...
Stewart did find, however, that "aesthetic and environmental wellbeing, like economic wellbeing, are important ingredients of the quality of life" and are "deserving of legal protection." For environmentalists, that was an important victory. Stewart went on to drop a footnote broadly hinting that if the Sierra Club amended its complaint, it might well succeed. Stewart even seemed to suggest that it need claim no more than that its campers regularly use and enjoy the area...
...dissenting Justices, Blackmun, Brennan and Douglas, were even more sympathetic to the conservationists; so Sierra Club lawyers were only briefly dismayed by their technical defeat. The problem now is time, and the attorneys have already begun planning strategy to reactivate the case before any Disney workmen start digging...
David Brower, the wild-haired druid, ecologist and outdoorsman who guided the Sierra Club during its rise to national prominence as a scourge of dam builders and redwood cutters, is the subject. The glitter in such a man's eyes can make it difficult to get a clear look at him, but McPhee had the happy notion of confronting Brower with three of his ideological enemies on threatened terrain-Glacier Peak Wilderness in the state of Washington, Georgia's Cumberland Island and finally, on a raft trip down the Colorado River. In the process Brower and his antagonists...