Opinion of the Court
this case, however, the causal uncertainty is not merely over whether observing certain procedures would have led to a different substantive outcome. Instead, the uncertainty concerns whether the substantive decisions the Department has made regarding the Plan under the HEROES Act have a causal relationship with other substantive decisions respondents want the Department to make under the HEA. There is no precedent for tolerating this sort of causal uncertainty.
Our other procedural-standing cases demonstrate the point. In the example posited in Lujan, proceeding with building the dam as planned and simultaneously sparing the adjacent landowner from the negative effects of the dam are mutually exclusive options. See ibid. While it might be uncertain whether undertaking an environmental impact statement would prevent the dam from being built, it is clear that building the dam would directly injure the landowner.
Similarly, in a case like Summers, it might be uncertain whether public comment would alter any particular land-management decision the Forest Service makes. There would be no uncertainty, however, that a plaintiff with concrete plans to observe nature in a particular area “would be harmed if the [land-management project] went forward without incorporation of the ideas he would have suggested” in his comments. 555 U. S., at 494.[1]
Accordingly, Brown and Taylor need not allege that observing negotiated rulemaking and notice and comment would “ ‘force’ ” the Department to reach substantive results more favorable to them than those embodied in the Plan.
- ↑ Although no plaintiff in Summers had standing because none had alleged specific plans to observe nature in one of the areas at issue in the case, see 555 U. S., at 500, the point remains that, in an equivalent case featuring those specific plans, environmental damage to such a plaintiff’s esthetic interests could fairly be traced to the Service’s land-management choices.
