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2.23_Environmental Law with Shawn LaTourette, RLAW '09
13 Plays3 years ago
Acting Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Shawn LaTourette, RLAW '09 and Co-Dean Kim Mutcherson discuss the role of the D.E.P. in protecting our futures.
Read the 2020 New Jersey Scientific Report on Climate Change.
Learn more about New Jersey's Global Warming Response Act.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally-known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Series Producer and Editor: Kate Bianco
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rutgerslaw/messageRecommended
Transcript
Introduction of Sean LaTourette
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi, my name is Kim Mettreson, co-dean of Rutgers Law School in Camden, and this is the power of attorney. Today, my very special guest, although all of them are very special, is Sean LaTourette, who is a 2009 graduate from Rutgers Law School. And we, I hope, we're going to have a pretty wide-ranging conversation today because he's got lots of interesting things to talk about. So let me start first, Sean, by thanking you for taking the time to talk to me today.
00:00:41
Speaker
You're welcome, but really I want to thank you for asking me to join you. The praises I have heard some. Thank you for what you're doing on behalf of the Empire Rutgers community and the broader university community and the DC community.
00:00:59
Speaker
Thank you so much, absolutely.
Sean's Origin Story
00:01:01
Speaker
So the way I always like to start these conversations is asking folks for their origin story, right? What is it, given all the things that you could have done with your life, why did you ultimately decide that law school and being a lawyer is what was for you? I don't know. I think that's the best answer. I think the best answer is I don't know. Let me back up and correct that because I know why I'm a lawyer. I know why I'm an environmental lawyer. What I mean is I didn't know that at
00:01:30
Speaker
much like I didn't know I was gaming at the original. I think when I think about my original story, it is one that I'm proud of, but I would not have imagined to find myself where I am today.
00:01:43
Speaker
if I were a five-year-old and I grew up in a working for a family that really struggled a lot. No one in my family had a college education. And actually, my cousin's daughter is now the second person to go to college. And I'm really proud of that. And she wants to be a scientist. And because I'm at the Department of Environmental Technology, I have to introduce her to a microbiologist. I'm like, yes, somebody speaks my language!
00:02:11
Speaker
Um, so in any event, you know, I come from, from a family that is, you know, if you call her at best and where, where no one had a sense of, or, uh, if they did, I didn't know it of higher education, right. And what that, what that could do for, uh, opening one's eyes and heart and all of that. So.
00:02:33
Speaker
When I was really young, I thought, you know, I'll just, I'll do whatever my, you know, do what my favorite does. We're hardworking folks. We're gonna, you know, I'll get a job and I'll get an apartment and I'll, you know, have a good car and all that good stuff. But I was really bold in school as a kid. And it made me not want to go to high school with the kids that I went to grade school with.
00:02:59
Speaker
And when I was in the eighth grade, we got a presentation about vocational technical history and 20 plus years ago.
00:03:11
Speaker
professional high school in New Jersey wasn't what it is today. I'm a proud graduate of the Middlesex County Education and Technical High School system, but at that time there wasn't a Woodbridge Academy and there wasn't the technical school that's on the Middlesex County College campus. It was, you know, what has historically been trades work.
00:03:32
Speaker
And I thought, well, this is great. I will go to this trade school, and I'll get a job, and it will happen a little sooner, and it seems great. And I wouldn't be around to really do this. So that's what I decided to do. And my family was just like, sure, right? Now if it will reverse, like now when my daughters had companies that I want to go to,
00:03:54
Speaker
Let's have that conversation, right? Let's talk about why you want that versus something else, and let's help you make the best decision you can. And I had a great experience there. I went to Woodbridge Botec. I grew up in Middlesex County. I still live in Middlesex County. I love it here. And at that time, the schools were divided very, very gender-y. And in program boy, they had
00:04:20
Speaker
auto machine shop and electrical work and all this stuff, which was fondly referred to as the boy's boyfriend. Then there was Woodbridge, which had cosmetology and fashion design and cooking and baking. And that was fondly referred to as the girl's boyfriend. And I actually chose the girl's boyfriend. And there was a program called automated office technology.
00:04:44
Speaker
which was, I think, at the end in 1994, the more PCA is saying secretariat. I was the only male in this program. I actually was inducted into the New Jersey Equity Hall of Fame for being the only man in all female area of study.
