A dairy farm in rural south Alabama in the late 1950s and early 1960s may not be an obvious incubator for future environmental litigators, but for me it had all the critical ingredients -- mud puddles, swamps, creeks and rivers to explore, wildlife curious and banal (look up the anhinga or "water turkey" sometime), and plenty of fishing and hunting. From my earliest memories, the world that started outside my backdoor was a source of great curiosity and passionate interest.
It also provided a ready excuse to collect -- or try to collect -- almost anything, from butterflies and bird eggs to muskrat and mink hides (limited success in this last endeavor, however, convinced me by age 12 that a career as a "trapper" was not in the cards). The small-town farming world I grew up in also provided effective insulation from the strong political tides of the deep South until well into high school.
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| Downtown Newbern, Alabama -- closed store, post office and general store (my sister is the postmistress) |
Curiosity and innocence, however, often collide, sometimes with unpredictable results. As high school stretched towards college, the politics of the South bore in and could not be ignored. And, of course, I was a teenager with a rebellious spirit in a rebellious time. Together with my inclination to ask questions and try to understand the world around me, these qualities led me to face the deep racial injustice of the 1960s South and work in my own way to address it, tutoring in an Upward Bound program. In the same spirit, I discovered the politics of war and organized what was by national standards a very modest 1969 anti-war rally on Vietnam Moratorium Day in Kelly-Ingrham Park in Birmingham. Along the way, I also became determined to leave the conservative, rural South as fast and as far behind as I could. Growing up in Alabama in the '60s did, however, leave me with at least one enduring and guiding value: If you don't like something, don't complain -- fix it.
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| My wife Amy & me hiking in Cappadocia, Turkey |
The first stop on my path out of the South was an urban, east coast college. It had the advantage of being a long way from rural Alabama but, to my surprise, I also found it was a long way -- literally and figuratively -- from any fields, forest, solitude or other physical surroundings that were comforting. After a year and a half, I had had enough and took a "leave of absence" to work.
The fascinating challenges and robust future of a life hammering nails in two-by-fours to build tacky apartments in suburbia soon led me to both reconsider my decision to leave college and to embark on a journey to discover other parts of the country -- chiefly the west. I eventually arrived in the friendly college town of Eugene, Oregon -- not exactly on the Pacific coast but close enough and sufficiently famous and interesting in its own right to be worth a longer stop.
The stop turned out to be a long one indeed: I stayed in Eugene for the next ten years, eventually returning to and completing college, meeting my future spouse, and graduating from law school. I also developed an abiding attachment to the wild outdoor rivers and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. The earlier joy of exploring mud puddles for tadpoles and tramping across fields and forests to flush a covey of quail was replaced with the wonder and silence of rafting a desert river canyon like the Owyhee in southeast Oregon, the serenity of a week-long winter ski trip into the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and the regular pleasure of a weekend hike to the myriad places so accessible from Eugene. Enjoying these places inevitably led to a strong commitment to protecting them, and to a growing awareness of the tools that work best to achieve this protection.
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| My two sons -- Galen is on the left and Morgan on the right |
By the time I started law school at the University of Oregon in 1978, I had already filed my first administrative appeals of Forest Service timber sales in roadless areas, challenged river management plans, and drafted comments on environmental impact statements. I had also learned firsthand the power of the law to effect change and protect places and resources -- and I had decided that if possible I would find a way to use my legal training for the environment. It took a few years, however, for lightening to strike.
I graduated from law school in 1981 and moved to Seattle with my wife, Amy, also a lawyer. I was extremely fortunate to start my legal career clerking for one of the nation's truly remarkable federal judges, Ninth Circuit Judge Betty Fletcher. Jobs in public interest environmental law in Seattle were scarcer than hen's teeth, however, so after my clerkship I joined a Seattle law firm and began to learn the trade from the ground up. In 1987, the clouds finally lined up and produced some lightening: the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now Earthjustice) decided to open a northwest office in Seattle. I jumped at the opportunity, lobbied hard, and had the incredible good fortune to be hired as one of two staff attorneys for the new office.
I told myself and my family that I would try public interest environmental litigation for three or four years before I returned to a career in private practice. Today, 17 years later, I'm still here, Amy and I are still in the same Seattle house, and our two sons are almost grown. I'm here for one simple and overpowering reason: I love this work. It's an incredible privilege -- a gift -- to be able to employ all of my skills in work that I think makes a difference today, and may make even more of a difference for my children, grandchildren and many other people and communities in this region in the years to come.
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| Earthjustice attorney Todd True |
Over the past 17 years I have had the extraordinary good fortune to be involved in some landmark environmental litigation. Soon after we opened the office we represented local environmental groups in a series of cases to stop a massive disposal of contaminated dredge spoils in Puget Sound in connection with construction of a Navy Homeport in Everett, Washington. I learned from those cases the awesome power of a federal court injunction -- a piece of paper that not even an "aircraft carrier battlegroup" can ignore. In 1988 and 1989, we embarked on a series of cases we pursued over the next six or seven years to protect the northern spotted owl and Northwest ancient forests. Once again, the astonishing ability of the law and the courts to catalyze change and compel real environmental protection was apparent.
I have, of course, worked on many other wonderful issues, including many cases to protect the pristine forests and wildlife that define the Pacific Northwest. For the past several years, water and salmon have dominated my docket with cases in the Klamath Basin in Oregon (again leading to provocative and catalyzing injunctions) and a continuing set of cases to restore wild salmon to the Columbia and Snake Rivers -- by bypassing some federal dams if need be. In many ways, the list of cases surprises me. Each one has been so fascinating and challenging that I have never noticed how many there are. But the measure of the work is not in the number of cases filed or the lawsuits won. It's in the rivers and forest and wildlife that are still there, the changes that have been made and that are still to come, and the opportunity to do even more.
Looking back and finding myself just the tiniest step past the half-century mark, I am grateful for the forces that have shaped my life and brought so much my way. My oldest son has returned to the South for college and my youngest seems determined to be sure I fully appreciate youthful rebellion from both sides of the fence. I can only hope they will be as fortunate as I have been in finding a passion that ignites their lives and gives them reason to jump every day at the challenges each one brings.
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