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Staff
Mike Sherwood
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Title: Attorney Office: California Department: Legal |
"You won't see diplomas hanging on the walls of my office, [but] pictures of the various critters I've represented, and, maybe, helped to save."
"If you need hotter water in the shower, don't turn the hot water up, turn the cold water down." That simple edict, given in June 1961 to the new National Park Service college recruits congregating at Yellowstone National Park's Canyon Village for a summer of fighting blister rust and forest fires, became a conservation ethic permanently burned into Mike Sherwood's consciousness. "The idea that there was a way to conserve limited resources that didn't mean you had to suffer in a cold shower made such good sense to me that I've never forgotten it," says Mike, a staff attorney with the Oakland office of Earthjustice, who celebrated 30 years with Earthjustice recently.
As a boy growing up in rural Connecticut, Mike learned to love the outdoors early. "The woods were my playground," he says. "I've felt more at home outdoors than inside ever since." Mike remains an avid backpacker, kayaker, bicyclist and scuba diver.
After attending Yale College and Stanford Law School, Mike headed to Hawai'i in 1967 where as an Assistant United States Attorney he brought the first criminal prosecutions in that state against shipping companies for oil spills in Honolulu harbor, and the first case on behalf of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the resources of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge from trespassers. After three years in the U.S. Attorney's office, he went into private practice for several years with an emphasis on public interest environmental law. He represented the Sierra Club in several cases, and thus began his long relationship with what was then the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.
"SCLDF must have liked my work for the Club as a private lawyer," says Sherwood, "because at a legal conference in San Francisco in early 1974, Jim Moorman, its Executive Director, asked me if I'd be willing to leave Hawai'i to come work in San Francisco as a staff attorney for the fledgling organization." It wasn't an easy decision to leave Hawai'i, but Mike knew SCLDF was doing the kind of work he'd always wanted to do, and he never regretted the move.
Since coming on board in April 1974, Mike has seen SCLDF grow from two offices (San Francisco and Denver) to eight, from a handful of attorneys to over 50, and from an organization mainly representing the Sierra Club in the west to the nationwide public interest environmental law firm that Earthjustice is today. Along the way he brought landmark litigation involving Redwood National Park, San Francisco Bay wetlands, Misty Fjords National Monument in Southeast Alaska, the national forests of northern California and the deserts of southern California, and the complex of National Wildlife Refuges in the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon and northern California.
Perhaps best known for his pioneering work with the Endangered Species Act (enacted in December 1973, just a few months before he came to work at SCLDF), Mike was one of the first attorneys in the nation to see and utilize the huge potential of the ESA. His landmark cases have established that the ESA requires protection of habitat as well as individual animals, and have resulted in the preservation and restoration of essential habitat for the endangered palila (a unique finch-like bird living only on one mountain on the Big Island of Hawai'i), the protection of hundreds of square miles of ocean habitat for the Hawaiian monk seal, and a reprieve from its slide towards extinction for the Hawaiian crow, one of the most endangered birds in the world. Mike's lawsuits have also resulted in several imperiled west coast salmon species and hundreds of native plant species in Hawai'i and California being listed under the ESA, the first and essential step towards those species' eventual recovery.
"You won't see diplomas hanging on the walls of my office," says Mike. "Instead, I have pictures of the various critters I've represented, and, maybe, helped to save. ESA litigation has been a big part of my practice, and is probably what I am most proud of." Perhaps it is not just coincidence but rather a case of convergent evolution that Mike and the ESA will both be celebrating 30-year landmarks in the next few months.
Michael R. Sherwood is a staff attorney in Earthjustice's Oakland Regional Office. He graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1964, and in 1967 received his law degree from Stanford Law School. After law school he moved to Hawai`i where from 1967 to 1969 he was Associate Counsel for the Legal Aid Society of Hawai`i, representing indigent persons in domestic relations, bankruptcy, landlord tenant, and other matters. From 1969 to 1972 he was an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Hawai`i. In 1972 he formed the law firm of Hart, Sherwood, Leavitt, Blanchfield, and Hall in Honolulu, specializing in trial work, including environmental cases, plaintiff's personal injury, criminal defense, and civil rights matters. Mike came to work at what was then the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in April 1974 in San Francisco, and has been with SCLDF/Earthjustice ever since, except for a six-month sabbatical to teach at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine in 1980. In 1988 he returned to Hawai`i to open Earthjustice's new Honolulu office, and stayed there for a year as managing attorney.
Created: January 3, 2006
