The case prompted a famous dissent by Justice William O. Douglas suggesting that in response to ecological concerns, environmental objects (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) should be granted legal personhood by the public.

In 1965 the United States Forest Service began circulating a prospectus calling for bids for recreational developments at Mineral King.

[5] Disney's master plan attracted national media attention from Harper's Magazine[6] as well as consistent, critical coverage by The New York Times.

[7][4] Michael McCloskey had just ousted David Brower as executive director of the Sierra Club and, emboldened by the Second Circuit's decision in Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, he sought a more direct, and litigious, approach to environmentalism by setting up the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, later renamed Earthjustice.

[4] The Sierra Club then sued the United States Secretary of the Interior in San Francisco federal court to block development of Disney's famous ski resort.

[1] Asserting itself as private attorney general, the Sierra Club argued that Disney's resort would cause "irreparable harm to the public interest".

After two days of hearings, on July 23, 1969, District Judge William Thomas Sweigert issued a preliminary injunction blocking Disney's ski resort.

Discussing the merits, Judge Trask felt it was within the Secretary's discretion "to make available a vast area of incomparable beauty to more people rather than to have it remain inaccessible except to a rugged few.

[12] Declining to clarify the meaning of "zone of interests", the Court reasoned that broadening the categories of injury is different "from abandoning the requirement" that plaintiffs themselves actually be injured.

[14] Justice Stewart closes by noting that although Alexis de Tocqueville had observed "Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later, into a judicial question", that Tocqueville further commented that "by intimately uniting the trial of the law with the trial of an individual, legislation is protected from wanton assaults and from the daily aggressions of party spirit.

Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.

It merely means that before these priceless bits of America (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) are forever lost or are so transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment, the voice of the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard.

Those who hike the Appalachian Trail into Sunfish Pond, New Jersey, and camp or sleep there, or run the Allagash in Maine, or climb the Guadalupes in West Texas, or who canoe and portage the Quetico Superior in Minnesota, certainly should have standing to defend those natural wonders before courts or agencies, though they live 3,000 miles away.

To assert standing in a natural resource manner, environmental groups simply need to find among their membership a single person with a particularized interest (e.g., one who hikes, hunts, fishes, or camps in or near the affected area).

[4] Thirty years later during the 111th United States Congress, Senator Barbara Boxer developed a bill designating Mineral King as the John Krebs Wilderness, which President Barack Obama then signed into law in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009.