Origins of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)

Victor Yannacone presented the idea of an Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) for the first time at the National Audubon Society Annual Convention in Atlantic City on 30 September 1967 as the answer to a series of rhetorical questions he posed

“…What can you do when a municipality decides that the highest and best use of a mighty river is the city sewer? What can you do when timber and paper companies cut down entire forests of Redwoods and other exotic species in order to “reforest” the area with faster growing pulpwood trees?
What can you do when real estate speculators insist on dredging estuaries in order to fill marshes or strip the topsoil from irreplaceable prime agricultural land in order to plant houses?…
Just what can you do?”

He went on to say,

“The time has come for you who are committed to the preservation of our environment to…enter the courtroom to protect our natural resources ….

It is time to assert your basic rights as citizens. Rights guaranteed by the Constitution and derived from Magna Carta. It is time to establish once and for all time that our natural resources are held in trust by each generation for the benefit, use and enjoyment of the next. Today, while there is still time, you must knock on the door of courthouses throughout this nation and seek equitable protection for the environment. You must assert the fundamental doctrine of equity jurisprudence—a doctrine as old as the Talmud or the New Testament or the Roman Law—a doctrine as old as civilization. Yet a doctrine as topical as today and as advanced as tomorrow: sic utere tuo ut alienam non laedas&mdash so use your own property as not to injure the property of another&mdash in particular that which is the common property of all mankind, the air we breathe and the water we drink ….

Experience has shown that litigation seems to be the only civilized way to secure immediate consideration of such basic human rights. Litigation seems to be the only way to focus the attention of our legislators on these basic problems of human existence.

The major social changes which have made the United States of America a finer place in which to live have all had their roots in fundamental constitutional litigation ….

Our adversary system of litigation as the means of presenting evidence to the conscience of the community has been the touchstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence since Magna Carta. That adversary system of litigation survives today as the hope of citizens seeking redress of a public wrong.

If you the citizen do not forsake your Courts, they will not forsake you in your hour of need. Thomas Becket and Thomas More are only two of the many who have given their lives so that you the citizen may have your day in Court.

Law is the framework of civilization and the ordering program for society. Our adversary system of litigation is the civilized alternative to bloody revolution; and so long as the door to the courthouse remains open, the door to the streets can remain closed.”

From that speech the Yannacones launched the Environmental Movement.

The original EDF mission statement

The Environmental Defense Fund was incorporated as a not-for-profit, public benefit, membership corporation in the State of New York in the fall of 1967, At that time a New York State Supreme Court Judge had to approve the purposes of any not-for-profit corporation before it could be filed with the Secretary of State. The original EDF certificate of incorporation was approved by D. Ormande Ritchie, the Supreme Court Judge who grangted the original injunction against the use of DDT on August 15, 1966 in the action brought by Carol Yannacone against the Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission.

The statement of purpose Yannacone presented to Judge Ritchie became the opriginal mission statement for the Environmental Defense Fund shortly after it was officially incorporated.

The EDF Proposal to the Ford Foundation

“Of all the creatures who over the eons have inhabited this planet, man has been unique in his ability deliberately to alter the environment. Problems arise out of the apparent conflict between man’s need and capacity to engineer his environment for economic use and the need and capacity of natural systems (including his own) to adjust to the consequences.”
“There is an extremely dangerous possibility that the full complexity of he interaction between ecological thought and the practical business of mankind’s survival will not be realized soon enough and with sufficient clarity by any of the decision makers involved. While ecology may, in fact must, continue to develop as an intellectual discipline, there must also be an increasing interaction between ecology and public affairs in the broadest sense. This interaction not only has intellectual appeal in its own right but is of overwhelming practical significance.”

The academic problem

The development of environmental scientists becomes more critical each year. Although more and more scientists are being graduated with the degree Ph.D, the extent of specialization has reached the point where very few scientists are capable or interested in matters of environmental concern—environmental degradation, land use planning, resource management. It is obvious that the environmental scientists must be able to tap the vast reservoir of the knowledge already amassed in a number of scientific disciplines. It is obvious that evaluation of environmental problems requires some awareness of and competence in such diverse areas as: mathematics, the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences, as well as competence and specialization in some particular discipline.

With the exponential growth of information in today’s society, the potential for individual competence in diverse disciplines becomes less probable. In the case of environmental problems however, society, as represented by the judicial process, accepts the opinion of a scientist on matter of general environmental concern, provided that opinion represents an awareness of the place of information from diverse disciplines other than that within the special competence of the opinion-rendering scientist, and is supported by specialists in those disciplines who also manifest awareness of the general interdisciplinary nature of environmental problems. With this in mind it is obvious that a graduate program in environmental science must be of an interdisciplinary nature if it is to be relevant to the real world of today.
The large university furnishes the ideal habitat for such a relevant graduate program in environmental science. Such a program must proceed in three concurrent areas. A program of basic education designed to develop academic competence in a particular field of environmental science within any of the major disciplines—mathematics, the physical sciences, the life sciences, or the social sciences; and a familiarity with the nomenclature, jargon, basic concepts, and available resources in the remaining disciplines.
The graduate student must constantly be involved in interdisciplinary research on matters of environmental concern. Research should be conducted by the case method already demonstrated as the most successful method of teaching techniques in business management, operations research, systems analysis, and the law relevant to the real world. The place of team effort in environmental science should be well established by the time the graduate student earns his doctorate.

The computer simulation of environmental problems and the development of models must be a standard technique in which the graduate student in the environmental sciences becomes independently competent. The development of computer simulation techniques and mathematical models will furnish the common interface for developing interdisciplinary relationships among the students and to a lesser extent among the faculty.

