Disputing Disney

In the heart of California's magnificent sequoia forests, in a lonely valley called Mineral King, Walt Disney Enterprises wants to build a $35 million resort, complete with ski lifts, swimming pools and housing to handle crowds of 14,000 tourists per day. In 1969, the corporation got a permit from the U.S. Forest Service to start work on the resort.

To the wilderness enthusiasts of the Sierra Club, the Disney plan was an outrage. They filed suit to stop it and carried their fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court--only to be faced with a blunt legal question: What right did the club have to sue?

Traditionally, a lawsuit claims damage or injury to the plaintiff. In rejecting the Sierra Club's action last week. Justice Potter Stewart, writing for the 4-to-3 majority, observed that the group had failed to argue that it or any of its members would be "significantly affected." Instead, they had tried to do "no more than vindicate their own value preferences."

Stewart did find, however, that "aesthetic and environmental wellbeing, like economic wellbeing, are important ingredients of the quality of life" and are "deserving of legal protection." For environmentalists, that was an important victory. Stewart went on to drop a footnote broadly hinting that if the Sierra Club amended its complaint, it might well succeed. Stewart even seemed to suggest that it need claim no more than that its campers regularly use and enjoy the area.

The dissenting Justices, Blackmun, Brennan and Douglas, were even more sympathetic to the conservationists; so Sierra Club lawyers were only briefly dismayed by their technical defeat. The problem now is time, and the attorneys have already begun planning strategy to reactivate the case before any Disney workmen start digging in.

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