Life-changing Job at 16
00:05:03
Speaker
I did automated office technology. I got put into a job as a file clerk at a law firm at the age of 16, and it changed my life.
00:05:13
Speaker
I think that's the origin story. Was that the first time you had ever stepped into a law firm? No. I carry my stepfather's last name. So once we went to a law firm so that he could formally adopt me. But beyond that, yes, it was my first time in any environment like that. And I just was so... I found it supercharging. Right. That was the beginning of everything, I guess.
00:05:40
Speaker
I love that. That seems like that would be such a transformative experience at that age. To be in this space with people who not only have gone to college, they've gone to law schools, so they've had lots of higher education. They're working in a space that is a very sort of high-powered, high-charging
00:05:58
Speaker
kind of profession, a profession that held in pretty high esteem. And so as you were there, as a 16-year-old watching all of these people doing this work, what was it that made you say, hmm, that might be something I could do or it might be something I might want to
From Paralegal to Law School
00:06:14
Speaker
do? I don't know that I thought of myself as a lawyer at that time, but it was also, it was a firm that was doing victim to my job, so they were also a professional. And I thought that that was really, I guess,
00:06:28
Speaker
And I think it just, the whole experience opened my eyes. I don't think I really understood what the plus of ill-living was until I walked in those doors. And it just took on its own life from there while I worked for an author and for two years while I was, they put you to work at InvoTech at 16th year and she worked at the junior and your senior year. You spent half the day doing your sort of core ed
00:06:58
Speaker
And then after lunch, you go to work. So I worked six hours a day every day as a junior and a senior in high school. And I just grew to really love it. And then found a paralegal job a couple days after graduation. And then that sort of became my career for a while, being a paralegal.
00:07:20
Speaker
and tried all different sorts of things and every different every different step every new sort of area of law and you know helping to support
00:07:29
Speaker
lawyers just kind of kept opening up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And so you're, you're a double Rutgers guy. Yes. So, um, first you went to undergrad and, and as you say, you were the first in your family to get a college degree, which is extraordinary. And then you came to us for law school. And I wonder, I mean, I'm sure that the transition to college was a significant transition.
00:07:59
Speaker
But I'd love to talk a little bit more about the transition from college into law school. Now, you know, at Rutgers, one of the things that I love is that we, you know, we get a number of students who are first gen and who have, you know, varying levels of familiarity with what law school might
Transition to Rutgers Law
00:08:15
Speaker
be like. But everybody sort of has a different story about what it's like.
00:08:19
Speaker
to walk in those doors and to sit in those classrooms, which are very different from being an undergrad. So what was that transition like for you, heading into law school? Okay, so I feel like there's a second order that is going on. Okay. So while I was working as a paralegal, I thought I should really be in college, right? And so I worked for 10 years and I slowly went to college
00:08:46
Speaker
And I started slowly going to college at County College in Middlesex. And I tried lots of different classes and I struggled to find my footing at first. And there was even one semester where I just felt like I couldn't do it. And I just stopped going fast. And that left a stain on my transfer. And then after I got it together, you know, I went back and I got straight.
00:09:11
Speaker
So then I transferred from county college to Rutgers, and I did that full-time at night. So I was working full-time during the day, going to Rutgers full-time at night, and continuing to do victims' rights work. I sort of took on the shape of a community organizer as a paralegal, and I would go into communities that had the hope for suffering from cancer, and this was contaminated drinking, but it was sort of like my discovery of environmental work. And one of these two amazing environmental warriors who just inspired me
00:09:42
Speaker
And they said, I should go to law school. And I worked for them for six years while I was finishing my undergraduate career. And I think I kind of had an understanding of what to expect in law school in a way. But I also didn't have the college experience of going and living in school and making friends there because I was doing it while working. It would be great time management skills, not so much on the social skills.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah. But then I said, you know what? I'll go to law school.
00:10:17
Speaker
I think I doubted myself and that I wouldn't do well. But I didn't do great on the LSATs, you know, because it's hard for a standardized test to measure the worth of a person or the amount. And I loved every second of it. You know, folks in the national talk about how terrible that actually was, I loved that. I loved being in the classroom and having insightful discussion with my peers or even the
00:10:47
Speaker
the Barb's and Con Law class when you realize that not everybody is of the same ideology. Right. But it was an exceptional experience. The best things to say when people ask me about law school, and they always do a double type. I thought it was great. And what was it? And then in particular, I took a class that I met in two, the environment, which was so secure. I love it though.
