Home, Sweet Home
When American Municipal Power announced last fall that it had canceled plans to build a new coal-fired power plant in southeastern Ohio, NRDC and its allies rejoiced. For senior attorney Anjali Jaiswal, who had helped devise the legal strategy to fight the proposed plant, it was a particularly meaningful victory. She spent much of her childhood in Ohio — "I love Cleveland!" she readily exclaims — and the battle over the power plant represents what she values most about environmental law: the ability to make real change in her own backyard. Jaiswal’s affinity for protecting the places she has called home bodes well for the planet: she’s had a lot of backyards in her 35 years. Jaiswal was born in India, but her family moved to the United States when she was just 3 years old, first to Dallas and then to Akron, Cleveland, and San Diego. By the time she was in high school, the Jaiswal family was settled in the Los Angeles area. Since joining NRDC in 2001, Jaiswal has fought and won many local battles. First based in the organization’s Southern California office, she worked to protect and improve water quality in rivers, streams, and coastal areas, waging battles that yielded immediate, tangible results. Jaiswal and other members of NRDC’s California staff have also successfully advocated for upgrades to a sewage treatment plant on the central coast, where sea otters in Morro Bay were being sickened by the discharge of dirty water. She waged legal battles to strengthen water pollution controls and to stop dairies in Southern California from dumping waste into the Santa Ana River. In the Sacramento area, she helped win the fight to require that irrigation projects leave more water in ecosystems, shielding endangered fish populations from further degradation. "We said, ‘This is the law, this is the science. You have to rule for us,’" she remembers. "It was a lot of sleepless nights and hard, hard work, but we won." Last year, as Jaiswal was immersed in state and local legal offensives, a colleague approached her about trying international work. "I was conflicted," she says. "I really like working on local issues as a litigator." But as she heard more, her choice became clear. NRDC was looking to start an initiative in India, through which it hoped to bring clean energy and efficiency technologies to a country undergoing tremendous development and modernization. As the country of her birth, it was a place full of import for her. She said yes. Jaiswal had visited India several times as an adult. In 2005 she took a leave from NRDC and spent three months in New Delhi working on pollution control through the Nehru Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program. She was gratified by how easily her knowledge transferred to a new setting, allowing her to help with a campaign to improve sewage treatment near the Ganges River. "I knew what sewage plants looked like, their operation, their energy issues," she says. "I knew about compliance and enforcement." She also knew the country on a personal level, having visited relatives in her father’s village in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, which shares a border with Pakistan. Her experiences there gave her a snapshot of the broad challenges India faces. One evening, she and a cousin walked out into the tobacco fields surrounding the village. Her cousin wanted to show off the village’s new power plant — a sign of progress. Jaiswal couldn’t help but see the environmental repercussions of the emissions spewing from the towering smokestacks. India and the United States have two important things in common: they have large English-speaking populations and are democracies, making collaboration easier than in other rapidly developing countries, such as China. Though NRDC’s work in India is full of potential, Jaiswal says, the challenges that lie ahead are significant: some 80 percent of the infrastructure the country will need by 2030 has yet to be built, and the number of motor vehicles on the road is expected to quadruple by 2020. The environmental ramifications of India’s path forward will be felt around the world. Jaiswal and Jacob Scherr, director of NRDC’s international program, launched the India initiative last June. Their goals include fostering U.S.-India cooperation on clean energy and climate, strengthening environmental compliance and enforcement, and incorporating energy-efficiency standards into building codes to reduce carbon emissions. "One of the great challenges in India is that there are laws on the books that are not implemented or enforced," Scherr says. "Anjali is in an excellent position to explain how we handle these problems in the United States and to translate her experiences to meet the needs in India." Jaiswal sometimes thinks back to her father’s village in Gujarat. The memory she recalls is a hopeful one — that of a relative proudly leading her up to the roof to show off a new possession, the village’s first solar cookstove.
