The environment needs trial lawyers who know how to fight for justice in a courtroom.
The courtroom is where fundamental human rights must be defended against those who threaten them, and the right to a salubrious environment is a fundamental human right.
The trial lawyer must identify the wrong, prove the injury, and demand an effective judicial remedy. That requires understanding that the environment is the complex, dynamic relational system comprising all the elements of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere of planet Earth, together with the relationships and interactions among those elements and the natural processes that create, maintain, and transform those elements, relationships, and interactions.
Every human being depends upon the environment for air clean enough to breathe, safe potable water to drink, and the functioning natural systems of planet Earth. The right to those conditions necessary for human existence is not a privilege conferred by government. It is a fundamental human right.
Protecting those rights requires a trial lawyer to understand environmental systems science and know how to present substantial credible scientific evidence of environmental injury in the courtroom.
Environmental Law Is About Human Rights, Not Congressional Statutes and Agency Regulations
Congress did not create the fundamental human right to breathe clean air. No administrative agency granted human beings the right to drink potable water. No legislature conferred upon humanity the right to the continued functioning of the environmental systems upon which human existence depends.
Those rights exist because human civilization as we know it cannot survive the destruction of the environmental systems upon which it depends.
The responsibility of government is to protect these fundamental human rights. When government fails, trial lawyers must fight to protect those rights in the courtroom.
The courtroom is where trial lawyers demand protection for our fundamental human rights.
Congress can enact statutes. Government agencies can promulgate regulations. Lawyers can litigate compliance with both, but that will not protect our fundamental human right to a salubrious environment.
A lawyer can win a lawsuit against a government agency and still lose the fight to protect the environment unless the court provides an effective remedy.
Trial lawyers demand injunctions that stop environmental injury before the damage becomes irreparable.
Courts have exercised the power to prevent irreparable injury for centuries. Their power comes from equity jurisprudence, a body of law developed to protect fundamental rights when ordinary legal remedies fail.
Equity recognizes that no award of damages can restore an extinct species, recreate a destroyed ecosystem, or recover an irreplaceable record of Earth’s natural history.
Progress Does Not Require Damaging the Environment
Altering the environment does not necessarily mean damaging it.
Human activity has been altering the environment since the dawn of history. Agriculture, transportation, industry, and urbanization have transformed the landscapes and natural systems of planet Earth. The distinction lies in whether human activity changes the environment or damages the natural systems upon which life depends.
Progress does not require clear-cutting old-growth forests, contaminating rivers, causing the extinction of species, or impairing the function of the environmental systems upon which human existence depends. Those consequences result from particular human activities and decisions, not from some immutable law of human progress.
Today, environmental destruction is the consequence of economic decisions human beings make without regard to foreseeable damage to the environment. Those decisions can be challenged and the destruction can be prevented.
Those who profit from environmental destruction rarely bear its costs. People who had no part in the decisions suffer the immediate consequences, while future generations inherit the lasting damage.
The damage is foreseeable. The damage is preventable. But only if someone takes action before it is too late.
Environmental Protection Is Not About Administrative Procedures
An injunction is the only judicial remedy that can prevent serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage before it occurs. An injunction can prevent the destruction of a forest, the contamination of a river, or the extinction of a species. But once the destruction occurs, no award of damages can restore what has been lost.
But an injunction cannot prevent environmental destruction unless someone fights to obtain it. That is what environmental litigation is all about.
Winning lawsuits about environmental impact statements and federal agency actions is not a victory for the environment unless it saves the forest, protects the river, or prevents the extinction of a species.
The Environment Needs Advocates
The environment cannot be protected by lawyers who mistake winning an argument over agency procedures for equitable relief preventing serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage.
The lawyer is not trying to establish that the government got it wrong, but to stop the environmental damage before it is too late.
Those who threaten serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage must face trial lawyers prepared to prove the facts, establish the causal relationship between the threatened activity and the anticipated injury, and demonstrate why the court must act before the damage becomes irreparable.
When Did Environmental Law Stop Being About Justice?
Environmental law began in a courtroom.
