The Jury is Out: Has the Supreme Court Just Shredded the Environmental Policymaking Safety Net?

Equal Justice Under Law - the pediment of the Supreme Court bulding, Washington, DC (by Thomas Hawk CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr).

Remember what it was like as a kid when a grownup told you “Because I said so”?

Well, a newly constituted majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has recently flexed its ideological muscle, upending 50 years of precedent guiding its decisions, and basically told us “Because I said so.”

This quiet revolution by an activist majority, deciding cases based on primarily political grounds rather than on the constraints of facts and legal precedent, will have grave impact on environmental policymaking – as well civil rights, healthcare, safety, education, elections, technology, finance, and economics…

The Edge of Extinction: Can sea otters survive the human threat? – Kim Steinhardt

Southern sea otter pup learns how to eat shellfish by mimicking mother's actions, first by manipulating an empty shell (Photo © Kim Steinhardt).

I was hooked the first time I saw a southern sea otter bobbing in the surf off the coast of California’s Big Sur. I didn’t know then that I would be as spellbound by these rare creatures decades later as I was at that very first sighting. And little did I know that I was witnessing the latest act in a continuing saga of survival against all odds and an all too real human threat…