I’m not normally a fan of the way environmental advocacy organizations sue to get things done. The Center for Biological Diversity, for instance, sues a lot. Like a lot.
This particular environmental nonprofit seems to be in the lawsuit business. On the nonprofit’s website, it brags about filing 266 lawsuits during Trump’s first term.
“We won nearly 9 out of 10 times—and we’re not about to slow them down now,” the center stated.
Awesome. Go get ’em, tiger. What actually happens when you win? Do things change? Sometimes.
This time around, the Center for Biological Diversity is 57-lawsuits strong against the administration, so far. In November alone, it sued over California spotted owls, offshore oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico (America?), a logging project in a North Carolina national forest, and a little flower in Washington.
That doesn’t include lawsuits filed against state agencies and local governments.
As the Santa Lucia Chapter of the Sierra Club and other organizations pointed out in a recent commentary in New Times, there’s unfortunately a good reason for these kinds of lawsuits: “environmental enforcement often fails when governments regulate themselves. That’s exactly why Congress included citizen lawsuit provisions in key environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act.”
It took lawsuits to get both State Parks and SLO County to release long-stagnant draft habitat conservation plans when it comes to protecting and managing endangered species at the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area and Arroyo Grande Creek below Lopez Dam, respectively.
And that’s a problem. Needing to protect federally listed species is an imperative issue, and it’s not new. These plans have been in the works for years and years but held back from the public.
Just three days after a federal judge ruled that State Parks was violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing off-roading in snowy plover habitat, the state agency finally released a draft of its more than 20 years of work on a habitat conservation plan. Coincidence? I think not.
Why did the agency need to spend five years in court and countless public funds to defend itself against a lawsuit when it already knew it was violating the law?
It didn’t.
Did the Center for Biological Diversity need to sue State Parks to get that document done and out in public circulation? It sure seems like it did.
The defendant, according to the federal judge, “largely does not dispute the many examples of ‘takes’ of snowy plovers provided by plaintiff, including specifically by vehicle collisions.”
How would you like to be the off-roader who ran over a cute, little shorebird?
A take—for you non-environmental nerds out there—is killing, harassing, or wounding an endangered species.
Takes are illegal, obviously. But they happen, and they can be “mitigated” and legal with the help of one of those habitat conservation plans. Wild, I know. In the meantime, though, snowy plovers seem to have staged a comeback—despite those dune buggies trying to mow them down and the lack of an official conservation plan, the population has more than sextupled since 2002.
Lots of snowy plover sex happening on the Central Coast, if you know what I mean.
Jeff Miller with the Center for Biological Diversity, which won its lawsuit and essentially compelled State Parks to release this conservation plan for snowy plovers and a dozen other endangered or threatened species, called the plan a “dune buggy conservation plan.” Hah! Good one, Jeff.
I smell another lawsuit in the future.
The Oceano Dunes is single-handedly propping up attorneys up and down the coast. The number of lawsuits that one, single state park has given birth to are too numerous to count, and it always seems like State Parks is on the losing end—whether it’s the off-roaders or environmentalists doing the suing.
Quagmire city.
While the Center for Biological Diversity didn’t hop onto the bandwagon suing SLO County over Lopez, the local Sierra Club absolutely did, joining up with its pals Los Padres ForestWatch (its lawsuit track record is not as good as the Center for Biological Diversity’s), San Luis Obispo Coastkeeper, and others. But it isn’t the snowy plover standing in the way of SLO County’s water releasing decisions.
It’s steelhead, and other species, too, but mostly steelhead.
A judge ruled that SLO County needed a habitat conservation plan for steelhead et al. The county worked for months to get the plan finalized and finally released it in October, almost a full year after the initial ruling.
But these sorts of things are slow, you know? It takes a lawsuit to really get things moving. Lawsuits are like the fiber local governments need to tackle environmental issues in “good faith.”
I’m not sure if a lawsuit will be the end result for Cambria and its water reclamation facility, but hopefully not.
After 10 years of not being able to use the facility that cost ratepayers millions of dollars, the Community Services District finally submitted a coastal development permit application to the county! Whew.
And, possibly, it also has a new solution to the facility’s problematic waste stream. Get this: long ago, someone convinced the district to install an evaporation pond to deal with it, but Cambria is too foggy for evaporation to even happen.
What? ∆
The Shredder evaporates weekly. Send comments to shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 7, 2025.
Since America was conveniently deindustrialized (by Boomers), the concentration of capital our industrial base represented no longer exists. As such, public agencies and the public wallet is all that is left for attorneys and their clients to go after. If Americans are concerned about the decline in public services or our public sector’s basic insolvency, we need reindustrialize. Doing so so serves many purposes, it provides jobs for Americans, it provides a stream of tax, and provides alternative targets for the specious lawsuits so many ambulance chasers, masquerading as attorneys, to go after. Our industrial base can be revitalized by applying the same principles given to our defense industry. Namely, looking at non-defense related industrial activity as a matter of national security. We don’t need to compete with China, let them go to work in coal mines. What we Americans can do is move from a culture of status seeking to one where we develope more enduring values. We could begin with food security and the security of small farmers. Next we could begin with appreciating quality and not building products that are designed to break a week after leaving the store. Let’s build a national healthcare system. This might require disallowing doctors to make the kind of money they do. Doctors need to take a haircut and healthcare management companies should be immediately dissolved.