00:11:17
Speaker
Good, good, good. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, I think that people, the vision that they have of law school, there is certainly some truth to it, right? It's very different from undergrad. It can be all-consuming in lots of ways. It is sort of fundamentally about teaching you both how to speak a different language and how to think differently. So it asks a lot of you intellectually, but that's what's so exciting about it.
00:11:45
Speaker
as well, right? I mean, I feel like I left law school with language to talk about the world that I had not had before. And that was really valuable. Yeah, no question. I couldn't agree more with that. So you finished up law school, and then usually what people do after law school is they try to find a job.
First Job at Latham and Watkins
00:12:01
Speaker
So you left law school, and what was your first job as a lawyer? So my first job as a lawyer was at a really large law firm that I was, that I recruited. And so I said, well,
00:12:14
Speaker
school turned out I didn't, I shouldn't have doubted myself as much as I did. I had a good 1L GPA, and I didn't know this was going to law school, but if you are
00:12:26
Speaker
looking to go a big law firm route, which I wasn't necessarily. I didn't even know it existed. But I had a good 3.9 DPA after 1L year, and apparently from the big law perspective, that's the key to the kingdom. If that's the kingdom you want. Turns out I didn't want that.
00:12:49
Speaker
So I did the on-campus interview thing, and I ended up with an offer from Latham and Watkins, probably one of the top five largest law firms on the globe. And I wanted to do that because they had the largest environmental program of any law firm, anywhere.
00:13:14
Speaker
I wanted to see that side of the work. It was obviously defense work, which was not what I learned as a paralegal with much more, it was all victim's rights, but it too was eye-opening and a great training ground because I had experience. I ended up on a trial on my first year as a first year attorney at a large law firm, ended up on a trial, it's unbelievable. That is incredibly rare. So those were all remarkable experiences.
00:13:44
Speaker
Excellent. So you were doing, and it's actually not that unusual to find people, I mean, you see it in criminal law all the time, right? People who started the prosecutor's office and then do that for a while and then switch gears and start doing public defender work or open their own criminal defense firm. And I think a lot of that is that you can learn so much by being on both sides of an issue when it helps you understand it much more in depth
00:14:11
Speaker
But it seems like once you got that bug for environmental law and not just environmental law, but really environmental justice, that that became something that was going to be the future for you. So when did you sort of make that transition from sort of defense side environmental work to the kind of work that you're doing now?
Significance of Environmental Justice
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that sort of bug starts when I was in the paralegal organizing kind of capacity where it was just so obvious that poor people, especially
00:14:49
Speaker
or people of color who suffered greater environmental disparities than others. And that notion just sort of cut through all of the work that I did throughout my career, right, whether it was from as a paralegal organizing and seeing that the folks that were getting cancer were actually the folks that were
00:15:11
Speaker
at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. And then that continued, I continued to see those same things in other facets of my work, whether I was at Latham and working on natural resource damage cases or large class actions. And then when I transitioned to come back to New Jersey, so to speak, I, because I was in New York and New Jersey at first at Latham, I did work again at England and Black Rivers,
00:15:41
Speaker
more point of side type urn.
00:15:44
Speaker
who did toxic injury work there. So it was obvious from doing litigation, which was probably about half of my portfolio as a private practice lawyer, and then also doing a lot of infrastructure work. The communities where some of the more heavily pending sites were located was painfully coincident with the communities that had the least. And so that just became, it became a point of interest for me
00:16:13
Speaker
You know, it's sort of hard to do environmental justice in the types of roles that I was in before. But it was something that I studied and had, you know, whenever I had the chance, maybe through the State Bar Association, to put together panels on the issues and invite advocates is something that always stuck with me. Great. And then eventually you transitioned to government work.
00:16:39
Speaker
which I also think is a really interesting transition for folks when you go from private practice into working for the government. So two questions on that. One is what sort of inspired you to make that move from private practice into working for the government? And then once you had made that transition, what are the ways in which your experience of that kind of work was different from or is different from what you experienced in private practice?
Move to Government Work
00:17:09
Speaker
I, in my last role in private practice, I was a partner at Giddens, focused on litigation, environmental litigation, and infrastructure development work. At that time, it was 2018, Robin Murphy had just been elected and was beginning to appoint his cabinet. And I've never been a particularly political person. I had political, oh, I owe a lot for abuse. But I've never been deeply engaged in the work of politics.
