Sanity has not perished from the earth, or even from the United States Supreme Court. Yes, it’s an endangered species, but it shows up every once in a while. The big questions: can it survive, can it regrow, can it thrive?

One sighting of sanity occurred today when SCOTUS ruled, unanimously, that a piece of land in Mississippi that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had designated “critical habitat” for the endangered “dusky gopher frog” was no such thing.

“Why?” you might ask.

Because no dusky gopher frogs live there. And the land “cannot provide habitat for them absent a radical change in the land use because it lacks features necessary for their survival,” as attorneys for landowner Weyerhauser Co. (which grows timber commercially to produce paper) argued.

USFWS had argued that some of the 100 frogs known to live elsewhere could be “translocated” to five ponds close to each other on the property, where they could breed and perhaps recover.

But if the possibility that a radical change in land use can make a given property “critical habitat” for an endangered species, there’s no limit to what USFWS could call “critical habitat.”

After all, the use of the land on which my house stands could be changed radically to make it “critical habitat” for any number of endangered species. Just remove the house, cultivate the appropriate flora on the ground, and—voila!—you have critical habitat for something!

One can’t help wondering why lower courts didn’t make the same judgment long ago. Maybe it’s because sanity is an endangered species among them.