Sting Ray

I admire folks who can truly reduce their impacts while still working on the big-picture problems; my comment was directed to people I know who make minimizing their impacts the whole focus of their lives, to the point that they do little to nothing else. These are the boring prudes who get nothing done. I agree that one can do what those folks do and still be effective. What I think is that we all need to be more tolerant and forgiving of each other's shortcomings, as we all have them. If someone is doing the best they can, that is all we should ask of them.

I make time to be with my wife and kids, to travel, and to do things I enjoy. I try very hard to be home by 5:00 or 5:30 every evening. Otherwise, I would go nuts. This often means turning down cases, and we do turn down two to five cases a week. There is so much need out there for environmental protection, I could work 100 hours a week and still turn away most of the work. So I prioritize and make the best of it I can. If I burn out, I won't get anything done. But as WildLaw has grown, I have been able to surround myself with an excellent staff that takes up more of the slack and enables us to do more of the work. I am learning to delegate more and have more family (and beer-drinking) time. I estimate that I work about 50 hours a week on average, but I have a home office also and do some of it there, especially in the mornings and on weekends.

That is probably his greatest work, but my personal favorite, the one I keep coming back to for gems of inspiration, is Abbey's Road.

I don't know of any. There are a lot of good folks and good writers fighting the good fight, but there is no one of Ed's stature these days. Maybe someday. I like to think of myself as a bit of a writer; you can see how bad my writing is by buying my novel, The First Amendment. But what we need more than another Edward Abbey is 100,000 more good activists like we have now.

I am no fan of organized religion in any form, but I am a very religious person. Not that I think organized religion is bad; it can be misused, but many people need it and find comfort there, and that is fine. But for myself, I do not feel the need for a preacher with his own agenda to act as intermediary between me and God. Everything and everyone is here for a reason, even if we can never know it. I believe we are here because someone needs us and loves us and is waiting to see what we will do.

1) I started WildLaw without any clue as to how you should do this, and I highly recommend that method. If I knew what it would have taken to do all this, I am not sure I would have done it. The hardest part is just to resolve to do it and start. Once you're committed to the creation of something new, like becoming a parent, you just have to keep doing it.

In 2003, we had a total income of $542,122, the first time we have ever gone over the half-a-million dollar mark. Of that, $392,246 was donations from individuals; $144,160 was from grants from smaller to middle-sized foundations. The rest was from interest ($1,607), expense reimbursements ($3,519), court-ordered costs ($128), and tax refunds.

It is not the only way, but sometimes it is the most effective. Also, litigation is not an end in itself, but a tool, a means to change. A good example is how, in 1992, we could not get the national forests in Alabama to obey the law and properly manage our public forests here, no matter what we did nicely. So, we sued them, sued them again, and again and again, until by 1999, we shut them down completely. The bad staff people then got transferred or "retired early," and new, good folks replaced them. Instead of saying, "We won, you're done," we then extended a hand to the good folks in the agency and said, "If you will change and do scientifically valid restoration work and leave the natural forest areas alone, we will help you." They agreed, and the national forests in Alabama now have the nation's best and foremost forest-restoration programs. Teddy said to talk softly but carry a big stick. If no one is listening, use the stick some -- then they will listen.

There is no doubt that environmental burdens fall heaviest on the poor and minority communities. Showing that this was intentional is difficult; perhaps it was inadvertent, but the disparate racial impacts are very real nonetheless. And even if racial motivations were not behind the siting of pollution, the racial divides that still exist can be useful to polluters, and they do take advantage of that. There is no doubt in my mind, though, that polluting industries and government regulators do target poor areas for new pollution; I don't think the motivation is usually racial (as there are plenty of poor white areas that are getting hammered, too) but a desire to minimize resistance to what they plan to do. Disorganized poor folks don't put up much of a fight. How many companies try to site a landfill in the rich suburbs? I have seen it happen on rare occasions, and damn if those rich folks don't get their buddy the state attorney general or the local district attorney (whose campaigns they heavily funded) out there to chase off the polluter before they start. The solution for those who aren't rich and who can't buy politicians is to get very organized and work to raise their community up, because who else will do it for them? Divides must be bridged and even healed, and the local community must do it, as no one else will. We have just started a full-service environmental communities program in WildLaw, because our being the lawyer called in at the last minute on these types of issues just was not enough. We hope that our more comprehensive community services will do more to give people the tools they need to get organized, get beyond the old divisions of the past, make their voices heard, and get results.

I will take a legal angle on this and suggest you build a means to use those laws. And you do not necessarily have to have a lawyer to do it; I know a number of activists who got educated on the law in one particular area (endangered species, national forests, etc.) until they knew as much about the law in that area as any attorney did. They have been able to file appeals, petitions, requests for rule-making, and even lawsuits, all on their own. Of course, if you can find a lawyer, preferably a young one who can learn your area of the law quickly and who doesn't know that they are supposed to be rich, you can start your own legal clinic or group for this issue. If you have enough experts to back up the proof of your damages, hire some trial lawyer willing to break ground in this area and start suing some of the worst manufacturers for money.

