Purple Activists: Using the Law to Keep Things Green

When Joe Bodovitz came to campus in the late 1940s, he studied English and didn’t spend a single moment engaged in discussion about the environment. And yet he ended up playing a pivotal role in preserving the San Francisco Bay. In January 1970, the historic Teach Out On the Environment was held at Northwestern, raising awareness, ruffling feathers, and acting as a prelude to the first Earth Day, which followed in May of that year. The Teach Out inspired students like Paul Growald ’70, who went on to found the Coevolution Institute, and who was featured in Crosscurrents, spring 2006. Still, there was no formal training on environmental issues.

More than two decades later, Joe Mann ’94, a philosophy major, began applying ethical principles to legislation to protect the waters of Maine. It was around the time Joe came to campus, the early ’90s, that faculty in the College, anticipating an explosion in public interest in environmental issues, created an innovative major in environmental science. Now students come to Northwestern specifically for its expertise in the field. Because of the major’s interdisciplinary approach and broad-based training in the sciences, students like Marisa Martin ’99 say they are well equipped to understand today’s complicated environmental issues. Freelance writer Emily Krone (MSJ Medill ’04) spoke with three of our alumni activists.

The lawyers called them Franken-fish, and they ran roughshod over the other salmon.

Bred for dinner plates, they bided their time in sea cages—until they escaped and headed for the nearest salmon river.

There, they ate as much as they could as quickly as they could, bred as often as they could, and muscled out the North American salmon for choice spawning grounds. The native salmon population began to wane.

Just as the salmon escaped from the pens, so too did the chemicals meant to keep the salmon pink, plump, and lice-free.

And there was the matter of permits, which the salmon farmers never secured, though the Environmental Protection Agency had warned them, more than a decade earlier, that they needed permits under the Clean Water Act.

In short, the lawyers said, major salmon farmers in Maine had been polluting the ocean and thumbing their nose at environmental laws for years. State regulators had turned a blind eye, and the EPA’s investigation into the matter could only be described as “leisurely,” a federal judge later said.

Enter Joe Mann and other lawyers for the National Environmental Law Center, a non-profit law firm that serves as a sort of neighborhood watch for the nation’s land, air and water.

Mann, an attorney at the Center since 2000, is part of a small community of lawyers who sue polluters violating the federal clean air and water acts. They sue on behalf of whistle-blowers, environmental activists and other concerned citizens when federal agencies can’t—or won’t—enforce federal environmental laws.

In 2000, the Law Center filed a suit in district court against two of Maine’s largest salmon farmers. Three years later, the court ordered both companies to pay $50,000 penalties, end the growing of non-native salmon, and allow their farm sites to remain fallow in order to give the sea floor an opportunity to recover.

Mann recalls the protracted fight as a watershed victory. “There was a huge backlash against salmon farming, which was recognized as a fairly destructive practice,” Mann said. “It also highlighted another backdrop, which is that regulated industries were in bed with the regulators.”

A philosophy major at Northwestern, Mann said he applies his undergraduate ethics training to litigation. He’s not interested in arguing both sides of an issue, finding a new legal loophole, or circumventing the intent of the law.

Mann’s belief in the Center’s cause allows him to deflect the personal attacks that come with the job. Mann shrugged off, for example, the representative from an Oregon seafood company who told him his presence made him physically ill.

“Nobody likes getting sued. And we’re not going after mom-and-pop stores. The companies we sue are used to getting their own way,” Mann said. “They’re sufficiently insulated…to believe what they’re doing is right and just.”

Generally, Mann is able to prove what they’re doing isn’t right or just. The law is tilted toward the plaintiffs, and most of his opponents settle before trial, Mann said.

Unlike other lawyers practicing for the public interest, environmental lawyers usually win, Mann said.

“Contrast that with civil rights lawyers or housing advocates,” Mann said. “I’m glad people are doing that, but I’m not sure I could keep my spirits up in the face of constant defeat. I need to know I’m not banging my head against the wall when I go to work.”

“I honestly feel this is a noble profession,” Mann said.

If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be worth the struggle, said Joe Bodovitz, a pioneering activist who spearheaded California’s urban planning movement for more than four decades.

