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Staff
Jim Angell
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Title: Managing Attorney Office: Rocky Mountain Department: Legal |
"I now understand that Yellowstone's 'wildness' is not a 'natural' thing we can take for granted but rather something we need to fight to preserve..."
Born in New York and raised in the Chicago area by a resolutely eastward-looking family, nobody from my youth would have pegged me for a career dedicated to the protection of our western wildlands. But my life was changed forever when, the year after college, a dog bit me on a mountain trail in Nepal and I was faced with the choice of continuing my on-a-shoestring world travels or spending my remaining travel money on rabies shots and heading back to the States. With a heavy heart, I chose the latter and six weeks later, rabies vaccine literally in hand, found myself struggling with customs at O'Hare and wondering what I'd do until fall when I was slated to begin graduate school. On a lark, I applied for jobs at several national parks in the West and when I was offered a truck-driving job by the concessionaire at Yellowstone, I jumped at it. I was stunned when I arrived. I had never experienced American landscapes on such a tremendous scale. In short order I managed to finagle my way into a four day-a-week work schedule so that I could take extended backpacking trips every weekend. While the scenery never ceased to inspire over the following months -- it inspires me no less today -- what I came to appreciate the more I hiked the park's trails was the wildness of my surroundings. Years later, after learning about and litigating Yellowstone issues as a member of Earthjustice's Bozeman office, I came to a more sophisticated view of the park. I now understand that Yellowstone's "wildness" is not a "natural" thing we can take for granted but rather something we need to fight to preserve. While the philosophical complexities of the national park ideal and management may have been unknown to me when I first came to Wyoming, what I felt keenly -- and what I'd certainly never felt before -- was that I was in a timeless landscape where humans were not entirely in charge of their experience and fate. This sense of being part of a world in which I was not a master, but merely a small and transitory part was exhilarating and, in the end, life-transforming for me. From Yellowstone I went to UCLA to earn a PhD in sociology and become a professor. Four years later I found myself with a Master's degree, two additional years of coursework, and a firm conviction that life in the ivory tower of academia was not for me. As I thought about what to do next, I reflected on the power of my Yellowstone experience and I thought maybe if I became a lawyer I could find a way to help protect places like that and the animals that live there. While I had no idea of what environmental lawyers did and the role they played, I knew they were out there and it sounded like a career that both would be meaningful to me and enable me to participate in the action. As I made my way through law school at Berkeley, I was fortunate to land a job at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, where my zeal to work for the environment was strengthened and where, best of all, I was able to work with Johanna Wald -- one of the truly great environmental lawyers and a mentor to this day. After law school I went to Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, a public interest land use law firm in San Francisco, where I had a two-year stint as their Environmental Fellow. Then, just as that job was ending, a friend at the Sierra Club called to tell me about an Earthjustice (then Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) opening in the new Bozeman, Montana office to work on Yellowstone and grizzly bear issues. Within a week I had a job offer to work in the very place that had so inspired me a decade before and led me towards my legal career. I thought I'd found the best job in the nation -- and I was absolutely right. The Bozeman office was only a year old at the time and I was the second full-time attorney. Doug Honnold, the founder of the office, and I shared a one-room office on Bozeman's Main Street. It was an exhilarating time. I jumped in to help Doug on a host of grizzly bear cases aimed at protecting the great bear's habitat around Yellowstone from logging and at winning additional protections for the tiniest of our remnant grizzly populations in Northwest Montana and Northern Idaho. I carried on over the following couple of years with this work while Doug and Susan Daggett -- a third lawyer who joined our one-room office a year after my arrival -- focused on their ultimately successful fight to stop the opening of a toxic gold mine on Yellowstone Park's wild Northeastern border. Over the next several years, our tiny office was in the thick of fights to protect some of our nation's most prized and iconic wild places and species, including successful fights to prevent oil and gas development along the Rocky Mountain Front next to Glacier National Park and to preserve free-flowing portions of the Yellowstone River in Montana. These were hard-fought battles and we didn't win every case. Most heartbreaking for me personally was our failed effort to prevent the State of Montana's pointless and mean-spirited slaughter of the Yellowstone bison that leave the park each winter. This was the only case in my career to give me nightmares. But we never doubted for a second as we worked away in our tiny office in small town Montana (Susan sat on the floor for her first three months and our office manager worked from a tiny typing table), that we were fighting battles on behalf of millions of Americans who love these lands and animals and care deeply about their preservation and welfare. While exhilarating on one level, I, like many if not all of my fellow Earthjustice attorneys and staff, have an acute sense of the heavy responsibility we bear in our work. In 2000, I moved to Denver, where I live today with my wife Nicole (a former Earthjustice fundraiser I met in Wyoming eight years ago at Earthjustice's annual staff gathering) and our two beautiful sons, Sam and Cooper. While the nature of my work in Earthjustice's Denver office is somewhat different from my Montana work -- my efforts today are aimed primarily at protecting the fragile deserts of the Southwest from the impacts of off-road vehicle use, livestock grazing, irresponsible energy development, and the like -- my passion for Earthjustice's work and mission runs just as strong. In addition to a wife, at Earthjustice I've found a tremendously challenging and rewarding career fighting on behalf of our supporters and clients for the things I believe in most deeply. To have such a career has been a rare blessing and I'll be forever grateful to that Nepali dog for setting me down this path.
Jim Angell is the managing attorney in Earthjustice's Denver office. Jim earned a BA from Columbia College in New York, a Master's degree from UCLA and, after realizing that the academic life was not for him, received his law degree in 1991 from the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall. After graduating from law school, Jim worked for two years as the Environmental Fellow at Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, a public interest land use law firm in San Francisco. In 1993, he joined Earthjustice's Bozeman, Montana office. Jim moved to Earthjustice's Denver office in 2000 and he became that office's managing attorney in 2005. Jim lives in Denver with his wife, Nicole, and his two young boys (Sam and Cooper), of whom he is inordinately proud.
Created: January 3, 2006