A concerned woman went to court with her attorney husband, Victor Yannacone. At the first hearing in June 1966, Justice D. Ormonde Ritchie asked what area of law supplied the cases supporting the novel cause of action brought to prevent the continued use of DDT for mosquito control. Attorney Yannacone answered, “Environmental law,” and a new field of law was born when Newsday and The New York Times reported the phrase. The New York State court system’s history of Suffolk County and Karl Grossman’s account of the origins of environmental law document the significance of that courtroom confrontation.
The lawsuit invoked the equity powers of the court and relied upon scientific evidence that continued application of DDT threatened injury to the Suffolk County regional ecosystem.
The Suffolk County DDT litigation led to the creation of the Environmental Defense Fund. What began as a courtroom battle over the use of DDT became a national effort to prevent environmental damage through class actions seeking declaratory judgments and equitable relief.
In the late 1960s, Attorney Yannacone moved environmental litigation beyond the fight against DDT to address air pollution from a kraft paper mill in Missoula, Montana.
He then went to Colorado to save the Florissant fossil beds from a developer’s bulldozers and facilitate the establishment of Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.
He obtained a temporary injunction to prevent flaring radioactive natural gas following the Project Rulison experiment to stimulate natural gas production by using nuclear explosives.
The last legal action Yannacone brought for the Environmental Defense Fund halted construction of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal before the United States Army Corps of Engineers could destroy the Ocklawaha River in central Florida.
Those courtroom victories of the 1960s demonstrated that environmental destruction could be stopped before it occurred.
Congress Declared Environmental Policy. The President Created the Environmental Protection Agency
On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 into law. Congress declared a national environmental policy, established the Council on Environmental Quality within the Executive Office of the President, and required federal agencies to prepare environmental impact statements for major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.
On July 9, 1970, Nixon submitted Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970 to Congress. It consolidated federal pollution control responsibilities in a new Environmental Protection Agency, which began operating on December 2, 1970.
Congress had established procedures for examining the environmental consequences of federal action. The President had established an agency to administer federal pollution control programs. Neither had diminished the historic equitable powers of the courts to prevent serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage.
But the environmental law born in the Suffolk County courtroom was abandoned. Class actions seeking declaratory judgments and equitable relief to prevent environmental destruction gave way to litigation over environmental impact statements, permits, regulations, and administrative procedures.
Environmental law had become administrative law. The question was no longer whether threatened environmental destruction should be prevented, but whether the government had completed the paperwork required before allowing it to proceed.
Sixty years after environmental law began in a Suffolk County courtroom, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan, a case where the residents were seeking to prevent the United States Air Force from detonating military munitions on Tarague Beach, Guam. The explosions threaten the beach, the surrounding ecosystem, and an aquifer supplying drinking water to more than 80 percent of the people who live on Guam.
The lawyers representing the residents identified the environmental dangers and challenged the failure of the Air Force to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, but the case before the Supreme Court is not a demand that the Air Force be permanently prohibited from destroying the beach or contaminating the aquifer. It is a fight over whether the Air Force must complete the environmental review required by federal law. Even if the residents win, the Air Force may complete the review, consider the environmental consequences, and proceed with the detonations anyway.
The aquifer will not be protected by an environmental impact statement. The beach will not be saved by a properly completed environmental impact statement.
This case exemplifies the exaltation of procedural formalism over substantive law and equity, the kind of legal formalism that led the diverse wits and pens of Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Gilbert to taunt the law and mock the lawyer.
The Law Cannot Restore What Has Been Destroyed
The forest is gone. The river is poisoned. The aquifer is contaminated. The species is extinct. But the paperwork is complete.
The courts had the power to prevent the destruction. The evidence could have been presented. An injunction could have been sought, but no one demanded that the destruction stop.
The courts have the power to prevent environmental damage. Lawyers must have the courage to demand that they use it.
Trial Lawyers Must Reclaim Environmental Law
How much more of our environment must be damaged and degraded before trial lawyers return to the courtroom and fight for the fundamental human right to a salubrious environment?
Forests cannot protest. Rivers cannot testify. Endangered species cannot speak. Trial lawyers must be their advocates.
Environmental law was born in a courtroom. It must be reclaimed by trial lawyers in a courtroom.
Permission to Repost. You may reproduce this article in its entirety on social media, blogs, and other websites without requesting additional permission, provided the article is reproduced in full without alteration, identifies Victor John Yannacone, Jr. as the author, and includes a prominent link to the original article on this website.
