Center for Biological Diversity v. Haaland

The federal district court for the District of Montana granted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s motion for voluntary remand of a challenge to the agency’s October 2020 withdrawal of a 2013 proposal to list wolverines living in the contiguous United States as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The court, however, vacated the withdrawal, rejecting the FWS’s request that it be left in place. The court found that the seriousness of the withdrawal’s deficiencies weighed in favor of vacatur and that the FWS did not show that the disruptive consequences outweighed the benefits of vacatur. The FWS requested remand to reevaluate the withdrawal in light of the Ninth Circuit’s 2021 decision concerning the meaning of “foreseeable future” and in light of new studies that “undercut the agency’s reliance on Canadian wolverines to establish connectivity, genetic diversity, and population density.” The court—which previously remanded a 2014 withdrawal of the listing proposal for reevaluation of climate change and other threats to the wolverine—ordered the FWS to submit a new final listing determination for publication in the Federal Register within 18 months.