Court Holds That Outfitters Can Bring NEPA Claims To Protect Their Recreational Business Interests

A federal court recently held that an owner and an employee of an outfitter were entitled to bring a lawsuit alleging violations of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) based on their recreational interests and rejected the government’s argument that they were disqualified from doing so because they also had business interests at stake.  Often courts rule that individuals such as outfitters who seek to protect bona fide recreational interests are not entitled to allege violations of NEPA because they are viewed as actually pursuing economic interests.  As the court held, recreational providers’ economic interests “do not blight” their genuine aesthetic and environmental interests in protecting the public lands where they work.

The case involved a challenge by a company holding a special recreation permit issued by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to provide heli-skiing in Alaska.  When the BLM issued a permit to another entity for the same activities, the plaintiff asserted that the issuance of the second permit violated NEPA as well as other statutes.  The court held that the interests of the company itself did not fall within NEPA’s zone of interests and thus dismissed its NEPA claim.  The company then moved to amend its lawsuit and add two individuals as co-plaintiffs, the company’s owner and one of its guides.  The two individuals asserted that the decision to issue another heli-skiing permit injured their recreational interests due to increased risks of injury to them and a decrease in the amount of untracked snow.  The court held that, while a corporation cannot have any recreational interests, these two individuals do and NEPA was intended to protect those interests.  While the government argued that the two individuals should not be able to assert violations of NEPA because they were simply trying to turn their business interests into personal recreation interests to invoke NEPA, the court disagreed because they in fact had recreational interests at stake.