A wolf, but not OR7. There are no known photos of wolf OR7.(Photo: Galen Rowell)

There’s nothing like a good road trip—you grab a handful of your favorite CDs, some snacks, a sense of adventure, and you’re off! Cruising down the open road, wind blowing through your hair, eyeballing heretofore unknown terrain, wondering who the heck lives in that little shack beside the highway in the middle of nowhere.

That’s how we humans do a road trip. But if you want to learn what a real road trip looks like, then you need to follow the saga of a gray wolf known to Oregon officials simply as OR7. Sure, OR7 could have grabbed his favorite Howlin’ Wolf album, packed some elk jerky and brought along his map of eastern Oregon.

But this dude is hardcore.

Earthjustice attorney Andrea Treece (Brian Treece)

This is the fourth in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing, as well as reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. Earthjustice attorney Andrea Treece is part of a core oceans litigation team whose work helps protect forage fish species like herring, anchovies and sardines, which serve as the building blocks of the ocean food web.

Jessica Knoblauch: You focus specifically on west coast ocean issues at Earthjustice. Are there issues in ocean management that are unique to the Pacific?
 
Andrea Treece: The west coast faces a lot of issues that are prevalent across the nation. That actually is a great advantage because we can as an organization get a bigger picture of what’s going on in ocean resource management. We can apply the law in a way that will hopefully set a beneficial precedent for management in the rest of the nation.
 
JK: Earthjustice has litigated heavily against industrial fishing in the Alaska pollock fishery. Why?
 
AT: It’s really one of the first cases that highlighted the ecosystem effects of fishing and how important it is to consider not just how much fish we’re consuming, but whether we’re leaving enough in the ecosystem for everything else to keep on sustaining themselves, including seals and sea lions and a lot of other key predators in the ocean. So it was a great case to try and bring that issue to the forefront and change the way that major fishery was managed.
 

Steve Roady speaks about Earthjustice's oceans litigation.

Intro: This is the first in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing, as well as reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. Earthjustice’s Oceans Program Director Steve Roady has been litigating cases that help protect our oceans for more than a decade. Check out earthjustice.org/oceans for more information.

Jessica Knoblauch: What first drew you to oceans management work?
 
Steve Roady: I was first exposed to the oceans while growing up on Florida’s Gulf coast. I spent a lot of time on the beaches as a child and was always fascinated by the shrimpers. But I really first became aware of the key problems in the environment in middle school where we were all forced to read Rachel Carson’s classic book, Silent Spring. The idea that birds were dying because of DDT was just amazing to me and it really got me thinking about environmental issues.
 
JK: How does Earthjustice use the law to protect oceans?
 
SR: Earthjustice is one of the leading groups to begin looking at oceans’ problems through the lens of potential federal litigation. Basically, we work with three or four of your standard environmental laws. There’s the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the main federal fisheries act, which directs the federal government to prevent overfishing and to minimize bycatch, to protect habitat and to rebuild overfished fish populations. There’s also the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates the federal government to carefully study the environmental effects of their actions before they take them. And we also invoke the Endangered Species Act to protect species like sea turtles, which are protected under the ESA but often killed as so-called bycatch in trawl fisheries around the country.
 
We invoke all of these statutes in an effort to try to curb the unrestrained fishing practices going on in federal fisheries and do our best to make sure the federal government is complying with the basic thrust of the laws that protect the ocean resource. Since we started the Ocean Law Project back in 1998, we’ve had a number of significant wins in the courts that set some significant precedents with respect to how the federal government manages ocean resources in a sustainable way. And typically we’ll have a case that we’ll bring on behalf of other groups, so if a case is won the precedent goes to everybody’s benefit.

The Delta

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed conservationists a victory and some good news for endangered wildlife. The court denied a request by an anti-wildlife right-wing group to strip federal Endangered Species Act protections from a rare species – a California fish called the delta smelt.

The right-wing Pacific Legal Foundation, has tried repeatedly to get any federal court to rule that the federal government has no power to extend ESA protection to species that exist only in a single state and have no current commercial value. The smelt just happens to be a species of convenience that fit those terms. PLF has been rebuffed by five different federal courts of appeals and now the Supreme Court.

Earthjustice attorney Trent Orr was involved in the big rebuff of PLF, pointing out to the courts that the anti-wildlife group simply didn’t understand established law. The Supreme Court hardly needed to hear it, having upheld the ESA by rejecting review of five earlier challenges from other corners of the nation.