“I have and had a real passion for the course we were on,” Bodovitz said. “I think one has to have the feeling you’re doing something useful to work that hard. Certainly you don’t get into this line of work to make large amounts of money.”

When Bodovitz graduated from Northwestern, the U.S. was enmeshed in the Korean War. He joined the Navy, served as a junior officer on a ship based in California and became enamored of the area.

After his stint in the Navy, he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and then accepted a job with the San Francisco Examiner. For six years as a reporter, Bodovitz covered urban planning and the nascent environmental movement.

His coverage of the issues eventually led to directorships of groups responsible for San Francisco’s planning, conservation, and development. From there, Bodovitz went on to lead a California coastal commission charged with controlling development. After a hiatus of consulting and teaching, Bodovitz was asked to direct the state utility commission. He went on to become the president of the California Environmental Trust. Happily retired, Bodovitz continues to lecture occasionally. He says he’s still trying to “stir up people’s thinking,” and last semester he taught a course at the University of San Francisco called “California in 2007: Still the Golden State?”

California still was the Golden State when Bodovitz settled there, but it was facing a pivotal time in its history.

Until the early ’60s, Californians largely encouraged go-go, American-dream, Gold-rush style growth. After World War II, veterans streamed west, the population exploded, and tract housing and new super highways mushroomed.

Then came the “freeway revolt,” led by residents who resented the giant thruways rammed into their established neighborhoods. There was ferment, a sense that unbridled growth might destroy the environment and natural beauty that had made California such a draw in the first place.

In San Francisco, focus turned to the Bay. For more than a century, diking and filling had reduced the size of the Bay, by about four square miles annually between 1850 and 1960.

Three very determined women, wives of prominent academics, led the charge to save the Bay. From their homes in the Berkeley Hills, they could see the Bay’s shallows and became alarmed when they learned of a massive plan to fill them. The women came to believe the entire Bay needed protecting from the seemingly insatiable demand for more ports, more industrial space, more homes, and more garbage dumps.

Due in part to the women’s prodding, university researchers began publishing studies. The Army Corps of Engineers produced a map showing what percentage of the Bay was privately owned, and predicted that the region’s signature body of water was in danger of becoming little more than a river. A clout-heavy San Francisco state senator began stumping for legislative change. A popular local disc jockey took up the cause.

“Really, it was a big groundswell of opinion that nobody had ever seen,” Bodovitz said. “The kind of citizen activism we’re used to now really began to take off.”

The phenomenon made lawmakers take note, and during a heated legislative session in 1965 they established the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, as a temporary state agency charged with developing a plan for the long-term use of the Bay.

Bodovitz was named the commission’s executive director in 1966. Three years later, the commission completed the widely acclaimed San Francisco Bay Plan, which designated areas for water-related purposes like ports, as well as policies on critical issues such as transportation and public access. Later that year, the commission was made a permanent agency, and the plan was incorporated into state law.

It was a bold move, to give a state agency such a wide mandate, and it encouraged the activists who had helped make it possible.

“It was a memorable exercise in getting people excited that in turn led people to think we could do this for the whole coast,” Bodovitz said. “The notion that something like this could succeed was amazing. And as people began to learn things could be done, the level of activism increased.”

Today, Bodovitz says, “I feel very good that there are parts of the coast I can take you to that are still in as good shape as we had hoped when we did all this in the ’70s.” Filling virtually stopped, and public access to the Bay increased exponentially.

It wasn’t always evident at the time, when they were fighting with people who felt their private property rights were being trampled on, but the Bay crusaders were participating in a sort of golden age of environmental activism, one that would shape the terms of the debate in years to come.

Today’s network of state and federal regulatory agencies is an imperfect system, Bodovitz says, but—with the passage of the clean air and water acts in the 1970s and the establishment of agencies like the Development Commission—at least there is a system, Bodovitz says. He believes he was simply at the right place at the right time to effect change. “The ’60s and ’70s were a period not since repeated, when federal legislation passed, states acted in response, and people were beginning to understand ecology,” Bodovitz said.

Nearly half a century later, Marisa Martin believes she has come upon a similar moment in history.

