Montana
A Landmark Victory in the Legal Fight Against Climate Change
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With the federal judiciary increasingly hostile toward the battle against climate change, environmental litigators have turned to state courts for progress. They scored a major victory on Wednesday when the Montana Supreme Court issued a landmark decision holding that the state constitution protects residents against climate change. On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss the case and its consequences for other climate-curious state supreme courts. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: This week, the Montana Supreme Court boldly went where we keep hoping state supreme courts will go.
Mark Joseph Stern: It all started with a provision of the state constitution that guarantees the right “to a clean and healthful environment” and requires the state “to maintain and improve” that environment “for present and future generations.” Citing this language, the Montana Supreme Court, by a 6–1 vote, held that the state constitution limits the government’s ability to exacerbate climate change. The court discussed the obvious and undeniable reality of climate change, not just globally but in Montana. Refreshingly, it began the opinion with facts about how climate change is ravaging Montana and threatens everybody’s way of life.
Then the court declared that the plaintiffs in this case, a group of young people, could bring this suit and hold the government to its constitutional obligation to protect the environment for future generations. It explained that this obligation is about not just preventing oil spills and other disasters but also limiting carbon emissions so that everyone can enjoy a clean Montana for hundreds of years to come.
If we’ve learned anything about environmental law, it’s that nothing stops or starts within the confines of a state. So while this sounds like an incredibly cool and lofty win, it also sounds like an abstraction, right? Does this actually change anything on the ground in Montana?
It does, and that’s what’s so extraordinary about the opinion to me. Montana Republicans enacted a statute that prohibited the state from considering greenhouse gas emissions when permitting energy projects. The state government essentially said that agencies could not consider the effect of fossil fuels when allowing fossil-fuel projects to move forward. And the court actually struck down that statute, requiring the government to once again consider greenhouse gas emissions when permitting projects. It’s laying the groundwork to limit permits in the future that exacerbate climate change.
That takes this case outside the realm of abstraction and moves it into a much more concrete area. The courts really do have the power to examine a statute or a permit and say, No, this is repugnant to the constitution and must be set aside. They can do the direct work of limiting the devastating impact of fossil-fuel projects today and in the future.
I want to talk for a minute about the question of standing, which is a persistent problem in climate litigation. Lawsuits fall apart on standing because the courts seem to believe that nobody is personally injured by environmental catastrophes that harm absolutely everybody. How did the Montana Supreme Court get around that problem?
The state, in fighting this lawsuit, did argue that climate change affects everyone, so the plaintiffs here did not have a “particularized” injury that gave them the right to sue. The Montana Supreme Court shut that down. It held that because climate change affects everyone in some way, these individual plaintiffs aren’t unharmed. Quite the opposite: It illustrates that these plaintiffs clearly do have real grievances, that their future in Montana is jeopardized, and they should be able to vindicate a constitutional guarantee that applies to each and every person under the state’s foundational law.
Here, the state Supreme Court departed a bit from the U.S. Supreme Court’s standing doctrine—and properly so, because the Montana Constitution provides broader access to the state’s courts than the U.S. Constitution provides to federal courts. Here, the majority refused to turn a provision so central to the Montana Constitution into a nullity just because climate change happens to affect the whole world. We know that it’s affecting Montana in a heightened way. We know that the plaintiffs’ future is imperiled by the acceleration of climate change. And the court said that’s enough for them to come into state court and challenge a law that will exacerbate Montana’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Some of the actual drafters of the Montana Constitution are still alive, right? And they were able to say that this was indeed the intent of their work?
Yes, that’s absolutely right. The current Montana Constitution was enacted in 1972, so there’s a very clear record of what the delegates wanted. And some of those delegates are still alive and have made it abundantly clear that at the time they wanted the strongest, most all-encompassing environmental protections in the nation. The delegates labored over this language to ensure that it would be the strongest found in any state constitution and rejected language that might limit it. Their protections were designed to be, as the court put it, “anticipatory and preventative” for both “present and future generations.”
Why? Because for decades, big corporations had destroyed Montana’s environment. They had harvested all these resources from the state without concern for the lives of residents. And in 1972, the delegates said: enough. They saw that their state was being ravaged by corporations, and they decided to make it a fundamental guarantee that any Montanan could walk into court and vindicate their right to a clean environment. And that is what happened in this decision.
One last thought: Is this utterly Montana-specific, to this one Supreme Court, or is this scalable and replicable across the country?
It is scalable. Montana isn’t alone here: Hawaii also has a state constitutional provision that guarantees the right to a “clean and healthful environment,” and its Supreme Court has vindicated that guarantee, holding that it includes the right to a stable climate system. It will continue to be a watchdog on this. Of course, the Hawaii Supreme Court is one of the most progressive in the country, but these provisions exist in the constitutions of five other states: Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
I think there is so much potential—especially in a state like Pennsylvania, which has a lot of dirty-energy projects going on—for the state judiciary to impose some limits on a corporation’s ability to destroy the environment. All these states have left-leaning supreme courts. And I hope they will be emboldened and inspired by what happened in Montana to take action here and vindicate residents’ right to an environment that not just is free of litter and toxic materials but can endure for centuries into the future. That means taking climate change into account and imposing limitations on a state’s ability to exacerbate it.
