Why I do this work
People often ask why I do this work. The answer goes back to a lifelong love affair with nature.
As a boy growing up in New York, I would comb vacant lots for their insects and spiders, and tramp local marshes to observe birds and other enchanting beings like snapping turtles.
Entering my teens, I was the treasurer of the Junior Entomological Society, the young person’s offshoot of the august American Entomological Society run out of the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West. Among the senior division’s members were heroes I was able to meet, such as Alexander B. Klotz, the author of the field guide to North American butterflies.
My first mentor was a great woman entomologist there called Alice Gray, who deserves her own story one day. Under her guidance, I could have become a biologist. This would have allowed me to align my daily work with the boundless yielding secrets of the natural world. At university, I studied Biology and Literature and nascent Computer Science, while majoring in Philosophy.
By the end of my time at Yale, I determined that Western philosophy would not yield the meaning of life, and turned that quest towards Zen and its better answers, or practices.
It became clear that the alarms sounded at Earth Day in 1970 were real. If I became a biologist, I would study the living world I loved and catalogue the damage. I determined to study law. Not because I was attracted to it but because I instinctively understood it would allow me to fight on the side of life.
I was pre-adapted to studying law. My father was a law professor. He was also a master of the Socratic method. There were four boys in the family, myself the third. All became lawyers, some after detours in career. Because there were five years between each of us, the disputations around the dinner table were a good testing ground for the less experienced advocates against the more. My father acted both as provocateur and judge, keeping score for winning arguments. I fiercely loved the game. By the time I got to Yale, I also realised that I had been trained in a dinner table regime that meant I would never be uncomfortable in an argument.
In my third year of law studies at New York University School of Law, I was editor in chief of the Law Review. One of my editors, called Fred Harris, came in one day and said, ‘James, you have to do the clinical programme with NRDC. They are environmental lawyers. They are brilliant and eccentric and I think you’ll fit right in!’ With a recommendation like that, who could resist. NRDC was only nine years old when I started my work there, about the size and age that ClientEarth now is. That taste of law practice for the Earth stayed with me. It showed me the way I wanted to use law.
The other question I am often asked is why I am in Europe. A Financial Times journalist yesterday asked in an interview, ‘so why are you here, isn’t the UK a small patch to work on after the huge scale of the United States?’ The scale question is simple. I never saw ClientEarth as being confined to the UK. For me, the UK is one local jurisdiction, like California. From the beginning, I saw ClientEarth as spanning the 28 countries of the EU. And I always felt that once established, it would reach out to China and Africa.
The question ‘why the UK at all’ is easy to answer. My partner is Martin Goodman. He is a writer and professor, and the lead author of this book. He lived with me for seven years in the US. But human rights laws were better in Europe. It was easier for me to be legally present in the EU than him in the US. The US made him leave every six months and stay out for three months at a time.
Though Martin was able to go to our mountain retreat in the Pyrenees to write during these times of absence, the charm of enforced separation wore off, even in French. You might say I’m in Europe as a refugee from the laws of my birth country. The good news is that the United States Supreme Court has since then ruled in favour of marriage equality, something I did not expect to see in my lifetime. So on this front, the law is moving in the right direction. Nevertheless, it was the difficulty of us being together in the US that led me to Europe, and that is what let me create ClientEarth.
As a boy I loved nature. Through practice, I’ve grown fond of people too.
My goal is systemic change to protect people and nature. The most efficient way to achieve it is through law. This use of law to create systemic change is the most complex and rewarding enterprise I know. Every day, you ask yourself how to go deeper, how to use these powerful tools better. Once you get a taste for it, you won’t want to do anything else.