Environmental Defense Fund

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), more than any other of the new environmental groups formed in the United States in the 1960s, illustrates the sweeping changes that have taken place in the public interest world, from the last 20th-century time of great U.S. social and political unrest, to the current wave of activism in the first decade of the 21st century. In the period that spawned the U.S. environmental movement, from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, remnants of state-sanctioned racism, divisions over the Vietnam War, and criminal activity in the White House created broad public engagement in debates about U.S. values and the federal government's responsibilities. With eyes opened by struggles over race, war, and corruption, the Americans were ready to pay attention to other issues.

No social cause benefited more from that attention than the changing and increasingly effective environmental movement. The EDF's roots are in Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring. Carson's warning that misuse of DDT and other persistent pesticides was wiping out bird populations had intrigued President John F. Kennedy and alarmed environmental groups such as the National Audubon Society and National Wildlife Federation.

Industry's futile attempts to discredit Carson only stimulated more environmental activism. The EDF grew from the urgency of a small team of lawyers and scientists who were unwilling to accept the impending loss of eagles and other birds of prey and who were impatient with the mainstream environmental community's slow response to U.S. wildlife's unnecessary death from pesticides.

In 1967, in the closing hours of National Audubon's annual convention, Victor Yannacone, a young lawyer from New York, ignored protocol and in questions from the floor demanded to know why Audubon was not litigating to prevent the extinction of raptors. After getting polite but uncommitted replies, Yannacone noted that he and his friends were organized to do the job. Yannacone, scientist Charles Wurster, and others had already been going to court to stop the dangerous misapplication of pesticides.

This was the beginning of the EDF. Yannacone quickly moved on to other legal adventures, but Rod Cameron replaced him, and with Chief Counsel Lee Rodgers, the organization survived and grew. EDF's legal success against inappropriate use of pesticides helped the bald eagle, the osprey, and other endangered birds to recover.

EDF's groundbreaking legal work against DDT and toxic substances, its litigation against a river-destroying Corps of Engineers project in Florida (the Cross-Florida Barge Canal), and other cases helped establish the legal principle that U.S. citizens have standing to ask that courts require the enforcement of environmental laws. With the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Law and Social Policy, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now Earth Justice), and Ralph Nader's young attorneys, EDF built environmental law into a formidable tool in defense of nature and public health.

Two other creative EDF leaders have helped shape EDF and influence the trajectory of U.S. national environmental activism. Before becoming EDF's president in the early 1970s, Arlie Schardt had covered civil rights for Time Magazine and then worked for the American Civil Liberties Union. EDF was then under attack by antienviron-mental politicians who repeated false claims that one of EDF's founding scientists was a racist. Arlie Schardt's commitment to social equity was beyond question. Schardt promptly erased the organization's debts and strengthened its legal and science abilities. Then he moved EDF beyond litigation into the forefront of work on national environmental [Page 256]policy. He created EDF's first legislative and communications offices.

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