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At Earthrise, we are passionate about using the law to protect and
restore the environment and the planet's natural resources, and about
training law students to become skilled environmental advocates.
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Welcome to the 2025-26 Clinical Class!
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Welcome Earthrise Students! This fall Earthrise’s 18 clinical students have been working with Earthrise attorneys on legal matters and issues spread throughout the United States including Massachusetts, Illinois, Nevada, California, and Oregon.
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Save the Date! Earthrise turns THIRTY next year! Please plan to join our celebration that will be held in Portland on Saturday, October 24, 2026!
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Photo of Walker Lake curtsey of Walker Basin Conservancy
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Earthrise Joins the Fight to Restore Nevada's Walker Lake
Mineral County, Nevada has retained Earthrise Law Center to represent it in its precedent-setting public trust litigation to restore Walker Lake, one of Nevada’s most precious and endangered natural water bodies. Walker Lake is a rare desert terminus lake that historically supported a vibrant ecosystem and served as a critical public resource. Its sole source of inflow is the Walker River, an interstate river system. Over the past century, increased upstream diversions and consumptive uses of Walker River water, primarily for agriculture, have severely reduced the river’s natural flow into the Lake. The dramatic reduction in Lake water volume has caused salinity levels to skyrocket. The resulting water quality degradation has eliminated the once-thriving Lahontan cutthroat trout fishery, devastated biodiversity, and crippled the lake’s environmental, recreational, aesthetic, and economic values especially for Mineral County and its residents.
The case is currently moving through discovery toward trial in 2026. Earthrise is co-counseling the case with Iris Thornton of Advocacy for Community and Environment, and Jamie Saul, former Earthrise attorney and current Executive Director of Wild and Scenic Law Center. Our client, Mineral County moved to intervene in the federal litigation in 1995. The Court granted intervention in 2012 after delays caused by the complex process of serving thousands of claimants to the waters of the Walker River and its tributaries, as well as their successors in interest. The case already set precedent by establishing the public trust doctrine applies to all water in Nevada and imposing a duty on the State to manage its water resources accordingly. The next precedent-setting step will be to convince the district court that there are available remedies that will result in more water flowing to Walker Lake that do not constitute a reallocation of water rights. Such a ruling could be used in other western prior appropriation water rights states to support flows to downstream resources in overappropriated watersheds. As Lewis & Clark Professor Michael Blumm and former Earthrise student Michael Benjamin Smith explain in their 2022 Virginia Environmental Law Journal article about the Walker Lake public trust case:
We maintain that the district court can reconcile the
public trust doctrine with the state’s policy of finality, and substantially
restore the lake’s ecology. If we are correct, the Walker Lake decision will
have precedential value throughout the West in a climate-changed era in
which water will be in short supply and conflicts between water rights
and public trust resources like Walker Lake are sure to increase.
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Photo of Tom Buchele and legal fellow Megan Sweeney with representatives of Earthrise’s client organization Regional Association of Concerned Environmentalists at temporary restraining order hearing.
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Protecting Bell Smith Springs in Illinois from Logging
Earthrise’s fall semester got off to an exciting start when Tom, new legal fellow Megan and three students, Sabrina Butcher, Joseph Gabaldon and David Fusco, had to seek emergency relief to stop logging in the Shawnee National Forest. Earthrise, representing clients Tom has represented since the 1990s, filed a lawsuit in July challenging a decision by the USFS to log near the Bell Smith Springs National Natural Landmark. Just a few weeks later and with no notice to our clients, the USFS began commercial logging. We filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order just a day after learning of the logging and after the USFS said it would not stop such logging to allow for a less-rushed preliminary injunction procedure. Megan, only in her second week at work, stayed up most of the night drafting the supporting declarations while Tom drafted the TRO motion itself. Three Earthrise students, who had started classes just days earlier, did very quick research to include in the motion. The district
court granted the TRO, but then required a hearing just a few days later to consider whether to convert the TRO into a preliminary injunction. Tom and Megan traveled to East St. Louis for that hearing.
Unfortunately, pointing to the Supreme Court’s recent Seven Counties opinion emphasizing “deference” to federal agencies’ NEPA analysis, the district court decided not to extend the TRO and denied our motion for a preliminary injunction. While we and our clients were disappointed by that decision, the case is not moot, and we believe we still have viable claims to pursue. The case has already provided our students with valuable learning experiences, and they are eager to continue litigating it for our client until we get a final decision from the court.