Martin majored in environmental science and international relations at Northwestern, and then went on to earn a law degree and a master’s degree in environmental policy at the University of Michigan. On a Fulbright Scholarship in Geneva, Switzerland, she studied climate change and carbon trading in the European Union. She now works for the law firm of Baker & McKenzie in Chicago in their climate change group.

Stirred in part by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary about the potentially devastating effects of global warming, Americans have, seemingly overnight, awakened to the dangers of global climate change, in Martin’s view.

“It’s really exciting, it’s such a sea change,” Martin said. “Six months ago we were still educating people on why they should be worried.”

At Baker & McKenzie, Martin advises corporations about how to comply with laws and policies limiting greenhouse emissions. The majority of her work once centered on foreign firms, bound by obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. Increasingly, though, her clients are domestic companies dealing proactively with climate issues.

California’s landmark legislation, which calls for market incentives and regulations to reduce greenhouse gasses by 25 percent by 2020, put American firms on notice, Martin said. The legislation includes the establishment of a statewide greenhouse gas emissions cap for 2020.

“A lot of domestic companies are becoming very progressive,” Martin said. “They’re looking to make changes before they have to. It’s really developing.”

Martin predicts climate change legislation will dominate environmental law for the next 30 years, just as legislation governing clean air and water shaped the past 30.

More and more, Martin said, consumption patterns will change, as legislation and policies make it more expensive for companies to emit greenhouse gasses. Once carbon emissions become more regulated, prices will reflect the true social and ecological price of greenhouse gasses, Martin said.

“The biggest result of climate law will be a new perception of what your actions and their implications are,” Martin said. “Society will have to internalize the true cost of carbon.”

Martin’s experience as an environmental science major at Northwestern demonstrates the paradigm shift that already has occurred since Bodovitz came on campus in the late 40s.

“In my days there, I don’t know that anyone would have known what ecology meant,” Bodovitz said.

Bodovitz says he never could have anticipated his career arc as an undergraduate at Northwestern. “I had no expectation that I would ever end up in a field like this.”

Martin did.

She chose Northwestern specifically for its environmental science program, which includes coursework in chemistry and chemical engineering, physics and biology. At the time, environmental science programs at other colleges focused more on policy, and Martin was drawn to the Northwestern program’s emphasis on the hard sciences.

Her junior year, she participated in a field study program under the guidance of Professor Paul Friesema, researching subsistence use of native resources at Katmai National Park in Alaska. “It helped me see the large-scale implications of federal law,” Martin said.

“Northwestern was really the incubator of my environmental interest,” Martin said, adding that her scientific training has given her a leg up in her career.

“It’s a unique skill to have not just science but environmental science,” Martin said. “This kind of environmental law gets highly technical very quickly.”

The highly technical nature of climate change makes this next frontier of environmental activism uniquely challenging, all three Northwestern grads agreed.

Climate change tends not to involve many litigation opportunities, according to Mann. “It’s hard to sue anyone for the global warming that all of us are engaging in. It’s not like suing a company for dumping a bunch of poison in the river.”

And, historically, it’s hard to rally the public until environmental threats become impossible to ignore.

“If you look back to the 1970s, and the Cuyahoga River catching on fire—it took this apocalyptic happening to have people wake up to the danger,” Mann said, referring to the famous 1969 incident. In Mann’s view, the image of the burning river, chocked with oil and industrial waste, attracted national attention and catalyzed a flood of pollution control activities, culminating in the Clean Water Act and the formation of the state and federal Environmental Protection Agencies.

Also, with global climate change, there’s a sense that it’s everywhere and nowhere: both too abstract and too pervasive to tackle. It’s easier to assume ownership of an issue—like a disappearing Bay—that you can witness from your own backyard.

“I do think so much of [the problem is] global, and based on computer projections, versus what you can see with your own eyes, which is easier to fight,” Bodovitz said.

Rising temperatures, melting ice caps, extreme weather events—the issues of the 21st century—are exponentially more complex than the environmental issues of the previous 50 years, Bodovitz concedes.

“I don’t think this generation will lack for challenges of great importance.”