Ninth Circuit Deals Blow to Izembek Wilderness

Ninth Circuit Deals Blow to Izembek Wilderness You may recall that in June 2020, we won our latest legal challenge in a decades-long battle over the construction of a road through the heart of the Izembek Wilderness in Alaska. As is sometimes the case, the story isn’t over. The Trump administration appealed to the Ninth Circuit in August 2020, and in a disappointing move, the Biden administration continued with the appeal, filing a legal brief in support. We learned on Wednesday that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the Trump and Biden administrations’ favor, putting Izembek at risk once again. A road bisecting the internationally-renowned Izembek National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness would be catastrophic.  The Izembek Wilderness is a remote stretch of land where a quarter-million migratory birds congregate each fall and where massive brown bears—as many as nine per mile—lumber through streams during peak summer salmon runs. Nearly 7,000 caribou make their annual trek into the Wilderness where they overwinter, and hundreds of sea otters swim with their young in the Izembek Lagoon, occasionally in the vicinity of migrating orcas, gray whales, and minke whales. Izembek is a hub of natural diversity, protected in large part because of its seclusion and lack of surrounding development. Commercial interests see this ecologically intact refuge as a barrier to commerce. King Cove, an Aleut town on the far side of the Wilderness that is home to foreign-owned Peter Pan Seafoods, has long pushed for a road to “link together two communities having one of the State’s premier fishing ports/harbors (including North America’s largest salmon cannery) in King Cove with one of the State’s premier airports at Cold Bay.” Then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell analyzed this proposal and issued a decision in 2013 prohibiting road construction due to “significant degradation of irreplaceable ecological resources” and because there are transportation alternatives for reaching King Cove. However, after the Trump administration took office, Interior did an about-face and ushered through a closed-door land exchange agreement to facilitate the road construction. We challenged that agreement in federal district court and won in 2019. When Trump’s Interior sealed a second closed-door agreement to push the land exchange and road construction through, we sued again in district court and won. Wednesday’s 2-1 ruling reversed the district court’s decision. We may have lost this skirmish, but the battle to protect Izembek is far from over. It’s long past time for the Biden administration to stop pursing this Trump-era road and start defending the irreplaceable Izembek refuge and Wilderness as Congress intended and as Americans deserve. The case is now remanded to the district court for further review. Trustees for Alaska represents Wilderness Watch and eight other groups in the lawsuit. Read the decision. Read more in a press release. To learn more: Watch our webinar, “Izembek: World-Class Wilderness or Highway?” Watch Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Izembek film

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