SELC'S GREATEST HITS
Two Decades of Results: SELC’s Greatest Hits
SELC is known and respected for its long, consistent history of results, and for its ability to identify, create, and utilize powerful leverage points. Some of our top institutional results include:
1. A unanimous Supreme Court decision for clean air. In April 2007, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices agreed with us that power companies cannot continue to extend the lives of old, coal-burning power plants in ways that increase yearly emissions without installing modern pollution controls. The ruling already has been instrumental in the largest power plant cleanup in history.
2. Added protection for two million acres of Southern Appalachian national forest. SELC accomplished this by halting clearcutting, expanding wilderness areas, improving long-term forest management plans, and defeating dozens of destructive timber sales, roads, or mining proposals. During SELC’s roadless area protection effort over the past eight years, not a single tree has been cut on the 723,000 roadless acres in our region.
3. Closing the worst wetland loopholes. Our East Dismal Swamp case closed a Clean Water Act loophole that had allowed developers to ditch, drain, and convert tens of thousands of acres of native wetlands to monoculture pine tree plantations. This settlement brought eight million acres of the highest-quality southern wetlands under the umbrella of federal law for the first time—at a cost of five cents per acre.
4. Passage of the North Carolina Clean Smokestacks Act. By joining forces with the governor of North Carolina, utility companies, physicians and health groups, and conservation partners, SELC helped enact this model state-level legislation which will cut power plant emissions statewide—equivalent to removing 4.5 million cars from the road.
5. The Navy OLF. Our legal team won three separate court rulings against the U.S. Navy, then ultimately removed Congressional funding for a massive fighter-jet training facility on North Carolina’s Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula—wintering habitat for most of North America’s tundra swans and snow geese, and site of the successful re-introduction program for endangered red wolves.
6. Tough controls on mercury pollution. SELC was chosen by four of the nation’s prominent public health organizations—American Academy of Pediatrics, American Nurses Association, American Public Health Association, and Physicians for Social Responsibility—to be their champion in a landmark legal challenge overturning EPA’s weak standards for power plant emissions of the dangerous neurotoxin mercury.
7. Protecting southern rivers. SELC has helped found and lead numerous successful alliances, including the 135+-member Georgia Water Coalition. Together, we successfully defeated attempts to usher in western-U.S. style water rights that would have allowed the buying and selling of Georgia’s waters as a private commodity.
8. Defending the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Through a combination of legal advocacy and building broad public support for a local community economic-stimulation settlement, SELC led the effort to prevent construction of the unnecessary, $600+ million “Road to Nowhere” that would have slashed through the center of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
9. Challenging sprawl-inducing highways. As a judge eloquently stated in one of our road cases, no human activity has a greater impact on where and how we develop and how we affect the environment than the decisions of where to build roads. To keep valuable landscapes intact, improve air quality, and coordinate road-building, land-use, and air-quality decisions, SELC has successfully challenged dozens of major road projects, including the 210-mile Atlanta Outer Perimeter and the proposed doubling of 1-81 across the entire state of Virginia.
10. Saving special places. The heart of SELC’s mission is protecting one-of-a-kind sites of particular beauty or exceptional wildlife, historic, or natural value. To protect extensive stands of longleaf pine forest, thriving colonies of endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers, and South Carolina’s last intact Gullah community, SELC stopped a bridge that would have opened up Sandy Island to resort development, then helped craft an innovative funding package to permanently protect it as a wildlife preserve. This helped jumpstart a 500,000-acre regional protection project in the surrounding Winyah Bay Focus Area.