BROADUS — A groundbreaking legal ruling has put Montana front and center in the climate change movement, with 16 young Montanans now the victors in a lawsuit aimed at securing their constitutional rights to a clean environment.
The name at the top of that lawsuit, Rikki Held, has become synonymous with a new generation's fight against climate change. But the young woman from Broadus never thought it would take her so far.
To really understand why Rikki Held, 22, cares so much about the environment, all you need to picture is sandstone buttes, sprawling prairie and the golden sunlight of the Powder River Basin.
This was Held's playground. She grew up on a 4,000-acre cattle ranch about 20 miles south of Broadus.
“The ranch is just my favorite place in the world," said Held. "I really valued being able to grow up here and have the space to grow and learn, and also having so many responsibilities with ranch in life."
Held's family has deep roots in Broadus, as her father's family owned several motels in town. Rikki Held herself is a fifth-generation Montanan and her father, Steve Held, ranched cattle and bred horses.
“Within this ranching community, everyone's very reliant on the land for our livelihoods," Rikki Held said. "With our crops and livestock, we depend on the well-being of the land.”
Growing up on the ranch with her dad and twin brother, Held built a strong connection with the natural world and community around her.
“She's just a great person. People have always liked her," Steve Held said. "She has been able to talk with adults since she was very young and she worked so hard that you couldn't deny her."
Life on the ranch inspired Rikki Held's interest in science, and she got her first taste of a scientific study in middle school, when she helped the U.S. Geological Survey conduct research around water use in the Powder River Basin.
"Connecting that environmental research back to home was really cool," Held said. "You can study it in the books, but then also relating it back to my home through research was really cool."
Over time, Held started noticing other changes.
"Things like wildfires, smoke, drought and water variability, less snow pack, more extreme events such as hail that damages crops and stronger windstorms, things like that," Held said. "Even in 2012, there was this huge fire that burned down 70 miles of power lines."
Through education and her own research, Held started connecting the dots of the changes on her ranch to a bigger, global problem.
“Learning about climate change in high school, it kind of sounded like something that was happening on the other side of the world or might be in the future more, affecting, like, sea level rise and polar bears. And so I didn't really connect it to my own life," Held said.
"But then the more I learned and did my own research, just in my own lifetime, I have seen climate changes."
Witnessing the impacts of climate change on her ranch led Held, then a freshman in college in Colorado, to approach a group from Oregon planning to take action against the state of Montana.
"They explained that it was a constitutional lawsuit and that we have rights in our constitution such as a clean and healthful environment. And the case just made perfect sense to me," Held said.
The lawsuit was filed in 2020 by Our Children's Trust, a nonprofit law center that focuses on youth and climate change, on behalf of 16 Montana children. At the age of 18, Held was the only one of the plaintiffs who was legally an adult, and she was named as lead plaintiff.
“Of course I was concerned because it's my little girl, and I know in this climate that can bring a lot of risks," said Steve Held, Rikki's father.
But Steve Held's faith in his daughter ties back to the very name printed on the lawsuit.
“Her last name is 'Held'— that means hero in German. 'Rikki' is benevolent king. So to me, she was a benevolent king hero with the strength of two men. What I was supposed to talk her out of it?” Held said.
Rikki Held says after joining the lawsuit in 2020, life continued as normal and the legal proceedings moved slowly. Then the case went to trial in June 2023 and international attention was trained on the Helena courtroom.
"She also doesn't like the spotlight. She doesn't like the attention," Steve Held said. "She spent a semester last fall sailing a 135-foot sailboat to Tahiti. Being on the ranch, being out on the ocean, being in another part of the world where she can be quiet in nature. That's who she is."
What the youth plaintiffs were challenging in court was the constitutionality of fossil fuel-based provisions on Montana's state energy policy and standing limitations to the Montana Environmental Policy Act, which forbids the state from considering the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions or climate change in their environmental reviews.
This, they argued, goes against Article IX of the Montana Constitution, which states, "The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations."
Lawyers from the state of Montana defended its policies, and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen had previously criticized the case, telling MTN there isn't a legal remedy for the young plaintiffs and saying any victory would be "hollow" for the young plaintiffs because the judge cannot order the Legislature to pivot to any type of alternative energy use.
Yet on Aug. 14, Lewis & Clark County Judge Kathy Seeley ruled in favor of the young plaintiffs upholding in her order that the young plaintiffs have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, and that the judgement invalidates statutes prohibiting analysis of greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts.
When Seeley's ruling came down, Rikki Held was in the mountains of Colorado and just happened to come down into cellphone service to apply for a backcountry permit. That's when lawyers told the young plaintiffs to gather for a Zoom call to hear the judge's decision.
"I was just in a Starbucks parking lot, listening in on my computer. Our lawyers told us and it kind of felt unbelievable because we'd been working on this for so long and waiting for the decision to come out and and then to hear that we had won the case it was just kind of overwhelming and great to hear," Held said.
A spokesperson for Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen called the ruling "absurd" and said his office plans to appeal.
Held says she knows the appeal is coming, but she is already planning the next steps of her life.
“The next thing is the Peace Corps. I'm going to go next month and be in Kenya for two years teaching science," Held said.
Held says she'll never drop her fight against climate change and she hopes the case will serve as a point of optimism for people of all ages.
“I'm just one story and it's been so personal for me, but everyone in the world is impacted by climate change," Held said.
"We know that there is a problem, that we have control over it, and we have responsibility to change it."