The Environment Needs Trial Lawyers
October 11, 2026 | The Legal Profession
The environment needs trial lawyers who know how to fight for justice in a courtroom.
The courtroom is where fundamental human rights must be defended against those who threaten them, and the right to a salubrious environment is a fundamental human right.
The trial lawyer must identify the wrong, prove the injury, and demand an effective judicial remedy. That requires understanding that the environment is the complex, dynamic relational system comprising all the elements of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere of planet Earth, together with the relationships and interactions among those elements and the natural processes that create, maintain, and transform those elements, relationships, and interactions.
Every human being depends upon the environment for air clean enough to breathe, safe potable water to drink, and the functioning natural systems of planet Earth. The right to those conditions necessary for human existence is not a privilege conferred by government. It is a fundamental human right.
Protecting those rights requires a trial lawyer to understand environmental systems science and know how to present substantial credible scientific evidence of environmental injury in the courtroom.
Environmental Law Is About Human Rights, Not Congressional Statutes and Agency Regulations
Congress did not create the fundamental human right to breathe clean air. No administrative agency granted human beings the right to drink potable water. No legislature conferred upon humanity the right to the continued functioning of the environmental systems upon which human existence depends.
Those rights exist because human civilization as we know it cannot survive the destruction of the environmental systems upon which it depends.
The responsibility of government is to protect these fundamental human rights. When government fails, trial lawyers must fight to protect those rights in the courtroom.
The courtroom is where trial lawyers demand protection for our fundamental human rights.
Congress can enact statutes. Government agencies can promulgate regulations. Lawyers can litigate compliance with both, but that will not protect our fundamental human right to a salubrious environment.
A lawyer can win a lawsuit against a government agency and still lose the fight to protect the environment unless the court provides an effective remedy.
Trial lawyers demand injunctions that stop environmental injury before the damage becomes irreparable.
Courts have exercised the power to prevent irreparable injury for centuries. Their power comes from equity jurisprudence, a body of law developed to protect fundamental rights when ordinary legal remedies fail.
Equity recognizes that no award of damages can restore an extinct species, recreate a destroyed ecosystem, or recover an irreplaceable record of Earth’s natural history.
Progress Does Not Require Damaging the Environment
Altering the environment does not necessarily mean damaging it.
Human activity has been altering the environment since the dawn of history. Agriculture, transportation, industry, and urbanization have transformed the landscapes and natural systems of planet Earth. The distinction lies in whether human activity changes the environment or damages the natural systems upon which life depends.
Progress does not require clear-cutting old-growth forests, contaminating rivers, causing the extinction of species, or impairing the function of the environmental systems upon which human existence depends. Those consequences result from particular human activities and decisions, not from some immutable law of human progress.
Today, environmental destruction is the consequence of economic decisions human beings make without regard to foreseeable damage to the environment. Those decisions can be challenged and the destruction can be prevented.
Those who profit from environmental destruction rarely bear its costs. People who had no part in the decisions suffer the immediate consequences, while future generations inherit the lasting damage.
The damage is foreseeable. The damage is preventable. But only if someone takes action before it is too late.
Environmental Protection Is Not About Administrative Procedures
An injunction is the only judicial remedy that can prevent serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage before it occurs. An injunction can prevent the destruction of a forest, the contamination of a river, or the extinction of a species. But once the destruction occurs, no award of damages can restore what has been lost.
But an injunction cannot prevent environmental destruction unless someone fights to obtain it. That is what environmental litigation is all about.
Winning lawsuits about environmental impact statements and federal agency actions is not a victory for the environment unless it saves the forest, protects the river, or prevents the extinction of a species.
The Environment Needs Advocates
The environment cannot be protected by lawyers who mistake winning an argument over agency procedures for equitable relief preventing serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage.
The lawyer is not trying to establish that the government got it wrong, but to stop the environmental damage before it is too late.
Those who threaten serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage must face trial lawyers prepared to prove the facts, establish the causal relationship between the threatened activity and the anticipated injury, and demonstrate why the court must act before the damage becomes irreparable.
When Did Environmental Law Stop Being About Justice?
Environmental law began in a courtroom.