00:17:37
Speaker
When the commissioner of the DEPs, like the secretary of the environment, so to speak, for the state was appointed, there was a search for a chief counsel for that agency.
00:17:51
Speaker
And my name was on a short list of environmental lawyers who would be worth talking about. And we met and hit it off. And I went to work for the Department of Environmental Protection, which is one of the largest state agencies. We've got about 3400 in phase scientists, lawyers, regulators, current writers. We even run the state parks.
00:18:16
Speaker
I started as chief counsel and began, you know, kind of running what was a in-house legal trial. And then a great leadership department in general started doing some big affirmative impact litigation, which was very exciting. So can you explain to folks who are listening, who aren't necessarily lawyers, when we talk about impact litigation, and particularly when we talk about affirmative impact litigation, what kinds of cases are those and what's the goal when you do a case like that?
Affirmative Impact Litigation
00:18:46
Speaker
So from the environmental perspective, I consider affirmative impact litigation to be a mechanism for achieving change. It is, in some ways, the lawyering equivalent of government. It is a way to fundamentally change the approach to law that will have
00:19:07
Speaker
are lasting impacts beyond that one individual case. And from the perspective of what we were doing at that time at the EEP in 2018, it was about turning the page. The approach to environmental enforcement was very different.
00:19:26
Speaker
And so the focus of that impact litigation was to bring new life into the environmental enforcement priorities in the state. And there was a number of things that we did in order to do that, including taking on some large corporations that have so thoroughly polluted out of groundwater, surface water, with what we call forever chemicals. These chemicals that never have been created, they bioaccumulate and they never go away.
00:19:54
Speaker
And so, you know, we have some of these chemical alcohol substances that are everywhere. And somebody's got to clean that up. Got it. So there are there are two things that popped into my head as you were just talking. One of them is sort of helping people understand when you bring litigation like that, what's the statute or what are the policies, et cetera, under which you are able
00:20:23
Speaker
to pursue that kind of action. But the second question, and the other thing that I was saying that I really, really love is the level of technical knowledge that lawyers often have to gain in order to be able to do the kind of work that they're doing. And in this area, I mean, just listening to the words that were just coming out of your mouth, this is a place where you definitely have to sort of learn things outside of the law in order to be able to enforce the law. So you can take those in whichever order
00:20:53
Speaker
works for you, but I think both of them are really interesting. Yeah, so I'll go with that. I'll do the latter first. Part of what I love about being a lawyer, even though I'm not functioning as a lawyer right now, is the way that lawyering, and perhaps litigation in particular, depending on the type, is like an unwell legacy.
00:21:14
Speaker
And when you crack that umbrella open, so many things can get collected within the sphere of what you are litigating or counseling on. So for example, if I am bringing impact litigation
00:21:32
Speaker
with respect to forever chemicals, I'm going to need to learn about a lot of different things. I'm going to need to learn about how the chemical bioaccumulates in fish tissue. And I'm going to need to learn about how that chemical circulates through the environment. So you need to learn things about the water cycle and how, what the concept called fate and transport, like how far does it go and where does it go and why and what's the, what is the chemical cycle to which it is apart
00:22:02
Speaker
I love that about you, that you can, in the course of any one engagement, sink your teeth in and become sort of an expert of that particular topic. You can have to learn a lot. If you're going to go into a room and try to pose a hydrogeologist about why a chemical is behaving in a waterway the way it is, you're going to need to learn a lot as a lawyer about what that
00:22:29
Speaker
is all about. It's really an exceptional opportunity when you get to do that kind of stuff. Yeah. So the other question about how you bring that impact litigation and under what statutes you bring them, part of the reason to bring impact litigation is to expand the reach of all of them. And so let's take, for example, an act like the Clean Water Act, for example.
00:22:53
Speaker
There are, there's so much case law out there about what different sections, different provisions of the Clean Water Act will allow. You know, part of the, in terms of compensating for an injury to a waterway or getting somebody to, you know, some company or some person to clean up the mess they can. Impact litigation can really shape the extent of liability. And when it comes to the environment, with how long environmental violence can
00:23:22
Speaker
You want to make sure, at least if you're my in the role that I am now in the state government, that you have the ability to deliver that level of accountability. And so part of the impact mitigation is about those very principles.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah. So we should probably tell people what role you're in now. So folks understand. So we were talking about the litigation that you were doing at the DEP, but now you have moved into a role as the acting commissioner.
