Our New Book Offers a Roadmap for Making Change and Protecting the Environment

Forty years ago, a very distinguished group of lawyers fought to stop Con Edison from building a power plant on Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Highlands.  They soon realized that a public interest law firm should be established so that ordinary citizens could fight the wealth and power of great corporations.

At the time, I was an assistant U.S. attorney in New York, and I was asked to start this organization. We called it NRDC. Looking for funding, I went to the Ford Foundation, and they introduced me to a group of recent Yale Law School Graduates who had a similar idea.

And so we began this great experiment—with passion and determination but absolutely no guarantee it would work.

Over the next four decades, we proved the power of our founding idea, and in the process we helped clean up the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the landscapes we leave to our children.

Now the modern environmental movement has reached a level of maturity and influence we couldn’t have imagined back when NRDC started and our future seemed so precarious that Johanna Wald, one of our first lawyers, remembers waiting for the phone call that would announce our experiment was over. Luckily that call never came.

But I still view the fight to protect the Earth as a work in progress. Each generation must confront new challenges and invent new solutions. Hopefully, they benefit from the lessons of the past.

That is why my wife Patricia and I wrote our new book, A Force for Nature. It is part memoir, part historical record. But it is also a roadmap for how to create political and societal change.

We learned early on, for instance, that it is possible to make change working within the system. We started discovering this on our first day of business, January 1, 1970. That was also the first day that one of the most important environmental laws went into effect. 

The National Environmental Policy Act, as well as such great statues as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, is what gives people the power to stop pollution. It established the principle that planning should come before action and that environmental impacts need to be factored into major projects. 

But a law means nothing unless it’s enforced.  The 1970s was the decade we made our name as NEPA’s enforcers.  We examined, commented on, and sued when necessary over the new regulations to make sure they were implemented and protected the public interest. And we did it with only about a dozen lawyers.

The EPA told us that when it came to NEPA, NRDC was like the American Revolutionaries—behind every tree.

Other battles taught us that relying on environmental laws wasn’t the only way to get things done. In the early 1990s, Rich Kassel, one of our young attorneys, biked to work and would often get stuck behind dirty diesel buses as he rode the whole way down Fifth Avenue – or Diesel Canyon as he called it. 

Rich wanted to clean up the buses, but he wasn’t getting any traction through policy channels, so he tried another approach: a guerilla advertising campaign of sorts. He knowingly tried to place inflammatory ads on the back of MTA buses that read, “Standing behind this bus could be more dangerous than standing in front of it.” 

We expected the MTA to balk and when they did, we slapped them with a First Amendment lawsuit. The fight turned into a PR disaster for the MTA because all major news networks picked up the story and that became more important to the public than the ads themselves. This became the springboard for negotiating with MTA and led to a wholesale clean up of New York City’s bus fleet, which is now made up largely of clean diesel, natural gas, and hybrid buses.

This diesel work became a template for NRDC’s diesel projects across the nation, as well as in Mexico City and Nairobi, and led to federal clean diesel rules. It taught us, as Rich says, “to start small and think big, because sometimes a local project may lay the foundation for a national solution.”  

We have learned many other lessons over the years, including the power of consumer outrage to get toxins out of everyday products, the ability of citizen activists to get the attention of Congress, and the occasional need to meet your sworn enemies at the negotiating table.

These strategies continue to be effective in our current battles to confront climate change and create a clean energy future. But these and other challenges will also require new tools which new generations will develop.

Our strongest force is the respect for nature found in the backbone of the NRDC staff and the determination of our members and activists. This strength will carry us into the future.