Interview with Richard Ayres
Environmental Lawyer

Q: When you were in college, how much interest was there in the environmental agenda?

Ayres: When I was in college, which was in the early 60's, I would say there was very little environmental interest., it was pretty much confined to a few people who liked to backpack or go to the woods or fish or hunt. Didn't really start until the end of the 60's.

Q: What are some of the things that influenced you and perhaps others of your generation to become involved with the environmental movement?

Ayres: I think all of us came of age during the period of the first space mission and so we were the first kids to see pictures of our planet taken by another human being and I think that affected everyone. It made us feel how small the planet was.

Also, I would say that the environmental movements of 1970 clearly grew out of the social movements of the 60's. During that period, of course, there were anti-war demonstrations, there was a real attempt to address the civil rights issues in the country, and I think the publication of "Silent Spring" and several other works suddenly showed people that there was an environmental disaster that needed to be dealt with as well...and so many of us who felt very unhappy about the general social trends in our time were drawn to that issue.

Q: What inspired you to help found the Natural Resources Defense Council?

Ayres: Well, I grew up in Oregon which is a beautiful green state and I spent a lot of time outdoors when I was young. Then I came East and went to college and law school. I think the sense of environmental degradation was increasing intellectually at a place like Yale Law School and some of us were drawn to do something about it... There was a group of about 6 or 7 of us who, in our third year of law school, sat down one day and began to talk about what we were going to do when we left law school. We ended the discussion by deciding we were going to create an environmental law firm. We then went to a foundation -- the largest one in the country at that time -- and proposed this preposterous idea. Much to our amazement, they agreed it was a good idea and even agreed that we were the people that should try to do something about it. So, NRDC was founded basically based on a discussion by a bunch of law school students in their last year of law school.

When we formed NRDC there were very few federal laws to protect the environment, but we knew they were coming. There was little doubt about that. So our main objective was to try and make sure those laws were carried out. We felt we could do that through the courts, by working through the executive branch, and I guess some of us thought we would eventually end up working in Congress as well. There wasn't an EPA until after we started, but we realized that one day there would be.

Q: To what extent were environmental issues on the mainstream political agenda during that time?

Ayres: Well, clearly the environmental issue was not on any political agenda before 1970. There was, of course, the Conservation Movement that began at the beginning of the century, but that was a gentlemen's movement concerned mostly with the outdoors, and with places that most people never went. In the Environmental Movement, the concern focused on what was happening in our cities and in the areas where most of us live: the quality in the air we breathe and the water we drink... That really began in 1970. Prior to that it wasn't on the political agenda at all. I think there was a sense that many of the industries were totally unaware of it as well. They just didn't take environmental damage into account in their corporate planning and decision-making. Consequently, the rivers were treated as a place to dump either sewage or waste from industrial plants. The air was a dumping "ground" as well... That might have worked at a time when industry was much smaller and the nation was much smaller, but by the 60's it had become apparent that it was simply too much for the air or the water to carry. That was our awakening, I guess.

As the 70's and 80's progressed, I think we all began to see that the problems were indeed much worse than we originally thought. When we started NRDC, we knew about air pollution and water pollution in the United States of America. We didn't yet understand that human beings were already beginning to change the ozone layer and the entire climate of the earth. So as the movement grew and people began to understand the issues better -- and as science proved that environmental problems were much worse than we thought -- the movement grew correspondingly, and the number of laws passed grew almost exponentially.

Q: What was the response of industry to the environmental legislation of the early 70's?

Ayres: Well, I think the first response of industry to the new set of environmental laws was to hope they'd go away and to not take them very seriously. One of the reasons why the Clean Air Act wasn't a national issue when it was first passed was because many of the people who were subject to it didn't really believe it meant anything. Others in industry saw it as a threat to the American Way of Life. They were outraged to have the government trying to intervene on these kinds of issues and tell them how to run their businesses.

Q: Did you believe at that time that legislation could lead to real changes in the way society treated the environment?