A concerned woman went to court with her attorney husband, Victor Yannacone. At the first hearing in June 1966, Justice D. Ormonde Ritchie asked what area of law supplied the cases supporting the novel cause of action brought to prevent the continued use of DDT for mosquito control. Attorney Yannacone answered, “Environmental law,” and a new field of law was born when Newsday and The New York Times reported the phrase. The New York State court system’s history of Suffolk County and Karl Grossman’s account of the origins of environmental law document the significance of that courtroom confrontation.
The lawsuit invoked the equity powers of the court and relied upon scientific evidence that continued application of DDT threatened injury to the Suffolk County regional ecosystem.
The Suffolk County DDT litigation led to the creation of the Environmental Defense Fund. What began as a courtroom battle over the use of DDT became a national effort to prevent environmental damage through class actions seeking declaratory judgments and equitable relief.
In the late 1960s, Attorney Yannacone moved environmental litigation beyond the fight against DDT to address air pollution from a kraft paper mill in Missoula, Montana.
He then went to Colorado to save the Florissant fossil beds from a developer’s bulldozers and facilitate the establishment of Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.
He obtained a temporary injunction to prevent flaring radioactive natural gas following the Project Rulison experiment to stimulate natural gas production by using nuclear explosives.
The last legal action Yannacone brought for the Environmental Defense Fund halted construction of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal before the United States Army Corps of Engineers could destroy the Ocklawaha River in central Florida.
Those courtroom victories of the 1960s demonstrated that environmental destruction could be stopped before it occurred.
Congress Declared Environmental Policy. The President Created the Environmental Protection Agency
On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 into law. Congress declared a national environmental policy, established the Council on Environmental Quality within the Executive Office of the President, and required federal agencies to prepare environmental impact statements for major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.
On July 9, 1970, Nixon submitted Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970 to Congress. It consolidated federal pollution control responsibilities in a new Environmental Protection Agency, which began operating on December 2, 1970.
Congress had established procedures for examining the environmental consequences of federal action. The President had established an agency to administer federal pollution control programs. Neither had diminished the historic equitable powers of the courts to prevent serious, permanent, and irreparable environmental damage.
But the environmental law born in the Suffolk County courtroom was abandoned. Class actions seeking declaratory judgments and equitable relief to prevent environmental destruction gave way to litigation over environmental impact statements, permits, regulations, and administrative procedures.
Environmental law had become administrative law. The question was no longer whether threatened environmental destruction should be prevented, but whether the government had completed the paperwork required before allowing it to proceed.
Sixty years after environmental law began in a Suffolk County courtroom, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan, a case where the residents were seeking to prevent the United States Air Force from detonating military munitions on Tarague Beach, Guam. The explosions threaten the beach, the surrounding ecosystem, and an aquifer supplying drinking water to more than 80 percent of the people who live on Guam.
The lawyers representing the residents identified the environmental dangers and challenged the failure of the Air Force to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, but the case before the Supreme Court is not a demand that the Air Force be permanently prohibited from destroying the beach or contaminating the aquifer. It is a fight over whether the Air Force must complete the environmental review required by federal law. Even if the residents win, the Air Force may complete the review, consider the environmental consequences, and proceed with the detonations anyway.
The aquifer will not be protected by an environmental impact statement. The beach will not be saved by a properly completed environmental impact statement.
This case exemplifies the exaltation of procedural formalism over substantive law and equity, the kind of legal formalism that led the diverse wits and pens of Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Gilbert to taunt the law and mock the lawyer.
The Law Cannot Restore What Has Been Destroyed
The forest is gone. The river is poisoned. The aquifer is contaminated. The species is extinct. But the paperwork is complete.
The courts had the power to prevent the destruction. The evidence could have been presented. An injunction could have been sought, but no one demanded that the destruction stop.
The courts have the power to prevent environmental damage. Lawyers must have the courage to demand that they use it.
Trial Lawyers Must Reclaim Environmental Law
How much more of our environment must be damaged and degraded before trial lawyers return to the courtroom and fight for the fundamental human right to a salubrious environment?
Forests cannot protest. Rivers cannot testify. Endangered species cannot speak. Trial lawyers must be their advocates.
Environmental law was born in a courtroom. It must be reclaimed by trial lawyers in a courtroom.
Permission to Repost. You may reproduce this article in its entirety on social media, blogs, and other websites without requesting additional permission, provided the article is reproduced in full without alteration, identifies Victor John Yannacone, Jr. as the author, and includes a prominent link to the original article on this website.