Although such a program would go a long way in developing environmental scientists necessary to cope with the environmental problems of this generation and perhaps part of the next generation, the program is essentially sterile and tautological in that the relationship between the input to the simulation and modeling process is compared with the output but only internal consistency is noted. Relevance to the real world depends entirely on relevance of the inputs. I n order to properly simulate and model the real world in such a program the number of inputs to the dynamic system must approximate the number of real inputs to the environmental process under study. This number becomes astronomical under many environmental crisis conditions.

A more meaningful program would include direct test of the proposed solution to the environmental problem in the real world. The extent of success or failure of the proposed solution would serve as feedback to the input of the simulation program and the model would be improved commensurate with the amount of such feedback, generating a new academic solution for testing again in the real world.

Scientists Advisory Committee

The Scientists Advisory Committee of the Environmental Defense Fund is an organization unique in science. Just as Monsieur Nicholas Bourbaki revolutionized modern mathematics by applying the collective efforts of a number of outstanding mathematical specialists to the general problems of modern mathematics, so has the Scientists Advisory Committee of the Environmental Defense Fund applied the specialized talents of many scientists to the environmental problems of our day. As in the case of Bourbaki and the EDF Scientists Advisory Committee, the whole, due to the intellectual stimulation resulting from a group attack on a common problem, is indeed greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Legal Advisory Committee

The Legal Advisory Committee applies the same approach developed by the EDF Scientists Advisory Committee to problems involving law and legislation. Its constant interaction with the Scientists Advisory Committee results in numerous opportunities to enrich the law with specific applications of the scientific method, while at the same time bring to the environmental science community the practical exigencies of the social compact. The direct interaction of the Scientists Advisory Committee and the Legal Advisory Committee is found in the work of the Office of the Environmental Defender.

The office of the Environmental Defender

The Office of the Environmental Defender evolved as the means of specifically affecting the corporate mission of EDF. Through the office of the Environmental Defender, the independent consensus of the environmental science community on a matter of particular environmental concern coupled with the evaluation of existing modes of action by the Legal Advisory Committee takes the form of direct legal action in the form test case.

The Office of the Environmental Defender will furnish the method whereby environmental science can be applied to environmental problems through direct action within the framework of the Anglo-American legal system. To the extent that the office of the environmental defender will serve as the place where the aggrieved citizen can lodge his complaints with respect to environmental degradation, and the environmental science community can recommend action, the office of the environmental defender will act much as the ombudsman of civil law jurisdictions. In particular those northern European countries with well developed programs of social action administered through complex bureaucratic agencies. The office of the environmental defender, however, has considerably more potential for action than his ombudsman colleague. This potential derives from the unique feature of Anglo-American jurisprudence, the principles and law of equity expressed in the maxims:

Equity suffers no wrong without a remedy and
So use your own property as not to injure that of another,

coupled with the equitable remedies of declaratory judgment and injunction furnish the means for direct public action by the environmental science community.

The “Test case“

The Environmental Defense Fund upon the recommendation of the Scientists Advisory Committee and with the advice of the Legal Advisory Committee, through the Office of the Environmental Defender takes direct legal action, preferably in the form of an appropriate equity action, seeking declaratory judgment and equitable relief from a federal Court, but under certain circumstances where a fall and impartial hearing on the scientific merits can be assured, resort can be had to administrative proceedings of a quasi-judicial nature.

The test case is brought to establish a basic environmental right, prevent a fundamental environmental wrong, or impose a degree of ecological sophistication upon an agency of environmental degradation.

Responsibilities of the Professional Staff

The defense of our environment is a full time occupation. The potential for conflict of interest is so great, and the opportunities for private gain following a short period of public service are so alluring, that the professional staff of the Office of the Environmental Defender must, under no circumstances, render professional legal services on a fee basis during their association with EDF. It must be assumed that the professional staff of the Office of the Environmental Defender, much as the professional staff of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, will devote their entire legal careers to public service through EDF. The proper defense of man’s environment against the economic and political power of those capable of degrading it requires legal talent competitive with the best that money can buy today.

Staff

The legal staff will consist of the following individuals, all of whom will be attorneys duly admitted to practice in some American jurisdiction.

• The Environmental Defender
• Deputy Environmental Defender
• Deputy Environmental Defender; Administrative law
• Deputy Environmental Defender; Investigation
• Litigation Associates
• Environmental Advocate
• Director of Legal Research and Law Librarian

The supporting staff will include clerical personnel appropriate to he size of the legal staff and the magnitude of the legal actions m which the office is involved.

Operations

The operations of the office of the environmental defender will include those necessary to support the legal actions in which the office is involved, together with those necessary to render legal advice and assistance to citizens and organizations interested in environmental matters. Such assistance will include research and legislative drafting assistance although no attempt will be made by the Office of the Environmental Defender or the Environmental Defense Fund or any of its divisions to influence legislation, either directly or indirectly in violation of §501 of the Internal Revenue Code.

Public information and education

In cooperation with the American Trial Lawyers Association (ATLA) and those state trial lawyers associations affiliated with ATLA, EDF will present Institutes on Environmental Advocacy for the purpose of acquainting the trial lawyer with the scientific resources available in matters of environmental concern, as well as providing the techniques and skills necessary to properly present environmental issues in local actions. Opportunities will be made available for selected law students to participate in the activities of the Office of the Environmental Defender as interns during their law school years, and as residents during the period they await admission to the bar. Appropriate collections of legal materials will be made available as developed on a public service basis for distribution throughout the legal community. In-service courses for law school faculty will be conducted on request.

The first look at EDF by Science

The general scientific community became aware of EDF from a 1967 article in Science, the official magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science