By Amanda Eggert, Montana Free Press
Conservation groups in Montana and Idaho allege an oversight body unlawfully attempted to invalidate Montana’s 2020 selenium rule.
Environmental groups in Montana and Idaho are defending a water quality standard Montana adopted in 2020 by suing a quasi-judicial board that’s spent the past year trying to invalidate it.
The lawsuit represents the latest development in a fight over environmental protections that involves a coal-mining operation in British Columbia and state, federal and tribal governments’ responses to mining-related pollution.
At issue is a standard for selenium, a chemical element that even in small quantities can hamper reproductive success in fish and lead to spinal and gill deformities. Selenium pollution from Teck Resources’ strip mines enters the Elk River in British Columbia and then flows into Lake Koocanusa, a waterway that spans the Canada-U.S. border, and the Kootenai River. For more than a decade, environmental groups and tribes from the Ktunaxa Nation have pressured governments on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border to do more to protect waterways from selenium, which becomes increasingly concentrated as it moves up the food chain. Environmentalists are concerned that selenium contamination in U.S. waterways will result in the kind of population crashes that have been recorded in British Columbia fisheries in recent years.
