The Montana Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a district court ruling in the nation’s first constitutional climate change trial, affirming that the youth plaintiffs have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment” while revoking two Montana statutes.

The 70-page decision, authored by Chief Justice Mike McGrath, comes 16 months after Lewis and Clark District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled in the landmark Held v. Montana lawsuit, explicitly stating that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions are “proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment, and harm and injury to the youth plaintiffs.” Seeley’s decision also rolled back two laws enacted by the 2023 legislature that changed the Montana Environmental Policy Act.

The state immediately appealed the decision to the Montana Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the appeal in July. The court found in a 6-to-1 decision that Montana’s constitutional guarantee of a “clean and healthful environment” includes a stable climate system, “which is clearly within the object and true principles of the Framers inclusion of the right.”

“Plaintiffs showed at trial—without dispute—that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future,” the order states. “Plaintiffs showed that climate change does impact the clear, unpolluted air of the Bob Marshall wilderness; it does impact the availability of clear water and clear air in the Bull Mountains; and it does exacerbate the wildfire stench in Missoula, along with the rest of the State.”

Call for Democratizing Environmental Organizing

The climate crisis is an existential threat. It’s one part of a greater ecological threat to a livable world for human beings, as well as many animal species, plants and ecosystems as they currently exist in relationship to one another. 

As physically, intellectually and emotionally challenging as the severity and intensity of the ecological crisis is, it’s heartening, hopeful and empowering to see, hear and, in many cases, join multiple projects, campaigns and movements to resist ongoing harms and to protect the natural world. 

The resistance is local to global. Defenders of water, land and air are everywhere. They cross every imaginable boundary: age, race, gender, physical ability, religion, nationality, political ideology, income, and nation-state.

The awareness of the magnitude and urgency to stop the drive for infinite economic growth and the corresponding ecological destruction to fuel this “endless more” increases with the pillage of every mountaintop, dumping of forever cancer-causing chemicals in every lake, pollution from the burning of fossil fuels from every smokestack, extinction of every species, fracking in every field, and leaking of toxic waste in every community, 

This fundamental ecological crisis continues to grow - despite all the education, advocacy and organizing of resistance in so many places by so many people.