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Earthjustice Lost the Case That Created It

A Disney ski resort in a California valley led to the lawsuit that became Earthjustice — now 240 lawyers who never send their clients a bill.

By The Pennygood team · Aug 2026 · 4 min read

In September 1966, Walt Disney Productions announced a ski resort for Mineral King, a narrow valley at the southern end of California's Sierra Nevada. The Forest Service had already issued the permit. The plans called for a hotel, restaurants, a theater and as many as 14 lifts, moving up to 10,000 skiers a day through a place that winter snow cut off for months at a time.

The Footnote That Opened the Courthouse Door

The Sierra Club had spent years fighting the project through administrative appeals. When those ran out, its board authorized a lawsuit — the organization's first — and in June 1969 attorneys Philip Berry, Fred Fisher, Don Harris and Leland J. Selna filed it. The legal work soon outgrew its parent: in 1971 it became a separate outfit, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, modeled on the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and backed by the Ford Foundation.

They lost. In April 1972 the Supreme Court ruled 4–3 in Sierra Club v. Morton that the club had not shown it would be specifically injured by a resort. But Justice Potter Stewart's opinion carried a footnote noting that the complaint could be amended. Within two months the lawyers were back with nine individual plaintiffs — people who actually hiked Mineral King and could describe what they personally stood to lose. That maneuver settled whether private citizens may go to court on behalf of a place, and it is why most environmental litigation in the United States is possible at all.

Disney abandoned the valley by 1976 as opposition kept growing. Congress finished it off with the National Parks and Recreation Act, signed on November 10, 1978, which folded Mineral King into Sequoia National Park. Most of the land once slated for lifts was designated wilderness in 2009.

A Law Firm Whose Clients Never Get a Bill

The group renamed itself Earthjustice in 1997, by which point it was representing far more than the Sierra Club. The tagline has stuck ever since: because the earth needs a good lawyer. Abigail Dillen, who joined in 2000, is its president.

The scale is unusual for a nonprofit — roughly 240 lawyers across 15 offices, around 760 active legal proceedings, and more than 1,000 public-interest clients, none of whom are charged for the representation. The costs are covered instead by tens of thousands of individual donors and by foundations. Charity Navigator currently gives the organization four stars.

Who Actually Shows Up on the Docket

The client list is mostly small groups you would never find on a masthead. On June 9, 2026, a federal court ruled that the Forest Service had violated the Endangered Species Act in the Bitterroot National Forest, 1.6 million acres straddling western Montana and eastern Idaho. The agency had stripped road-density limits out of its management plan, opening the remaining old-growth stands to logging access; the court found it had waved past the consequences for threatened grizzly bears and bull trout. The plaintiffs were Friends of the Bitterroot, Friends of the Clearwater, Native Ecosystems Council, Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment and WildEarth Guardians.

That is roughly the shape of any given month. In August 2026 alone the organization logged a decision upholding the designation of two forever chemicals as hazardous substances, an appeals court ruling blocking the GulfLink oil export project in the Gulf of Mexico, and a halt to a Fort Lauderdale dredging project after a lawsuit flagged damage to rare coral.

What Five Decades of Filings Add Up To

Single cases are hard to feel. The accumulation is easier. Earthjustice's own accounting of its long-running fights includes mercury emissions from power plants falling by about 80% after the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards took effect in 2011; bans or withdrawals of the pesticides vinclozolin in 2004, endosulfan in 2010 and methyl iodide in 2012; and opposition that helped stop more than 150 proposed coal plants, with over 200 existing ones retired or scheduled to close.

Paying for the Lawyers

Because clients pay nothing, the work runs entirely on donations. Earthjustice takes one-time gifts at earthjustice.org, and its monthly program, Justice Partners, is the steadier version of the same thing; the site also handles tribute gifts and legacy giving. There is no trail crew to join here — what an ordinary person can offer is money, or attention to the cases being argued in their own state.

Not every kind of good work has a courtroom behind it. A lot of it is one person in a neighborhood, unpaid and largely unnoticed, doing something useful week after week. Pennygood exists for those people: a place where a community can send someone small monthly support, starting at $3. Earthjustice is not on Pennygood and has no connection to it — but if you are the one quietly doing the work where you live, you can start a page at pennygood.me.