Role as Acting Commissioner
00:23:52
Speaker
And so can you talk about what, what that work is that you're doing now?
00:23:56
Speaker
Sure. The state government structure very much like the federal government, where the governor has a cabinet and the cabinet members run agencies. On the federal level, the president appoints a administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
00:24:15
Speaker
On the state level, the governor appoints a commissioner of environmental protection. It's the same thing. The commissioner is both an advisor to the governor, as well as the head of the agency. So in 2018, I first joined the Ph.D. council to the, who was then the commissioner, a story environmental lawyer named Catherine McCabe, who I think is just amazing. And she decided to retire.
00:24:43
Speaker
and she's served in part, she took a life in public service 40 plus years and made a great change herself. When I joined this chief counsel, I then, after a while, I became the chief of staff, which is sort of like the right hand and then became, from an operations perspective, and then became the deputy commissioner, so the second in charge.
00:25:06
Speaker
So when she retired, the governor appointed me to take her place. And so now I am serving, you know, pending formal nomination to the Senate as, as the action for the current environment. And so I, I, one, what do you think? So you get to sort of decide things like, you know, what's the direction that the agency is going to go in? What are we going to prioritize? All of that good stuff.
00:25:31
Speaker
Yes, so my job, primarily, I guess it's two different jobs in a way. The first job is to care for the agency itself, right? It's a bureaucracy of 3,400 people with different specific things that ultimately are in service of protecting public health and the environment.
00:25:51
Speaker
is whether it is ensuring that the drinking water systems that bring water to our homes are actually bringing us clean water, that the folks that make a mess of a property in the spill rail are actually cleaning it up to make sure that we have clean air. We have a whole program that is about monitoring and improving upon the quality of the air in the state. So that's one of the functions.
00:26:17
Speaker
being the chief executive over all of that bureaucracy. The other function is to drive the governor's agenda with respect to environmental protection and the priorities around that. So under Governor Murphy, we had a number of important priorities, climate change being chief among them, the enhanced protection of water being another
00:26:44
Speaker
the care of our water sheds, which are the greater environment in which our streams exist, being another one, and doing that all through the lens of environmental justice. The idea that for us to do environmental justice, it's not another program. It's not like you do environmental justice, like you do control air pollution. It is the spirit that guides all the others. And so I helped to create programs and policies to do those things.
00:27:14
Speaker
Excellent. I do want to talk about climate change and the work that can be done on a state level.
States' Role in Climate Change
00:27:22
Speaker
I don't know when we're going to be broadcasting this, but I think one of the things that lots of us are thinking about right now is the storm in Texas.
00:27:30
Speaker
and the utter failure of the electrical grid in the wake of that storm. And so, you know, I think that there, you know, there are sort of two levels that we have to work on here. One is obviously the federal level, but states also have a really important role to play in dealing with climate change. So, and different states are going to take different positions, right? You're in New Jersey, which puts you in a very different mindset than, say, somebody in Texas or
00:27:57
Speaker
you know, some other parts of the country. So, you know, what do you see as the role that states should be playing in, you know, what is one of the most important issues of our time? So in my perspective, states should do two things. The state should adapt their inherently backward looking legal structures to account for what is a
00:28:25
Speaker
present and future files. So much of environmental law is focused on the lessons of the past and not pointed at the challenges of the future. So turning that ship around is important, and we're working on that here in New Jersey. The other thing that is really important is for states to be aggressive
00:28:48
Speaker
in order to demonstrate the leadership and bring other people along. And thankfully, because of the leadership that we have in New Jersey, both on the part of the government and part of our legislature, which has been proactive in this space, we're going to do both of those things, which I find really exciting. So there are two, three lines on climate policy in New Jersey. So the first is how we reduce this, the next is how we respond. What I mean by that is we have to mitigate the climate emissions
00:29:18
Speaker
or what I often refer to as the emission of climate pollutants, whether that's green, whether that is methane, whether that is carbon dioxide, whether that is something with black carbon, which particularly affects our most disadvantaged communities in a negative way. How are we all working, regulatory and legislatively, to pull down on those emissions, to cap that in some respects. And that is, there are many legal and policy mechanisms for doing that.
00:29:47
Speaker
And then the second piece is how we build resilience. This notion of climate change as a distant risk is fallacy. It is here now. And if we're all arms with ourselves, it's gone to get a lot worse.
