Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court gave its approval Monday for waste from a gold mine in Alaska to be drained into a mountain lake, dealing environmentalists their fifth defeat this court term and lobbing another controversial Bush administration policy into President Obama's lap.
The 6-3 ruling upheld a decision by the George W. Bush administration to label the planned drainage from Alaska's reopened Kensington mine as "fill" rather than pollution.
The Clean Water Act forbids pollution of rivers, lakes and bays, but it also allows the Army Corps of Engineers to move dirt and gravel "fill" into waterways to divert the stream or build a dam.
Environmentalists said that draining the Alaska mine waste into Lower Slate Lake would kill the lake's fish, and that the ruling opened the door for similarly destructive dumping in waterways across the nation. But they also said the Obama administration could effectively nullify the ruling, and several other cases that conservation groups have lost recently at the high court, by issuing new rules to supersede Bush-era policies.
"It's been a tough, tough term for the environment" at the Supreme Court, said Tom Waldo, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, who argued the Alaska mine case on behalf of conservation groups. "But these problems are fixable by the current administration, and we hope they'll take measures to do that."
The owner of the mine, Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp., said in a news release that it would push to start production at the mine by the second half of 2010. Industry allies also hailed the decision.
"If you're going to have mining, you've got to put [the waste] somewhere," said Virginia S. Albrecht, an environmental lawyer at Hunton & Williams in Washington who represents public and private entities regulated by the water act. "What happened here was, the corps said this was the least-damaging, practicable alternative."
Environmentalists have suffered a series of setbacks at the Supreme Court this term.
In November, the court overturned a judge's order in Los Angeles that sought to protect whales from the Navy's high-powered sonar that is used during training exercises off the California coast. The 7-2 decision said the judge's order unduly interfered in the Navy's anti-submarine training.
