On November 5, an anti-environmentalist faction led by and supporting Donald Trump prevailed in the national elections. The policy assaults by Trump & Co. promise to be fierce: second renunciation of the Paris Agreement, disruption of the greening of the energy sector, regulatory rollbacks, the evisceration of EPA and natural resource agencies. Those who want to protect the environmental gains we’ve made will do what they can to forestall or derail those efforts. As a now-retired environmental lawyer, I hope to be able to help. But I also intend to engage productively on other fronts; to make the next four years something more than a rearguard action to lessen the impending wreckage at the national scale.
I consider myself an environmentalist, although I’ve thought and done things that others of that persuasion would find disqualifying. I went to law school to be an environmental lawyer because I believed in the efficacy of lawyers and law to protect the places we loved. At that moment, in the early 1970s, the environmental movement was a spring tide that swept citizens and politicians of every stripe along with it. On the First Earth Day, April 1970, with hundreds of others, I picked up trash along the Potomac River – a heap of plastic bottles, aluminum cans, the jetsam of a waste-blind consumer economy – and vowed to go to law school to fight the damage...