Buck In Brief

Stepping Down, Looking Back

In Brief: As Earthjustice Executive Director Buck Parker prepares to step down, he reflects on the organization's progress during his decade at the helm.

11/26/07

As you probably already know, on January 1 I will step down as executive director and Trip Van Noppen, currently head of our legal staff, will take my place.

It has been a privilege to serve as executive director for the last decade, and I will always feel like one of the chosen few for having had the opportunity. But 10 years is enough, it's time to give someone else a shot, and I am very happy that my place will be taken by a good friend with whom I have worked very closely over the last two years. The most selfish pleasure, however, lies in the fact that I will continue to be a member of the Earthjustice team, contributing what I can to work that has inspired me since I first learned of the organization more than 30 years ago.

The spirit of the moment allows me to look back at the last ten years. In next month's e.Brief, I'll talk broadly about some of the critical issues we face going forward.

Buck in his office in Oakland

We have endured the most anti-environmental administration in history for seven of these 10 years, and during much of that time we also had a hostile Congress. It is a tragedy that so much time and energy that could have been devoted to making progress had to be spent blocking attempts by the administration to actually undo progress that had already been made. Thanks in no small part to the courts, however, most of our key environmental laws and programs will survive the best-financed, most coordinated assault ever made on them by an alliance of corporate interests, libertarians and people of a particular religious persuasion, and the politicians who court their money and votes. Indeed, it appears that Americans are becoming more concerned about environmental issues, and especially climate change, than at any time since the 1970s.

A few other broad observations about the past –- and how it should help us in the future -- stem from this experience. Speaking for Earthjustice, we have come to understand the need to set priorities among the many cases we are asked to take and the campaigns our litigation anchors. We may be the largest, most experienced and most active group of environmental litigators in the country, but we are still David facing armies of Goliaths on many fronts. Whether blocking plans for even more coal-fired power plants, containing toxic wastes or restoring an ecosystem approach to forest planning, every case we take has to provide a lever for large, systemic change. We must distinguish between the symptom and the disease and strike close to the heart of the problem.

We have also learned a lot more about how to use litigation to move an environmental agenda forward despite potential, or even active, opposition. We have added legal staff over the last decade, but we have also invested in building a top-rate communications team and in exploring strategies and technologies for engaging people who are not ordinarily environmental activists. Making our case to the public earlier and using more people-friendly messages is part of the approach, but at a much more fundamental level it means truly partnering, often in a lawyer-client relationship, with groups and interests with whom we have not worked closely in the past. An example of this is the work of our Oakland office with Latino groups, health groups, and labor to address air and water pollution in California's Central Valley, where we are making progress despite the opposition of Big Agriculture and the petrochemical industry.

Over the last 10 years the public has come to appreciate more than ever before that the environmental laws we work so hard to get passed are mere words on paper unless organizations like Earthjustice see that they are enforced and followed. Most of the attention has been focused on the negative aspect of our work –- stopping bad things from happening –- but I am convinced that the lessons we have learned can be turned to much more positive use in the future, and that our greatest contributions lie in the future, when we will again use the law and court rulings as catalyst for positive change. I'll say more about that next month.

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org