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HELENA — You probably have goals and plans for 2026—the Montana Department of Agriculture does too.
“We’re really focusing on innovative agricultural practices,” Montana Department of Agriculture director Jillien Streit said.
It’s no secret that agriculture—farming and ranching—is not easy. There are long days, planning, monitoring crops and livestock, and other challenges beyond farmers’ and ranchers’ control.
(WATCH: Montana Department of Agriculture focusing on innovation in 2026)
Montana Department of Agriculture focusing on innovation in 2026
“We have very low commodity prices across the board,” Streit said. “We still have very high input prices across the board, and we have really high prices when it comes to our equipment, and so, it’s a really tough year.”
But innovation, including new practices, partnerships and technology use, can help navigate some of those challenges.
“We can’t make more time and we can’t make more land, so we need to start putting together innovative practices that help us maximize what our time and land can do,” Streit said.
Practices range from using technology like autonomous tractors and virtual fencing—allowing rangers to contain and move cattle right from their phones—to regenerative farming and ranching.
“It is bringing cattle back into farming operations to be able to work with cover cropping practices to invigorate the soil for new soil health benefits,” Streit said.
The Montana Department of Agriculture is working to help producers learn, share, and collaborate on new ideas to work in their operations.
The department will share stories of practices that work from farms and ranches across the state. Also, within the next year or so, Streit said the department is hoping to roll out technology to help producers collaborate.
“(It’s) providing a communication platform where people can get together and really help each other out by utilizing each other’s assets,” she said.
While not easy, agriculture is still one of Montana’s largest industries, and Streit said innovating and sharing ideas across the state can keep it going long into the future.
Montana
Frontier Conference women: MSU-Northern, Montana Western pull upsets to advance to semifinal round
BUTTE — MSU-Northern and Montana Western pulled a pair of upsets Saturday at the Butte Civic Center to wrap up the quarterfinal round of the Frontier Conference women’s basketball postseason tournament.
The fifth-seeded Skylights started the day with a red-hot shooting performance to down No. 4 Rocky Mountain College 82-74. Western, the sixth seed, used a third-quarter surge to defeat No. 3 Carroll College 65-56.
MSU-Northern (17-11) and Western (14-13) now advance to Sunday’s semifinal round, where the Skylights will play No. 1 seed Dakota State at noon and the Bulldogs will face No. 2 Montana Tech at 2:30 p.m.
MSU-Northern 82, Rocky Mountain College 74
MSU-Northern sizzled in the first quarter, making seven 3-pointers to take a double-digit lead, and put together a crucial third-quarter run to get past Rocky and advance to the semifinal round.
Becky Melcher splashed four 3s in the first 10 minutes, and Taya Trottier, Canzas HisBadHorse and Shania Moananu added one apiece as the Skylights built a 29-13 lead. Melcher scored 14 first-quarter points and finished with a game-high 30 on 10-of-19 shooting (7 of 15 from 3-point range). She added 11 rebounds, a blocked shot and three steals to her stat line.
Rocky battled back to tie the game at 36-36 in the second quarter on a Brenna Linse basket, but MSUN responded with consecutive triples from Trottier and Melcher and took a 44-38 lead into halftime. The Bears eventually stole the lead back in the third quarter following a 9-0 run capped be an Isabelle Heggem bucket.
But the Skylights again answered — this time with a 13-2 run to take a 60-51 lead. MSUN led 66-59 going to the fourth and wouldn’t trail the rest of the way. The Skylights trailed for less than two total minutes of the game.
As a team, MSUN made 14 of 26 3s in the game. Ciera Agasiva was 3 for 3 from behind the arc, and Trottier was 2 for 3. Trottier had 18 points, eight rebounds and six assists, while Agasiva had 13 points.
Paige Wasson led Rocky (20-9) with 29 points but was 0 for 10 on 3-point attempts. Heggem had a double-double of 21 points and 12 rebounds.
Montana Western 65, Carroll 56
After neither team led by more than five points in the first half, Western broke open a 25-25 tie game by outscoring Carroll 20-9 in the third quarter.
Bailee Sayler scored 10 points in the quarter, including making two 3-pointers, to help the Bulldogs take control. They led 45-34 going to the fourth, and Carroll wouldn’t get closer than six points the rest of the way.
The Fighting Saints were just 18-of-65 shooting (27.7%) for the game.
Sayler scored an efficient 22 points on 7-of-8 shooting. She was 2 for 3 from 3-point range and 6 for 7 at the free throw line. The Missoula native also had nine rebounds.
Isabella Lund added 16 points for the Bulldogs, and Keke Davis had 11 points and 11 rebounds.
Carroll (19-10) was led by Kenzie Allen with 12 points. Willa Albrecht and Meagan Karstetter scored 11 points apiece for the Saints.
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