00:30:07
Speaker
So one of the things that we did was to put together the first ever at the Department of Environmental Protection, the first ever climate science report that is state-specific, right? So you can read all the stuff in the intervention, learn about climate change, all of it is great, great work. But it can often mean feeling like it's abstract, like how does it apply to me?
00:30:30
Speaker
And so we kind of really brought it home and said, here's what we're going to see in New Jersey. We did all this science about sea level rise, which is one of our greatest risks. And the science that we did and the modeling that we performed with folks at Rutgers and many other institutions says that by 2050, we face a risk of two feet of sea level rise.
00:30:53
Speaker
No matter what we do, no matter how many electric vehicles we put on the road, no matter how many wind turbines we build, the power plants we close, because that's a product of emissions we already put in the atmosphere over, over the course of the industrial revolution, right? We are going to use land use as a result of that. That is a sobering, a hard reality. Between 2050 and 2150, depending on what we do today, how many EVs we put on the road, how many wind turbines we built,
00:31:23
Speaker
we have a chance to avoid the worst scenario, right? So by 2100, our projection under even a moderate scenario, where we are doing more than we are doing, but it's going to take a long time to get there, we'll see five years of scenarios, right? And then by 2050, we can see as much as it's going. Under the worst case scenario,
00:31:48
Speaker
in New Jersey, which we don't think we'll see, but just to put it in perspective, under the worst case scenario, our new shoreline's I-95. I don't know about you, but I like my beach to be as very partner and splendid. Wow. Right, and that's what we've got to do. How do you get ready for that? How do you help people to be up to that level? Right. So that's one of our biggest challenges, and there is so much we can do, right? Starting by making sure that what we build today
00:32:18
Speaker
and stand the test of tomorrow. We should at least be building things today that are ready for that community that will rise, and hopefully for the five people, right? We should be elevating things more on the shoreline, so we are going through it at my agency, a regulatory modernization effort, where we're going through every regulation and bringing it into the future, and accounting for the fact of time. And it's very controversial, right?
00:32:42
Speaker
folks in the community of home builders or in other places, they don't want to see this happen. It's a change to the status quo, and that's harder. But what's harder is someone losing their home. And while maybe the folks that are building things today are less concerned about that because they're going to build it and sell it, it's actually my whole job to care about that person's behaviors.
00:33:08
Speaker
One of the things that is so challenging with this kind of work is the number of people who continue to deny that climate change is a thing, or who continue to deny that even if there is something going on, they deny that it's a result of the kinds of things that we are doing to the planet and on the planet. And this is really an impossible question, and I recognize that as I'm asking it, but I'm still going to ask it.
00:33:36
Speaker
How do we get people on board with the kinds of things, as you say, that need to happen now so we can avoid the disaster 20 years from now, 50 years from now, when frankly, a lot of the folks who are climate deniers are thinking, I'm not going to be here, right? So why are you making this my problem? Yeah. How do you deal with the nihilism with honesty?
00:34:03
Speaker
You are honest with as many people as you can, and you work on to learn the law. I had the honor of last week of being invited to a special committee on climate in the state assembly. And the first question I was asked was, what does DEP learn about climate change in the last 10 years? I'm like, here I am for you. There's a report on that. But let me tell you what you're doing. Let me tell you some of the things that we're doing. And then some climate scientists spoke.
00:34:29
Speaker
And then a representative from a trade organization, a business organization, spoke at the end about why what I was proposing was so preposterous. And the conversation was thick with denialism.
00:34:46
Speaker
It's a lesson for me and you've got to meet people where they are. So to my counterparts in business and industry who might say, Sean, are you crazy? You're going to suggest that new development on the barrier islands should be built five feet above the ground level. The first floor should be five feet above. Well, no, I'm not crazy.
00:35:10
Speaker
And let me tell you why, if you do it this way, you have a value proposition to offer your customer, to offer your constituent, because let's say I'm wrong. Let's see. Let's say it's all wrong and we're not going to see five feet of CEO. You know what will be crazy. So I mean, that's, that's the conversation that I try to have about it. And.
00:35:38
Speaker
As keen as this pandemic has been, I think it has offered us an important perspective, which is that preparation matters. Being ready for the unthinkable thing, the thing that seems distant and far off and unlikely,
00:35:58
Speaker
It matters. And that is a function of government. That's why government exists to help lift up people when they have the trouble lifting up themselves into something like this, except that it's going to be way, way worse. And it doesn't have to be.
