State of Alaska v. Lubchenco

MEMORANDUM OPINION

ROYCE C. LAMBERTH, Chief Judge.

The absence of an expected change is sometimes indistinguishable from the presence of an observed one. So when the best available science predicts that a recently enacted ban on subsistence hunting will reverse the abrupt depletion of a species, a decade without any noticeable recovery in the species’ population should raise a concern that the true cause of its decline has not been fully addressed. The species in this case — beluga whales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet — was nearly wiped out by a catastrophic spree of subsistence whaling between 1994…