Environmental Defense Fund original Resolutions 1967–1969

Shortly after the environmental Defense fund was incorporated in the Fall of 1967, the trustees agreed that the only formal documentation of organization operations and decision-making would be in the form of published “Resolution.”

The founders agreed that the actual meeting minutes would remain private and unpublished during the entire time the founders believed that the organization needed to exist — no more than five years. By that time, the founders believed that their efforts would have created such a groundswell of public concern in United States and throughout the world that the United States Congress and the legislatures and parliaments of most industrial countries would see the necessity for ecologically sophisticated, environmentally responsible, socially relevant, economically rational, and politically acceptable legislation to protect the environment and assure the wise use of natural resources. The decades that followed creation of the Environmental Defense Fund have shown that the vision of the EDF founders was not to be fulfilled.

These resolutions begin with the organization meeting of the Environmental Defense Fund in October 1967 and come to an abrupt end in May of 1969 when the trustees declined to take action to protect the Florissant fossil beds and released Yannacone to head for Colorado and do the job himself. He did; and shortly after the close of the Florissant fossil beds litigation he returned to Colorado to prevent the flaring of tritium contaminated natural gas from the Project Rulison underground nuclear gas stimulation experiment by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Returning to Long Island, at the request of the naturalist Marjorie Carr, Yannacone and EDF went to Florida to save the Ocklawaha River regional ecological system from the Army engineers and their reckless and ill-considered plan to complete a Cross-Florida Barge Canal connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Gulf of Mexico. The action succeeded on the basis of Yannacone’s anticipation of the Environmental Impact Statements that would be required under the National Environmental Policy Act which Congress was then debating and presenting one t0o the Court as the basis for the complaint. That was the last action filed by the original Environmental Defense Fund and by December, 1969, the Yannacones were gone from the EDF Board as the organization turned away from its original plan to protect the environment through trials on the merits in open Court of Equity litigation asserting the Constitutional rights of the American people to a beneficent environment.