DDT Wars: Rescuing Our National Bird, Preventing Cancer, and Creating the Environmental Defense Fund

by Charles F. Wurster

Ford solved the problem by making a grant of $100,000 to the National Audubon Society, with instructions to use the money to support EDF.

disagreements and frictions had developed between Vic and the board.

In October 1969 Joe Hassett and Bob Smolker went to Washington, DC, in search of a new executive director.

Roderick A. Cameron, a West Point graduate with a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

EDF’s board of eight trustees was run by an executive committee of only four: Dennis Puleston as chairman, Art Cooley, Bob Smolker, and me.

We had an excellent scientific reputation as an activist organization, but nobody was sending money.

Edward Lee Rogers, a tax attorney with the Department of Justice.

Lee also was hired to be general counsel.

Some called us FED, the “Fundless Environmental Defenders,

Marion Lane Rogers (no relation to Lee) could “type like the wind” but did no shorthand, nor did she have bookkeeping experience. Instead she added to her résumé that “the danger that I will elope with that divine staff bachelor, and retire, or request seven months maternity leave at an inopportune moment is remote—and diminishing.”

She remained with EDF for 20 years, then became editor and an author of Acorn Days, a book about EDF’s early evolution.

Despite the chaos and lack of amenities it was fun working there. I liked and admired Rod and Lee and the trustees immensely. We were all true believers united by a common cause more important than any one of us. Every EDF triumph called for team rejoicing because somehow we had all played a part in its conception, development or execution.

EDF had one extraordinary asset: its “Founding Four” Executive Committee. These were a high school biology teacher, a wonderful Old World naturalist-adventurer, both from the South Shore of Long Island, and two Stony Brook University professors, one in biology and the other a chemist in marine sciences.

They were also passionate in their belief, fashioned partly by their association with Yannacone, that a partnership of scientists and lawyers could accomplish something the eloquence of Rachel Carson could not: regulatory reform that would change the pesticide practices of agribusiness.

Victor Yannacone, a South Shore personal injury and workers’ comp lawyer. He had a flair for publicity and for the dramatic gesture.

He was combative, energetic, imaginative and irreverent. He had enough chutzpah that he easily would have brought a class action suit against the Deity.

He was a slugger and if some of his punches went wild, many of them hit home with telling effect. His vaulting ego and abundant energy, harnessed (somewhat) to the discipline of EDF’s trustee-scientists, provided the thrust to get EDF airborne at the dawn of what some now refer to as the Environmental Era.

Yannacone probably accomplished more in that pre-1970, pre-NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] legal environment than many a more careful attorney would have. [He] was the EDF champion-at-arms.

Amyas Ames and his wife, Evelyn,

Amyas helped launch EDF’s financial reporting and bookkeeping systems, about which the rest of us knew nothing.

Conservationists of that time always put great faith in education:

We did not have that kind of faith, and most important, we did not have that kind of patience.

EDF was showing signs of permanence and might soon be called an organization. It was a splendid and enthusiastic team of talented and dedicated people.

Environmental law was essentially nonexistent in 1969, and it was a major goal of EDF to establish, enhance, develop, and use this new strategy for solving environmental problems, not just involving DDT but other issues as well.

Conservationists were tired of losing by being reasonable, compromising, and timid. Earth Day was about to arrive, and it was time for action.

Dr. Clarence C. Gordon,

He came to visit us and convinced us to “sue the bastards” in Missoula, and soon Vic Yannacone was on his way to Missoula.

company undertook a $13.5 million air pollution abatement construction program, which was well on its way to solving the problem.

We had won most of what we were after, with some excellent language besides. Once again, we had won while losing.

Dr. Paul P. Craig, a physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, began attending our almost-weekly EDF board meetings.

Unlike the DDT issue, a very recent development, humans have been poisoning themselves with lead for thousands of years.

According to some historians, the Roman Empire disintegrated partly because of lead pipes, while the elite stored their wines in lead containers, poisoning Rome’s leaders.

Lead is a neurotoxin, especially for children, and it was estimated that countless American children had lost some IQ points because of lead toxicity.

EDF submitted a legal petition to the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) seeking reduction and elimination of lead from the exhaust of motor vehicles.

Progress was painfully slow, but soon federal government vehicles began using unleaded gasoline, and use of leaded gasoline slowly declined.

By 1987 all gasoline in the United States was unleaded.

Blood lead concentrations and mental retardation in schoolchildren both peaked around 1980, while violent crime peaked about 20 years later (Drum, 2013).

Next time you drive up to the pump and see that “unleaded” sign, remember how it got that way.

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.

Here was another early example of the value of taking an environmental issue to court.

In July 1969 EDF became involved with efforts to stop construction of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, a huge $210 million project to connect the Gulf of Mexico with the Atlantic Ocean.

FDE had conducted a substantial public relations effort for several years to save the Ocklawaha, which played a critical role in this complex case. Following oral argument, in January 1971, EDF and FDE won a significant court victory.

where FDE litigation, with some help from EDF, had won by winning.

the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, which required an environmental impact statement for all major federal actions.

March 1970, EDF launched its public membership, and in April 1970 the first Earth Day arrived.

EDF initiated an increasingly varied agenda testing the limits of environmental law as the new decade began.

Dr. Roger S. Payne of Rockefeller University,

with Scott McVay of Princeton University and EDF’s executive director Rod Cameron, their goal being to save the world’s great whales.

Many organizations, including EDF, worked on the whaling problem for years, leading to a partial moratorium on whaling established by the International Whaling Commission in 1982.

EDF filed suit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on October 1, 1970, against their proposed Gillham Dam on the Cossatot River in Arkansas. Richard S. Arnold, attorney for EDF, argued that the benefit/cost analysis of this project was greatly exaggerated and that a wild and scenic river system would be destroyed.