Ayres: I remember reading the Clean Air Act of 1970 in the subway in New York City just after NRDC started and I of course had not read any clean air legislation before that. I was amazed at how powerful this law could be. It was clear that the authors of the law felt there needed to be some major changes in the way our society worked in order to deal with this problem. They contemplated changes in the internal combustion engine. They contemplated changes in traffic in our major cities. And they clearly meant that major industries had to clean up. So I read this law as a brand new lawyer and I thought: "Why is no one saying anything about this law? It's so powerful". But of course, I then realized it was my job to go out and make it become something meaningful, and that's what I worked on for the next 20 years.

Q: What kinds of things did you do to help these laws become meaningful?

Ayres: One of the things the Clean Air Act required was that every state government put together a plan of how they would attack the air pollution problem. What we saw was that the Federal Government would be likely just to relax and not enforce that mandate. So we went to Washington and we began to pester the Federal EPA and pester the States as well, and most of all, we started to build up a network of citizens across the country who wanted this law to work. Working together, we sort of forced the two levels of government to actually take the law seriously.

There were other ways in which we tried to make sure the law worked, too: The law says that pollution from large power plants should be cleaned up, not just dispersed, but many in the power industry were building tall smoke stacks -- a thousand feet tall or more -- in order to disperse the pollution instead. So we brought a law suit to enforce the law as it stood and we won. As it turned out, it took more than a law suit to change that practice, and ultimately it wasn't changed until the Acid Rain Control Law of 1990. But those law suits forced the issue and kept it alive, leading eventually to the Acid Rain Law.

Q: How has the way in which pollution is perceived as a problem changed over time?

Ayres: When I first started working on this issue, most people saw pollution as a local issue. They had steel mills in Pittsburgh, they had car pollution in Los Angeles... Within the next 10 years we began to understand it was continental in proportions: acid rain covered half the continent of North America and covered much of Europe. Within another 5 years we realized the problem was indeed global, that there were threats to the viability of the atmosphere itself. I think this is very much like many environmental problems. The more we study them, the more we understand how fundamental the threat is to the entire habitability of the planet.

Q: What effect do you think that Earth Day had on the environmental movement?

Ayres: Earth Day was a turning point. The original Conservation Movement back in the early 20th Century and late 19th Century was very much an elitist movement. It was a few wealthy gentlemen who had been to beautiful places and wanted to protect them. I think the 1970 Earth Day marked the first step toward making that movement a people's movement. It was the beginning of the modern Environmental Movement. People around the country began to realize that their local problems were part of a great national problem and that really began to build citizen networks. Through the 70's and into the 80's we saw problems over and over again that had not been anticipated: Love Canal, Valley of the Drums, et cetera. I think with each new revelation people became increasingly concerned that even with the statutes passed in the 70's, we didn't have the protection of the environment that we needed. So people became increasingly better organized, more willing to join with larger groups, and increasingly became a political force throughout the country.

Also, I think mainstream politics began to take the environment into account after Earth Day. Senator Muskee, who at that time was seen as the democratic candidate in 1972... was very strongly pro-environment. So President Nixon, who was not particularly pro-environmental, could see which way the wind was blowing. Nixon began to put up his own bills, put rhetoric into his speeches, and tried to posture himself as an environmental president...He was the first one to do that.

Q: What was it like for you to read Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring"?

Ayres: I read Rachel Carson's book a year ago and I found it very disturbing because so little progress appears to have been made on the issues that she brought up. I thought it was a very compelling book and I can see why many of the people that read it were led to the environmental cause.

Q: How would you respond to critics who say that the environmental movement has only affected superficial change and not actually altered the entrenched social and economic systems?

Ayres: I think that those who criticize environmental laws for having just chipped away at the external parts of the problem have a point, but I would put it a different way. I would say we've just begun to solve the problems. We began by recognizing that too much stuff was coming out of a pipe. The next step was to figure out how to make a product a different way, and eventually rebuild our economy... We are only part way into that. Some people in business have begun to understand it ; most people in the remainder of the world have not.

I think there's no question that the major task in the next 25 years is to remake the world economy so that it's an environmentally sound one. In that sense, we have just begun and we have not yet really solved many of the problems.

Q: What is the most important thing, in your opinion, to come out of the environmental movement over the last thirty years?

Ayres: I think the greatest achievement so far has been the developing awareness of environmental problems worldwide...The laws have only started to work, but the people are now aware of what's going on and they've begun to organize.

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