Hire a good trial lawyer and sue for damages. Just because an act of pollution is officially sanctioned by the government (that is what "permits" are, permission to pollute), that does not mean the polluter has the right to damage you and your property. Our pollution permit laws do not usually trump trespass and nuisance tort law.

Folks in the Bush administration know there is a better way to get what they claim they want (more balance in regulations, protect communities from wildfire, etc.) than the ways they are doing things. But the administration is filled with good soldiers who do what they are told. Who gives the orders? Look at the contributors to the Bush campaigns. I think many of the folks in the administration would personally rather do things in a less damaging manner, or even do things right, but this administration is the most organized and regimented in a long time. They have to do exactly what they are told or they are out. If we can stop them, as with a successful lawsuit that keeps them from following orders, then they may be free to go to "Plan B," which the contributors do not have. So, they might then be freed up to do things a better way. That is one reason we sue the Bush administration so much, so that they can find a better way to do things. As for Bush himself, I don't know if it was the cocaine or whether he is just simply not right in the head, but he has some serious mental and emotional problems and clearly needs help.

Somebody has to change Bush's heart; that man is not right in the head. As much as he talks and pretends about God and religion, I wish he would really get some faith. As long as he thinks the way he does, nothing can change how he does things. Once Kerry is in, he has to address everything first; the wholesale rollbacks of the Bush administration cannot be addressed individually but with a coordinated plan that hits all the agencies and policies. He has to make an unequivocal executive-branch-wide commitment to putting law, people, and democratic participation back into all environmental policy.

I have actually stood in the core of a nuclear power plant reactor (TVA Watts Bar Unit 1), as they were finishing it and before the fuel went in (obviously). What a massive investment in something from which we cannot dispose of the waste safely. Regardless of the environmental pros and cons, I do not think nuclear power plants can be economically justified; without the massive subsidies, no one would ever build one. Plus they take far too long to build (Watts Bar #1 took 23 years to get on line; #2 never did), and even if they never have a major accident, what do we do with them and the spent fuel once they are done and cannot be used? Sticking this stuff in a hole in Nevada for 300,000 years sounds like hubris to me.

Alabama does not encourage any renewable energy; the more coal we use, the more our state officials like it. We have energy-efficient lighting throughout the house and the office, low-flow faucets and toilets, and very good insulation. Our home electricity bill averages about $90 per month, and our office bill (for a staff of nine right now) is $75 per month. We have cases and programs on what air pollution from coal-fired plants does to human health and the environment (mainly focusing on acid precipitation that kills forests in the southern Appalachians). We try to show people that the current electricity system means our forests die and our children (like my youngest son) cannot play in their own yards during the summer without having asthma attacks and lung damage. Someday, we will have a critical mass of demand for something better and more sustainable.

I have fought some pipelines that were going where they should not, but I have never done any work on ones already there and causing problems. If your property is contaminated and there are trespass and nuisance damages, I strongly recommend that you and all the folks there hire top-notch trial lawyers who have environmental tort experience to represent you and get you adequately compensated. Sorry, but I don't know any up your way.

Well, I have been too busy to do much caving in the last two decades or so. But I went to Sewanee in Tennessee for college, and I was out in the caves weekly then. Mostly caves around there; I even discovered one in Thumping Dick Hollow. Yes, that is the name of the place.

I am very familiar with the ARC, and while the folks in the ARC are well-intentioned, I have long since given up on reforming ADEM. Most of the ARC's ideas were first put forth in 1992 and nothing happened. ADEM has only gotten worse since then, and I see no reason to think ADEM will ever make serious improvements to how it operates. I now think that the only real solution is to abolish ADEM and start over with something entirely new, like an elected commissioner of the environment, making the agency directly accountable to the people. Alabama has an elected commissioner of agriculture; we should have one for our environment and natural resources. While politics are heavily influenced by money and power, it is not totally captive. People can still vote and throw out a bad politician. The current system at ADEM makes its director accountable to no one, and, thus, the polluters have a total lock on the agency. As Edward Abbey said, "The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy."

There is no doubt that the last thing ALFA does is help real farmers. For those of you elsewhere in the nation, ALFA is our version of the Farm Bureau, but much worse. As long as ALFA controls ADEM and the Alabama Legislature, there is little we will get there. All we can do is keep fighting against things getting worse. We need to change the entire system, which means public demand for change. And in Alabama, as you know, that is about as hard as flying to the moon in a chicken suit. Still, we have to try to change things by getting people mad. And while the first few lawsuits against CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations] were not big successes, folks need to keep hiring trial lawyers to sue the crap out of CAFOs that damage their neighbors. That gets change and attention.

My favorite is Knob Creek.