NRDC’s Hinerfeld: “They win lawsuits.”
Several years ago, I wrote “Has the NRDC Gone Hollywood?” at the request of Environmental Protection Magazine, where I had a bi-monthly column and feature commitment. Based on my trip to the Robert Redford house in Santa Monica, California, and my interviews with environmental activists and strategists with offices there, “Has the NRDC Gone Hollywood?” is about white-hat environmental attorneys at the Los Angeles office of the well-regarded Natural Resources Defense Council, a national public interest lobby now in its 45th year. I’m told the piece is still hip and funny. We are not certain if it was ever linked to by this blog. So I am sharing this with you now.
Has the NRDC Gone Hollywood?
By J. Daniel Hull
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Daniel Hinerfeld, the young, ultra-articulate director of communications for the Southern California office of the Natural Resources Defense Council (“NRDC”), agreed to let me drop by in mid-September to interview him and some other NRDC staffers so I could write this installment.
I was slightly nervous about visiting. It was a little unseemly, I thought, for me to mingle brazenly with the Los Angeles office of the smartest, hippest, and arguably most successful public interest group in the world. I grew up in the Midwest, and as an environmental lawyer, I have represented chiefly companies — some quite large and many of them processors, transporters, or storers of fossil fuels.
While several clients have been laudably progressive in their environmental quality management, more than a few of them allegedly violated their National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permits or were driven into consent orders under the Clean Water Act, Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or Resource Conservation Recovery Act.
Plenty troubling was one ex-client: an operator of 50 underground storage tanks outside of Pittsburgh with a history of alleged groundwater contamination violations and a compliance program which, in the good years, consisted of sporadically checking properties to see if the ground had caught fire.
So, I wasn’t really sure if I had the cultural, political, or professional qualifications to visit the NRDC’s Los Angeles office and write this article. But the energetic Hinerfeld was quick to point out that, as a single issue, protection of the environment often transcends politics and culture wars.
“It’s really a bi-partisan issue,” he noted. “Everyone wants clean air and clean water.” Hinerfeld, of course, is right. Although it’s true that environmental compliance costs on occasion have put good companies out of business and good people out of jobs, strictly speaking, we all — Republicans, Democrats, Independents, whatever — want a healthy planet.