Our Children’s Trust, a small nonprofit law firm, is the force behind a watershed moment in the fight against fossil-fuel-driven climate change.
On Monday, a Montana District Court judge issued a ruling in favor of 16 young people who had sued the state for its permissive approach to fossil fuels. The plaintiffs, ages 5 to 22, powered the law firm’s arguments by testifying that the state had violated their constitutional rights to a clean and healthful environment by ignoring the impact of oil, coal, and gas projects on climate.
“Plaintiffs have proven that as children and youth, they are disproportionately harmed by fossil-fuel pollution and climate impacts,” Judge Kathy Seeley wrote in her decision. To the surprise of many, she declared that the state’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in affecting the climate.
The victory orchestrated by Our Children’s Trust was 13 years in the making. The public interest law firm based in Eugene, Ore. has launched youth-led climate lawsuits and legal actions in all 50 states and against the federal government, but the Held v. Montana case was the first to go to trial.
“It’s an incredible decision so we were all extremely excited about what the judge did with the ruling,” says Julia Olson, who founded the firm following years in environmental litigation and after becoming a mother. “It’s monumental and it’s really necessary.”
Legal and climate science experts describe the small nonprofit as a leader in the climate litigation field both for its legal strategy and its work to put the stories of young people front and center in the climate fight. The Montana case may have been a landmark victory, but the nonprofit has been quietly influential in the past decade’s legal battles over climate.
“Their strategic campaigns to deploy youth-based climate cases to move the needle on government ambition has been a leading light in the field,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
“By putting those stories front and center, Our Children’s Trust has moved the discussion of climate change away from a technocratic problem that is far off in time and space to a very human problem that is felt immediately, that is happening now, and that needs to be addressed now,”
Shaping Climate Law
Our Children’s Trust’s approach has been able to frame legal arguments around constitutional rights, human rights, and the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that requires states to manage certain natural resources, like rivers and lakes, for the benefit of the public.
Perhaps the firm’s best-known case before Held is Juliana v. United States, brought by a group of 21 young people in 2015 who asserted that the federal government had promoted a fossil fuel economy that violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. This June, a federal judge said it could proceed to trial.
Juliana v. United States may still be working its way through the courts, but it has already had some impact on climate discourse and the legal field.
“You can’t really go to law school these days without learning about our Juliana v. United States lawsuit,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, the chief development officer of Our Children’s Trust. Most environmental lawsuits rely on statutes and regulations, while Juliana and other cases brought by the nonprofit firm are novel in that they frame the climate crisis as a civil rights concern.
In the past five years the number of climate lawsuits has more than doubled, according to a report from the Sabin Center. In 2022 alone, 2,180 such suits were filed, most of them in the U.S.
Our Children’s Trust has youth-led legal actions pending in Virginia, Utah, and Florida, and several more cases are brewing. One case, against Hawaii’s Department of Transportation, will proceed to trial next summer.
Though the scope of the Montana case is limited, “It’s highly likely that it will influence and at least inform the way other judges in the United States and in other countries look at their own climate cases,” Burger says.
Delta Merner, lead scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Science Hub for Climate Litigation, lauded the firm’s use of climate science in the Montana court room.
“The scientific facts were well laid out during the trial and supported the firsthand experiences that youth plaintiffs described in their testimony,” she said in an email. “This straightforward approach proved to be irrefutable — the state didn’t even try to counter the scientific claims.”
The plaintiffs were not seeking money from the state; rather they want Montana to acknowledge that its laws are making the climate crisis worse and they want the government to change those laws.
Montana District Court Judge Kathy Seeley’s ruling notably invalidated a policy that forbids state agencies from evaluating the environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions when deciding to approve or renew fossil fuel development.
A spokeswoman for the Montana attorney general’s office called the ruling “absurd” and said the state would appeal, which would send the case to the state Supreme Court.
A Volunteer Network
Before founding Our Children’s Trust, Julia Olson was an attorney at Earth Justice and Wild Earth Advocates, representing grassroots conservation groups working to protect the environment and human health.
Her focus shifted after she became a mother in the mid-2000s. “It became really clear to me that young people were going to suffer the most and that they had no power over any of the decisions being made about our energy systems and fossil fuels,” she says.
She began talking to representatives of human rights organizations, who said climate change was not on their agendas. In conversations with environmental law groups, lawyers told her they didn’t view climate change as an issue of constitutional or human rights.
In 2010, she founded Our Children’s Trust as the only volunteer employee, aiming to represent young people upset and outraged by the climate crisis. Today, she serves as executive director and chief legal counsel for a staff of around 30 full-time employees and more than a dozen summer law clerks.
Our Children’s Trust also relies heavily on volunteers. Expert witnesses and scientists volunteer their time, as do dozens of pro bono attorneys who serve as local counsel in the states where the nonprofit brings cases. In Montana, for example, Olson’s firm worked in partnership with the Western Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit environmental law firm, and the Montana-based McGarvey Law Offices.
Since its founding, the nonprofit has raised more than $25 million to bring lawsuits to state and federal court, says development director Dickinson.
Most of that support comes from individual donors, many of whom give less than $500 annually. Institutional funders, which have included the Libra Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Wallace Global Foundation, provided less than a third of the group’s budget last year, Dickinson said. Some climate grant makers have been hesitant to fund litigation as a tool to fight environmental harms, despite its potential to compel lasting change.
“It has taken quite a while to get this kind of a victory from our state courts,” Dickinson said. “Our donors and the staff and the board, we’ve needed a victory. We’ve needed to be able to get into court.”
She expects Our Children’s Trust 2023 fundraising haul will be around $5.9 million, more than double what the firm raised last year. Already, this week’s ruling has led to a bump in donations.
Youth Testimony
Young people have been central to the success of Our Children’s Trust and they have come to the nonprofit in a variety of ways. In Montana, some heard about the organization through their teachers at school, while others were already involved in climate activism through other nonprofits or got involved after learning about the lawsuits in the media.
Not all youth volunteers get to be plaintiffs. They go through an interview process talking to attorneys about the ways climate change may have harmed their health, their home, a special place that they love, or their families’ finances.
“It was clear early on that a lot of these young people were experiencing climate anxiety and trauma around climate change, whether it was from acute events like hurricanes and flooding or fires to just the chronic trauma that comes with knowing what’s happening to your home planet and your communities,” Olson says. “That became a really important part of these cases.”
Support from donors allows Our Children’s Trust to bring on a consultant who provides trauma-informed care to plaintiffs and their families, as well as coaching for the attorneys. The consultant, Juli Alvarado, whose background is in clinical and organizational psychology, worked with plaintiffs ahead of the June trial and was there in the Helena courtroom as the young people provided their emotional testimony.
Rikki Held, the named plaintiff in the Montana case, grew up raising cattle and building fences on her family’s 3,000-acre ranch in the southeastern corner of the state. She testified that wildfire, drought, and extreme weather have threatened the property and her family’s livelihood — and challenged her own mental health.
“It’s just stressful ’cause that’s my life and my home is there,” she said in the courtroom.
Big Ambitions
Olson has big ambitions for the future of Our Children’s Trust. She’s establishing partnerships with other organizations focused on children’s rights and developing a new California-based federal case.
In Utah, the nonprofit is working with a broad coalition, including the ACLU and reproductive rights groups, to bring a case before the state’s supreme court focused on the right to life — of children who are alive today and people who want to have children in the future.
“If we can have our laws protect kids, we’re going to take care of so many problems,” Olson says. “This work in our democracy and our courts is so vital because our political system alone is not going to address climate change in time. We need the courts involved in this issue.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
