May 11, 2026
Wayne National Forest Fracking Litigation
I (Nathan) became an environmental public interest attorney because I believe the law can be a shield for places that cannot speak for themselves. The OEC’s fight to protect the Wayne National Forest from unlawful fracking is now ten years in. We have won critical victories—but the fight is far from over.
When our effort began in 2016, there was little analysis of what fracking would mean for local streams, wildlife habitat, or nearby rural communities. The forest, though federally protected on paper, was being treated as an industrial sacrifice zone. Our role was to force accountability where the process had failed.
In 2020 and 2021, our hard work paid off with court rulings requiring federal agencies to follow their own laws. Judges agreed that leasing approvals had ignored basic environmental safeguards, including meaningful analysis of forest fragmentation, air pollution, and stream impacts. These rulings halted drilling plans and sent agencies back to the drawing board. For the forest itself, that pause mattered. Streams continued to run clear. Trails stayed open. We protected sensitive habitats from destruction and prevented harmful air pollution for the public.
In 2025, the Trump Administration issued a new, deeply flawed environmental review and unilaterally declared that the injunction halting the leasing project had dissolved. The OEC is back in court fighting this unlawful project. Our legal briefs are in, and the stakes are high. The agencies’ figures show that this fracking project could cancel out the entire national forest’s carbon sequestration for thirty years. Those figures also show that the project could generate nearly as much coarse particulate matter as the entire oil and gas industry in the state.
Today, fracking has not begun in this forest. That is something to celebrate. Yet the legal protections we rely on are only as durable as our willingness to defend them. The opposing pressure has not disappeared; it has simply regrouped. As an environmental public interest attorney, I have learned that success often looks less like a final victory and more like sustained vigilance.
The fight for justice never ends, and protecting public lands is not a one-time act. It is a continual effort to ensure that the promises of the law are honored—to conserve these places not just for profit or politics, but for the generations who will walk beneath these trees long after our briefs are filed.
