Source: Youth activists sue Montana, arguing state’s fossil fuel support violates their rights | Grist
The complaint in the groundbreaking climate lawsuit Held v. Montana reads like a history of grief and loss in the short lives of its plaintiffs. In it, displayed simply in a numbered list, are the ways the 16 youth have spent their childhoods watching the world burn. A rancher’s daughter recalls the sadness and stress of seeing a river cycle through droughts and floods, endangering and even killing her family’s cattle. Two brothers who love to hunt and fish recount how the forest they rely upon for food is deteriorating around them. A toddler struggles to breathe as wildfire smoke aggravates his asthma. A young Indigenous woman worries that inexorable changes to the seasons will cause her tribe to lose the ancient cultural traditions that have seen them through seasons of war, genocide, and dispossession.
Each is tired of politicians not only failing to mitigate the problem, but, in their view, actively making it worse. In response, they have taken the bold step of suing the government of Montana, arguing that its enthusiastic support of fossil fuels violates their inalienable right, enshrined in Article II of the state constitution, to a “clean and healthful environment.” They accuse the governor and other officials of neglecting their constitutional duty to preserve and protect the environment for future generations. “Although defendants know that the youth plaintiffs are living under dangerous climatic conditions that create an unreasonable risk of harm, they continue to act affirmatively to exacerbate the climate crisis,” the suit states.
The suit is named for Rikki Held, the rancher’s daughter and the only plaintiff who was 18 when Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Eugene, Oregon, filed the suit in March 2020. It is one of many similar lawsuits nationwide but the first to reach a courtroom. The trial begins Monday and is expected to last two weeks. The youth will take the stand, and the state will vehemently defend itself against what a spokesman for state Attorney General Austin Knudsen has called “meritless and politically motivated” claims by an organization trying “to impose their authoritarian climate agenda on us.”
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The state of Montana, led by a Republican supermajority, does not seem to believe Vlases and her fellow plaintiffs have much agency in this matter, preferring to cast them as puppets of nefarious private interests. State officials have called the lawsuit an act of “political theater” and accused Our Children’s Trust of using the 16 youth as ignorant props. But if it is political theater, it must be effective if the state is so worked up, Hornbein said.
“They understand how big of a deal this is,” said Hornbein. Read Next
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Montana is known for abundant natural beauty and vast public lands, a national destination for lovers of the outdoors. But its Republican-led legislature has been running counter to national decarbonization trends. The state is home to the nation’s largest recoverable coal reserves, as well as the Bakken Formation and its billions of barrels of untapped oil. The Big Sky state is the country’s fifth-largest producer of coal and its 12th-biggest oil producer, and multiple state lawmakers spent time in the oil, gas, and coal industries. Fossil fuel interests have contributed mightily to state legislative campaigns over the past 20 years. So far, one activist wrote in an op-ed to the Daily Montanan, Montana’s legislators have flagrantly ignored environmental protections, and judges have done little to enforce them.
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