(CN) — The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state on Thursday, rejecting a constitutional challenge to a 30-year-old wildlife statute’s definition of “sustained yield.”
That the Legislature was within its authority when it enacted the law regulating management requirements for the Board of Game in 1994, the court affirmed, quashing the argument that the Legislature illegally changed the meaning of the term to require the killing of predators.
“The plain meaning of the Alaska Constitution’s sustained yield provision, as well as the framers’ intent and precedent, all reinforce the Legislature’s authority to define sustained yield in statute, as well as the statute’s compliance with the Alaska Constitution,” Alaska Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Henderson wrote in the 18-page ruling.
In natural resource management, the term “sustained yield” refers to the amount of a resource that can be harvested in the long term without depleting it. The Alaskan statute in contention defines is as “the achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of the ability to support a high level of human harvest of game, subject to preferences among beneficial uses, on an annual or periodic basis.”
Ronald West, the attorney challenging the statute, says it required the state to “abandon science,” an argument the Supreme Court sharply refuted.
“Although AS 16.05.255(k) does not in itself contain the word ‘science,’ this does not mean that the statutory subsection either requires or even suggests the abandonment of science in managing for sustained yield,” Henderson wrote.
The court also refuted West’s argument in the 2021 complaint that the statutory definition violated the sustained yield provision in the Alaska Constitution, finding that “the statute’s expression of a more specific sustained yield goal or preference is consistent with the flexible constitutional language.”
The sustained yield clause in the Alaska Constitution states “fish, forests, wildlife, grasslands, and all other replenishable resources belonging to the state shall be utilized, developed, and maintained on the sustained yield principle, subject to preferences among beneficial uses.”
The constitution, the Supreme Court found, expects the Legislature to distill the broad term into narrower laws that govern resource management.
To explain its findings, the Supreme Court turned to a glossary definition of the term used by the Resources Committee of the Constitutional Convention which recognized that calculating the sustained yield for resources like huckleberries, fish and wildlife is “difficult or even impossible to measure accurately.”
“The intentionally broad nature of sustained yield as a concept suggests that there must be some flexibility in implementing the principle,” Henderson wrote.
West also argued that the statute’s definition of sustained yield omitted predators from management for sustained yield. That move, he contended, required state wildlife departments to kill predators — an issue West has previously raised before the state’s high court.
In 2006, he argued a state predator control plan violated sustained yield under the Alaska Constitution and the very state law he challenged in this case. The state Supreme Court ruled against him in 2010, and used findings in part to support its decisions in the current challenge.
In West’s first challenge, the Supreme Court found that both the statute and state constitution’s sustained yield portions required management of predator populations and allowed the state to determine how to balance predator and prey decisions.
“Our precedent reinforces the Legislature’s discretion to define sustained yield in statute, as well as AS 16.05.255’s constitutionality,” Henderson wrote.
West and the Alaskan Attorney General’s Office did not provide comments before press time.