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Meet Our New Legal Fellow Megan Sweeney
Megan joined Earthrise as a Legal Fellow in the Fall of 2025. Originally from Springfield, Missouri, she received a BA from the University of Missouri in 2021. Megan graduated magna cum laude from Lewis & Clark Law School in 2025, earning Certificates in Animal Law and Environmental and Natural Resources Law, with distinction. While in law school, Megan was an active member of Animal Law Review and Northwest Environmental Defense Center, served on the board of Animal Legal Defense Fund, and participated in Earthrise’s clinical class her 2L year. In her spare time, Megan enjoys hiking and camping throughout the Pacific Northwest, as well as paddleboarding and spending time with her cat.
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Oregon Otter Do This!
Sea otters are not only photogenic and beloved by nearly everyone, they are ecosystem engineers of the near shore environment. By keeping the predator populations in check, sea otters help protect the kelp forests that provide habitat for many species – including commercially valuable fish. Kelp forests also buffer wave action which reduces coastal erosion.
Unfortunately, the fur trade wiped out sea otter populations along the Oregon coast a century ago. This year, however, Earthrise is contributing to efforts to restore these important and charismatic marine mammals. The Elakha Alliance, an Oregon group that advocates for sea otter reintroduction in the state, turned to the clinic for help understanding the legal dimensions of possible pathways for the animals’ return.
Working with Director Dan Rohlf, Earthrise students are analyzing the legal issues that agencies would face to bring back sea otters to Oregon. The laws that would play a role in otter reintroduction include a complex tangle of state and federal law, and Earthrise is assisting Elakha identify the most promising and expeditious path through these requirements.
With Earthrise’s help, in the coming years a visit to the Oregon coast may include a chance to glimpse playful sea otters going about their business of making near-shore ecosystems more productive – and fun.
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Back to the Court to Protect Columbia Basin Salmon In mid-October, Earthrise and lead counsel Earthjustice asked a federal judge in Portland to order federal dam managers to take steps to maximize survival of listed salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin. The plaintiffs’ motion calls for operations such as spilling water through hydroelectric dams to improve survival of juvenile fish on their journey to the ocean.
Renewed legal action in the 25 year-old NWF v. NMFS case became essential when the Trump Administration this summer threw out an agreement the parties hammered out that called for improved dam operations for fish, as well as charted a path toward potential removal of the four federal dams on the lower portion of the Snake River that are particularly problematic. Parties to the case, including federal defendants, the region’s Indian tribes, and the states of Oregon and Washington negotiated a deal to put litigation on hold for up to a decade to work together toward meaningful recovery of the Basin’s imperiled runs – action that would help fulfill the federal government’s treaty responsibilities to indigenous cultures.
Like so many of the Trump Administration's short-sighted environmental decisions, federal agencies cast aside this cooperative approach and are now determined to maximize power generation of the federal hydropower dams regardless of the impacts on survival of listed salmonids. The plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction motion seeks to leverage dam operations starting in March, when the 2026 migration season for salmon and steelhead begins.
Earthrise director Dan Rohlf has worked on this case since it was filed in 2001, as well as other salmon litigation for nearly a decade prior to that. While some listed runs have improved over the years, many are still in deep trouble; for example, a quarter of the spring/summer chinook populations in the Snake Basin are at levels indicating functional extinction.
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Protecting Water Quality In the Pacific Northwest Earthrise has been busy in 2025 advocating for improved water quality and protection for aquatic species throughout the Pacific Northwest (PNW). On behalf of our longtime client, Northwest Environmental Advocates (NWEA), Earthrise been working on two separate matters, both aiming to protect the cold, clean water on which wildlife (and people) that call the PNW home depend.
First, with our co-counsel at Telegin Law, PLLC, we filed a motion for summary judgment challenging EPA’s approval and adoption of Total Maximum Daily Loads (aka TMDLs) for the Deschutes River and Budd Inlet — the southernmost part of Puget Sound—in Washington state. We hope that the court will agree that EPA acted arbitrarily in approving and adopting temperature and dissolved oxygen TMDLs that do not meet the Clean Water Act’s requirements. NWEA v. EPA, Case No. 2:19-cv-02079-BJR (W.D. Wash. 2019).
Second, we are working to protect Cold Water Refugia—pockets of cold water crucial for providing migrating salmon with respite in otherwise overheated rivers—in the iconic Columbia and Willamette Rivers. NWEA v. U.S. EPA, et al., Case No. 3:21-cv-01591-AB (D. Or. 2021). After successful motions practice, the court ruled that NWEA can rely on evidence outside the administrative record, including expert discovery, to support its claim that EPA violated the Endangered Species Act. With that favorable result in hand and expert reports in process, we hope to proceed to summary judgment briefing in the new year.
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Issue No.
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