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The California Red-Legged Frog, the largest native frog in the western United States, was made famous by Mark Twain in the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Once widespread from Northern California to Mexico, the California red-legged frog has been eliminated from 70 percent of its former range, including the entire Central Valley and most of the Mother Lode streams in the Sierra Nevada. The remaining populations are found mostly in isolated coastal watersheds, which are under heavy development pressure from sprawling suburban communities.

In May of 1996, the frog gained some protection under the Endangered Species Act and was listed as threatened. In March of 2001, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) -- under a court order following an earlier lawsuit brought by Earthjustice -- designated four million acres in California as critical habitat for the frog under the Endangered Species Act. Soon afterward, the Home Builders Association of Northern California and other development interests filed suit in Washington, D.C. to overturn the USFWS designation. In a controversial decision, Judge Richard Leon of the Washington DC circuit court suspended protection for all but 200,000 acres of the frog's critical habitat, pending a new study of the economic impacts of the 2001 designation. Conservation groups were shut out of the negotiations between Home Builders and the USFWS.

Despite this setback, Earthjustice attorneys in Oakland are continuing the "Healthy Cities, Healthy Wildlands" campaign, which addresses the impacts of rapid population growth and unrestrained development on the quality of life in urban centers, on agricultural lands in the Central Valley, and on forests and wildlife in the Sierra Nevada.