Alaska News Brief November 2025—With gratitude to you, we sue
This week we sued the Alaska State Board of Game and the Interior Department. Soon enough, we’ll sue again.
Our purpose has always been to uphold the environmental laws so many people and groups fought to put in place, precisely to protect healthy lands and waters that nourish abundant life. We sue when the people and agencies making decisions about what happens in Alaska break the law.
Humpback whale tail lob. Photo by Harvey Hergett.
We can only do this work because of you.
Thank you for standing up for Alaska.
Thank you for joining our lawsuits, for caring about clean water and healthy caribou herds, unindustrialized landscapes and salmon runs, healthy eelgrass beds and migratory birds.
Thank you for putting your time, money, thinking and heart into protecting what matters now and for the people who come after us—the health of Earth and Alaska’s lands and waters and all the living beings who sustain our communities and ways of life.
I believe what we share centers on caring about the lands and waters that hold and nourish us and all the other beings, from mushrooms and algae to tundra flowers and polar bears, and how could I be true to myself without mentioning whales!
Doing that caring work honors those who fought for clean water and air, and healthy land and communities before us, and it honors those who will do the same for generations to come.
Thank you for joining us by showing up and contributing when and where you can.
Thank you for advocating for land, water, and all the living beings that enrich our lives by giving us food and giving us awe.
Thank you for knowing the connections between our health and the health of salmon, geese, bears and all the beings and natural environments that surround us.
Thank you for sharing the work we’re doing together with the people you know and meet so that they, too, can bring their thinking and hearts into the conversation.
And thank you for joining our board, signing petitions, making comments during agency processes (if they hold them!), responding to our appeal letters, reading some of our newsletters, coming to our outreach and fundraising events, sharing kind or inquiring words, and letting us know when there’s a typo in the headline!
Seriously, we really do depend on your energy and purpose to inform our own, particularly when the conditions ahead look rocky and icy with a cruel headwind.
I’ll be honest. Going to court in environmental law doesn’t typically look like the human spectacle of court hearings we see on our screens—real or fictional—but the outcomes of these cases far outweigh and outlast the distraction drama that drives the media cycle these days.
Going to court means giving clients a legal voice and giving the law its due, absolutely, and it can also mean stopping the devastating costs and consequences of pollution, toxic spills and waste, land and water destruction, and more, even if for just a period of time.
Humpback whale makes a splash. Photo by Jean Beaufort.
I’m going to get outside the legal frame here, but it feels necessary and important to speak from the heart. We can’t use the law and courts to pound into people’s heads and hearts that caring about other living beings and natural places lifts up all living beings, including ourselves. But we can go to court to show how agencies have evaded or broken the law on behalf of private interests, or money and power interests, or simply disinterest in the scope and breadth of the consequences of their decisions—despite the evidence that remains of similar actions in the past.
When we win in court, we know we must then prepare for another legal round, because when powerful forces want something—to put infrastructure on protected public lands, to put oil fields on sacred lands, to put mines on watersheds teeming with life—the greed doesn’t go away. The profit mission of CEOs and shareholders doesn’t evaporate. The ideology of many political players doesn’t shift from privatization and exploitation to stewardship.
The human forces pushing for massive projects and diminished natural places have a lot of wealth, a lot of pundits and figureheads, a lot of legal teams and lobbyists.
We don’t have any of that, being a small-but-mighty Alaska nonprofit law firm, but we do have friends and colleagues. We have all of you.
What you bring to this work is concrete and specific and strategic and absolutely essential, and also expansive and infinite and wholly heartfelt.
Thank you.
With gratitude and respect,
PS. Thanks to supporters like you, we can continue fighting to protect Alaska’s land, water, air, wildlife and people.
Izembek Lagoon from above. Photo by Zak Pohlen, USFWS.
We sued Interior for illegally trading away public lands in Izembek Refuge
Bear walking in the morning mist in Lake Clark National Park and preserve. Photo by Eric Kilby.
The Alaska Board of Game blew off the State Constitution when advancing its plan to gun down every bear possible
Photo of eelgrass seeds by Eduardo Infantes.
On beings and biomes–eelgrass is the sexiest plant alive