A petition to list the eastern North Pacific gray whale on the federal endangered species list went unanswered last year. On Tuesday, three environmental groups threatened to sue the federal agency that administers the Endangered Species Act for failing to meet a required deadline.

If the whales are listed as endangered, protecting the species would legally require the government to consider protecting the ecosystem the whales depend on — the sea beneath the melting Arctic ice.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.