Our Work

• Cases
• Wildlife

Advocates for the West is the conservation community's legal SWAT team.  We use law and science to protect the West’s public lands, water, and wildlife.  Our team of attorneys works with our partners to develop and prosecute strategic legal cases aimed at enforcing our nation's environmental laws and protecting important places and species.  We handle a huge caseload - and win about 85% of our cases - because we utilize a strategic approach that maximizes our resources.

America’s public lands, water, and wildlife face enormous threats from habitat loss, degradation and climate change.  These include irresponsible energy development and mining; excessive livestock grazing in fragile habitats;  inefficient and antiquated water diversions that dry up streams and block fish passage; and industrial pollution of the air, water and lands (such as mercury emissions from Nevada gold mines).  We hold government and industry accountable by enforcing the laws of the land to protect the places you love.  We give voice to iconic western species including bighorn sheep, salmon and steelhead, wolves, sage-grouse, pronghorn antelope, and many more. Our expertise helps keep your water clean and flowing freely.

Since our founding in 2003, our team has represented over 30 conservation partners throughout the West, plus numerous concerned individuals who need help battling damaging agency policies and industrial threats.  Our work has spanned protecting the Selkirk mountain caribou from threats by increasingly powerful snow-machines that disrupt their winter habitat; safeguarding New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande River from de-watering; pressuring the Bureau of Land Management to improve protections for the imperiled greater sage-grouse on millions of acres of its sagebrush habitat; and defending wild and scenic rivers, wilderness areas, and intact native habitats across the West.

We have successfully battled some of the world's largest and most environmentally destructive corporations - such as ExxonMobil's attempt to turn the Lochsa and Middle Fork Clearwater wild and scenic rivers in central Idaho into an industrial ‘high and wide’ corridor for shipment of massive oil refining equipment to the Canadian tar sands.  We successfully blocked efforts by the last Bush Administration to roll back environmental protections and public involvement in management of over 160 million acres of western lands.  And our strategic use of law and science has prompted agencies and irrigators in the Upper Salmon basin of Idaho to install fish screens and more efficient stream diversions to protect endangered salmon, steelhead, and bull trout. 

We work in partnership with our clients, often helping pull together coalitions of groups and individuals allied to achieve environmental protection of key species or places.  For example, we worked with numerous groups to protect the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness from helicopter landings in winter to dart and collar wolves; we forced the Forest Service to protect bighorn sheep from the fatal diseases spread by domestic sheep grazing in Hells Canyon and the Salmon River of Idaho; and our work with a broad array of local and national groups pressured the Bureau of Reclamation to improve water management and efficiency in the Middle Rio Grande of New Mexico. 

These are but a few examples of our successes for the western environment.  For much more detail on our past and current work, see the Cases, Wildlife, and Partners pages.