For nearly 40 years the California condor, North America's largest terrestrial bird, has teetered on the brink of extinction. During the late 1980s, fewer than two dozen condors remained. Captive breeding programs have since helped the population to grow tenfold, but now, just as condors find themselves on the verge of recovery, they've encountered another threat: lead bullets. Many sportsmen hunt with lead ammunition and leave behind animal carcasses and gut piles that the massive scavengers eat. The birds mistake lead shot and bullet fragments for calcium-rich bone and accidentally eat the toxic metal. Lead poisoning threatens not only condors but also golden eagles and poses a danger to the hunters and their families who eat lead-tainted meat. In early September, NRDC sued the California Fish and Game Commission for violating the Endangered Species Act by issuing hunting licenses that allow the use of lead ammunition in the condors' habitat. Other options exist: Ammunition made from copper, for example, is commonly used to hunt deer and other game and is equal -- some say superior -- in performance to traditional lead ammunition.
-- Erika Brekke

In what is sure to be one of the most important environmental battles ever argued before the Supreme Court, NRDC and a coalition of 30 states, cities, and environmental groups will argue this fall that the federal government can and should regulate pollutants that contribute to global warming. To support its position of inaction on global warming, the Bush administration maintains that the Clean Air Act does not grant it the authority to limit carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions. David Doniger, policy director of NRDC's Climate Center, counters: "The plain language of the Clean Air Act gives the government jurisdiction over any air pollutant that threatens public health or welfare." If the court sides with the states and environmental groups, California will be able to proceed with the implementation of a landmark law limiting carbon dioxide emissions from passenger vehicles; New York and nine other states are expected to implement similar rules.
-- Kathryn McGrath

For more than half a century, California's Friant Dam has diverted nearly 95 percent of the 350-mile San Joaquin River -- the state's second-longest river and a major tributary to the San Francisco Bay-Delta -- to irrigate farmland. Downstream from the dam, the only flowing water comes from feeder streams; more than 60 miles of the riverbed is bone-dry. Once-thriving Chinook salmon runs are gone. The lack of freshwater concentrates agricultural runoff, degrading the drinking water of the 22 million people whose faucets tap into the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary. In 1988, NRDC sued the federal Bureau of Reclamation for violating California state law, which requires dam owners to release enough water to sustain healthy fish populations downstream. Farmers and government bureaucrats bitterly opposed the case for 16 years, until August 2004, when the federal district court in Sacramento ruled in favor of NRDC. In the wake of that decision, NRDC has reached an agreement with local irrigation districts and the federal government to undertake one of the largest river-restoration projects in U.S. history. Soon the San Joaquin will once again flow all the way to San Francisco Bay. Reviving the river will bring back salmon populations and help clean up the drinking water for millions of Californians.
-- Erika Brekke