The story is really about preserving endangered US mountain carribou from weekend-warrior snowmobile enthusiasts, but I thought this quote was worth pointing out:

Citing aerial photographs that show snowmobile tracks crisscrossing caribou routes to vital feeding areas, the judge added, “The court chooses to be overprotective rather than under-protective.”

And why not? If you move the snowmobiles to another location, or require them to reduce their pollution (noise and emissions), is there any real difference? Whereas if you do not, the carribou may be gone forever. Seems like the judge made a wise call, in terms of risk. The article goes on to show a little irony:

Snowmobile interests have countered that the herd has shrunk over the decades mostly because of past logging, backcountry skiing and global warming

Global warming, likely to be caused by exhaust. And snowmobiles are one of the worst polluters, each engine putting out the equivalent exhaust of 1,000 cars as I’ve mentioned before. Think about that for a second. Just one hundred snowmobiles would put out 100,000 cars worth of exhaust.

The risk actually identified by the animal experts was that the heavy snowmobiles pack down so much snow that it prevents the caribou from escaping their enemies in deep powder. They also argued that the noise of the unregulated engines disturbs the caribou enough to hurt their feeding and calving. These claims make sense, and were apparently well documented, especially when compared to the “it’s because of global warming, not because of the engines that might be a major contributor to global warming”. Interesting that the snowmobile interests wanted to argue about disturbances caused by backcountry skiing. With logic like that, it is no wonder the judge decided to send the snowmobiles packing. Did the defense present photos of angry-looking ski couples making nasty faces at the caribou? Perhaps they had evidence of the latest ski fashion colors causing a loss of caribou appetite?