The nonprofit attorney fighting to save Oregon's oldest forests

Did you always know you wanted to be an environmental lawyer?

Yeah. Both of my parents had worked in nonprofit fields—my dad in outdoor leadership, education and environmental work out of St. Louis. And a few of his friends we played soccer with were attorneys. I was complaining about sprawl one day, and they said, “Nick, you can sue people for that.” And I was like, oh!

By my third year of law school, I had pretty much stopped going to class and was just working on federal litigation. I've been at Cascadia Wildlands ever since.

Just suing people on behalf of trees, day in and day out?

Our organization is the client, so I'm essentially in-house counsel who also handles all the active litigation, which is a wonderful position to be in. We often represent smaller community organizations, like a group from a resort town on a famous fly fishing river upset about federal logging next to their property, or a small rural town whose drinking water is naturally filtered by a forest basin. If you clear-cut that, the town has to spend God knows how much upgrading their water filtration plant.

Also, litigation is only one piece of what we do. We have a legal side, a grassroots organizing side and a policy side. Nine or 10 staff total. We take a holistic approach because, in the end, Congress or the state legislature could always change the laws we're suing under. So we're simultaneously working with the political figures and bodies involved, pursuing litigation, and working on the messaging.

Does coming at this from so many angles impact your legal strategy?

The court sees the other work we are doing, whether people want to acknowledge that or not. And we know we're going to be back in front of the same judges and DOJ attorneys again and again. So you have to play the long game.

Even when we win outright in court, we often end up settling in the remedy phase to arrive at a reasonable middle ground. 

A good example is the Elliott State Forest in coastal Oregon. It took three or four lawsuits in both state and federal court, but we were able to shut down logging in a forest where they were clear-cutting old growth, using prison labor and aerially spraying herbicides and pesticides that were getting into small towns' water supplies. It's now co-managed by the state of Oregon and Oregon State University as a research forest focused on restoration and carbon storage. 

Commercial logging is still part of it, just not “log everything to maximize volume and profit.”

What sort of cases are you working on right now?

Most of our cases are turning on two things. First, wildfire. Every one of our cases for the past five to seven years has involved fire risk to communities in some way. And contrary to the talking points, industrial logging—clear-cutting old growth and replanting with tree plantations—actually increases fire risk: ignition risk, hazard severity, rate of spread. That's become a central part of our legal strategy.

Second, field verification. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have been declining in capacity and staffing for decades, under Democrat and Republican administrations alike.

When they used to plan timber sales, they used to protect and enhance recreation opportunities. They used to protect view sheds. They would have landscape architects, like look at the view from where the logging would be to make sure you couldn't see it from like scenic byways. All of that stuff is gone. Because they fired all those people, and they haven't bothered to replace them. 

And so now they're not even doing surveys for species anymore, kind of the most basic stuff. They're relying on satellite data that's 20 years old, and they're not going back to check it. We'll go out and find a stand they've flagged for logging, and they have it listed as 80 years old. We get out there, and it's 300 years old. We have pictures, documentation. We bring it to the judge, and the government literally can't respond because they don't have the staff to deal with it.

I’m guessing the judges don’t like that. 

The judges who live out here can tell who knows what they're talking about. The lawyers who fly in from DC frequently do not. That's not a small thing.

Part of our grassroots organizing work means we get out into the field and see every project we're litigating over. Partly to verify what the government is saying, because their records are often based on outdated or inaccurate data, and partly because you need to actually understand what's at stake when you're standing in a courtroom arguing it. 

None of that is what they teach in law school. How do you actually train someone for this kind of practice?

Very intentionally. After I was hired, I started bringing on summer interns and giving them real work on active cases—briefs, arguments, federal court, Ninth Circuit. We try to give people the opportunity to argue things, too. Eventually, so many of our former interns got jobs in the field that we attracted foundation funding for the program. Now we take three summer interns and one law clerk during the school year.

Any tips for other managers who are tasked with guiding eager but inexperienced students or early career folks?

Group check-ins don't work. You have to meet with each person individually, or they won't tell you what they're actually struggling with. It takes a little more time, but it's worth it. 

I’ve also realized you have to break legal writing and research into chunks for people to work on. You can course correct after they finish the first piece and then kind of keep going incrementally from there.

That’s good advice, no matter what kind of legal org you work at. 

The more time I have spent in this field, the more that I have realized that it is the small firms, small shops pulling the weight. Nearly all the innovation comes from those organizations actually in the trenches doing the work. Support your small local non-profits and law firms!

Bonus Round: If someone wanted to learn more about environmental law, where should they go next?

“The Monkey Wrench Gang” by Edward Abbey

(Image credit Cascadia Wildlands)

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