Sierra Club v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service

The Gulf sturgeon was listed as a protected species under the Endangered Species Act. In 1994, an environmental group sued the United States Department of the Interior (Interior), seeking a decision on whether to designate critical habitat for the sturgeon. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service (the services) (defendants) found that it was not prudent to designate a critical habitat for the sturgeon. Interior regulations provided that critical-habitat designation was not prudent if such designation would not be beneficial to the species. Critical-habitat designation benefitted a species mainly because federal agency actions that would result in the destruction or adverse modification of a critical habitat required consultation with the secretary of the Interior prior to taking the action. Any action that was likely to jeopardize the continued existence of a species also required consultation with the secretary. One of the Interior’s regulations, 50 C.F.R. § 402.02, defined “destruction or adverse modification” as an alteration that diminishes the value of critical habitat for both the survival and recovery of a listed species. The same regulation defined “jeopardize the existence” of a species as an action that would reduce the likelihood of both the survival and recovery of a listed species. The services reasoned that critical-habitat designation was not prudent because any federal action that destroyed or adversely modified the sturgeon’s critical habitat would jeopardize the sturgeon’s existence and thus trigger consultation with the secretary of the Interior under the jeopardy standard, so designating a critical habitat would have had little practical benefit. Notably, the consultation requirement was not triggered under this regulation if only a species’ recovery, and not its survival, was threatened. The Sierra Club (plaintiff) sued the services, challenging the decision not to designate critical habitat for the sturgeon as arbitrary and capricious because it was based on an invalid regulation. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the services. The Sierra Club appealed.