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Home, Sweet Home
Keeping It Real
When Kate Sinding heard NRDC was looking for a new attorney, she knew the timing was bad. Just five months earlier she had made partner at a prestigious New York City law firm. She was feted at the firm’s posh Christmas party; her new salary was four times what the NRDC job would pay. Somehow none of that mattered. Environmental or not, corporate law wasn’t really what she wanted to be doing with her life. What she really wanted, she says, was to make policy. Three years later, Sinding is now deputy director of NRDC’s urban program. Working at her "dream job," she spends her days trying to prevent environmental problems rather than picking up the pieces when things go wrong. Ten years in the private sector proved to be superb training. At her old firm she represented clients of all kinds, from activist groups to the food giant Kraft. When the New York village of Hastings-on-Hudson wanted to redevelop its PCB-contaminated waterfront — to make it truly Hastings-on-Hudson rather than Hastings-near-the-Hudson, in the words of one town official — Sinding mediated the competing interests of environmentalists and developers, honing skills that now help her defend NRDC’s policy goals from legal challenges. Her latest challenger is the electronics industry. Last February, NRDC helped to shape and pass a New York City law that makes manufacturers, rather than consumers, responsible for recycling old electronics. "Right now, all the incentives are to design for obsolescence," Sinding says. "They’re not thinking about any of the costs on the other end." The industry has filed suit against the city, and NRDC, with Sinding in the lead, is stepping in to aid in the defense. She aims not only to defend the New York City law but also to expand it to cover the entire state. Colleagues say that Sinding’s effectiveness as an attorney and a policy maker is a product of her legal moxie and innate people skills. "Kate can disarm opponents and cut them down to size in the same meeting," says Mark Izeman, director of the urban program. "Not every environmental lawyer has that level of emotional intelligence." Sinding began to develop those traits early in her childhood. When she was 4, her parents, both foreign-aid workers, moved the family to Islamabad, Pakistan, where Sinding remembers learning to take off her shoes at mosques. Later they lived in Kenya, the Philippines, and Arlington, Virginia, where sophisticated suburban teenagers provided the biggest culture shock of all, she recalls. Sinding went on to Barnard College and New York University School of Law before earning a master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University. She now calls New York City home, but only during the work week. On weekends she takes off for the wilderness, sometimes as far away as Washington’s Mount Adams, for a taste of the pristine natural places she is working to protect. She hikes to the summit of Mount Adams, rides her snowboard 4,000 feet down along its glacier, hikes back to the rental car, and hops on the red-eye back to New York, just in time for work on Monday. "That intense physical exertion involves 120 percent concentration and focus," Sinding says, not unlike some of her legal efforts. In both, "it helps to be a little type A." She pauses a moment. "Monday morning is hard." To preserve those natural spaces before they are despoiled, Sinding and NRDC’s urban team are pushing the New York region toward policies based on the principles of smart growth, the idea that development should be planned to reduce driving time, promote compact communities, and encourage walking, biking, and public transit (see "Redrawing the American City"). "This is about not having to get in your car every time you need a quart of milk or your kid goes to a soccer game," Sinding says. Sinding and her New York colleagues hope to replicate a California law that funds regional smart growth projects that aim to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The law provides incentives for towns and developers to design walkable communities. The NRDC team is also looking to develop state legislation that would require auto insurers to offer pay-as-you-drive insurance rates: the fewer miles you log each year, the less you pay in premiums. And they are hoping to popularize a new green building standard called LEED-ND (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development), which addresses how a building fits, or doesn’t fit, into the surrounding community. If the smart growth initiatives take hold, Sinding will fulfill her personal goal of making policy that succeeds on a grand scale, and she’ll see the wild places she loves preserved. "I feel most in touch with my spirituality when I’m out in those places—more connected, more in awe of it," she says. "Something about the outdoors drives me."
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Keeping It Real
CSI: Planet Earth
On a crisp October day in 2007, two men set off into the woods of New York’s Hudson Valley. The younger man carried a pair of venomous copperhead snakes, and the older hiker, posing as an amateur wildlife photographer, carried a camera. The snake-toting man had no idea his hiking buddy was Lieutenant Richard Thomas, an investigator working undercover for the New York State Bureau of Environmental Crimes. The young man had sold Thomas a protected red salamander through kingsnake.com , a Web site popular with reptile and amphibian enthusiasts. That transaction promptly turned the seller into Target F, part of Operation Shellshock, New York State’s effort to curtail the huge black-market trade in protected and endangered wildlife. Over the next two years, Thomas and his partner, Daniel Sullivan, collected evidence — including detailed conversations secretly recorded during the October hike — that led to the arrest of Target F and dozens of other wildlife poachers and traders. The investigators uncovered thousands of snapping turtles bound for dinner plates in China after being laundered through a farm in Louisiana. They also discovered dozens of endangered Canadian rattlesnakes stashed in secret compartments in a van whose driver was lured to a meeting in a parking lot in Niagara Falls. For Thomas, Operation Shellshock fulfilled a boyhood dream that began in New York’s woods, where he hiked with his sportsman father and imagined himself an officer of the law, chasing and catching thieves who plundered the forest. As a youngster, Thomas says, he thought catching poachers was "probably the most glamorous job there was." As environmental protection goes, there are those who craft policy and those who wage courtroom battles — and then there are people like Thomas, who work the trenches, meticulously gathering the evidence required to enforce the law. Thomas applied to a unit of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in 1989, a specialized squad of police officers who focus on environmental law. Out of thousands of applicants, he was one of 29 admitted, and he enrolled in basic training that year. He learned to uphold criminal law, as regular police officers do, and also to enforce a separate and vast universe of environmental law. Once on the job, Thomas routinely carried six volumes of environmental rules and regulations in the trunk of his car, just for reference. Thomas spent more than a decade on the Environmental Conservation Police force as a uniformed officer, conducting aerial investigations of chemical spills and checking permits held by recreational hunters, as well as making traffic stops and arresting the occasional armed robber. In 1999 he was named Conservation Officer of the Year by the Northeast Conservation Law Enforcement Chiefs Association. His promotion to the position of investigator soon followed. His first assignment was to gather evidence against a company suspected of polluting the drinking water of the small city of Elmira, New York, with lead. Working closely with a special agent from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Thomas scoured some 50,000 documents, studied historical photographs, and conducted hundreds of hours of field interviews, eventually proving that the source was a metal foundry, Kennedy Valve, which was using scrap metal to make fire hydrants and other products. Thomas’s passion for the environment plays out at his home in Caledonia, New York, too, where he and his wife have restored 23 acres of wetland to promote biodiversity. Local science teachers use his property as an outdoor classroom. "It’s very satisfying," he says, ever hopeful that nature will inspire the students to protect the environment, just as his childhood adventures inspired him. Thomas is even holding out hope for Target F, whose knowledge of herpetology impressed the investigator. "He could benefit our understanding and protection of reptiles and amphibians," Thomas says — if he could find a way to channel his enthusiasm into more productive pursuits. "But that’s up to him now."
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CSI: Planet Earth