00:36:15
Speaker
With respect to the pandemic, you hear so many folks say it didn't have to be this way. We've got to learn from it. We've got to learn from it. And if we over-prepare by elevating a few commercial structures, then we over-prepare. It's not going to kill the economy, right? Just the green energy isn't going to kill the economy. It is not the Green New Deal's fault that Texas decided to deregulate and to not invest in icing their equipment.
00:36:42
Speaker
They didn't do that because they're Texas and they thought they'd always be born, but you want to know what happened? Point change. So we all have these lessons to learn. But I think the biggest lesson for me is just try to meet people where they are. That's what we do with the environmental justice law. We're now the only state in the country to have a meaningful environmental justice law.
00:37:02
Speaker
Can you talk to me a little bit about that law?
New Jersey's Environmental Justice Law
00:37:05
Speaker
And again, one of the things that I have found, I'm not a native of New Jersey. I moved here a few years actually after I came to Rutgers. I started in Philadelphia and eventually moved into
00:37:16
Speaker
into New Jersey, but one of the things that I am really enjoying about New Jersey right now is that this is a state that can really, that is often at the vanguard, right? I mean, we are creating policies that are policies that other states will and should follow on a variety of different fronts, criminal justice, reproductive justice, and environmental justice. So can you sort of talk about what that law is and what it helps us achieve? Yeah, I'm happy to because it is a passion
00:37:47
Speaker
One of the questions I get asked sometimes, and I'm kind of where the defense bar is present, is, is New Jersey a leader, or is New Jersey an outlaw? Let's make no mistake, New Jersey's a leader, and always has been. There's been times where we've lost touch with that. This is not one of those times.
00:38:05
Speaker
We've been fortunate to know that the federal law, the circular, was super funny. That entire thing, the law on the federal level that has led to the cleanup of hazardous waste sites throughout the country,
00:38:20
Speaker
is based on a New Jersey law from 1977. That is who we need to be. And that's what this individual is about too. We know, there's no mistake about it, the things that folks may not like to have in their backyards.
00:38:36
Speaker
whether it is a sewage treatment plant or a power plant or a recycling facility, they end up somewhere else. Where do they end up? They end up among the communities where folks are either so overtaxed by the structure of our society that are working multiple jobs that don't have the power or the knowledge, which is also a structural issue,
00:39:06
Speaker
to fight back, right? And so what happens is some of our low income and black and brown communities in particular, become the path of least resistance for the location of the most highly polluting facilities. Now someone say, and there's truth to it, that those same locations are also the main thoroughfares, the main arteries of our transportation system.
00:39:35
Speaker
And from an economic standpoint, you need to be near a transportation hub to achieve certain things. Both things can be true at the same time, right? But the reason we see a higher proportion of leading facilities in the environmental justice communities is part of the, it's part of a larger problem. But what it shows us is that
00:40:00
Speaker
We're not looking closely enough at the lived experience of these individual communities. And the reason we don't do that is because the law is not set up to do that, right? The way environmental law works, great, tangent, the way environmental law works is that we regularly, the agencies like mine, regulate the right to believe, right?
00:40:24
Speaker
In order to live in a modern society, there is pollution. That is a fact. So environmental laws will exist to limit the amount of pollution. And what we looked at as regulators and agencies like mine is whether every new facility, whatever it is, that is adding pollution is using the best technology to control that pollution.
00:40:49
Speaker
The only thing we ask, we don't ask about where it's going or who lives there or how many other police facilities they have. And so there becomes this concept of what's called cumulative impacts. The idea that one sewage plant is one thing, but five of them in one community to the other. But we never look at the whole thing. We look at it issue by issue. To look at it in these little silos,
00:41:18
Speaker
That is the status quo. What we've done in this law is say no. We are going to look at the community, and we're going to look at the environmental and public health stressors that exist in this community, and we're going to ask ourselves the question of whether this facility will add more. We'll work a disproportionate amount of pollution on this community versus other communities.
00:41:45
Speaker
It's about fundamental fairness. We had a subset of the population in this state across the country, across the world, that there's a disproportionate burden of the pollution that we all together create. And it's about fairness. And so that's what we're doing with this law, and it empowers the environmental agency to say no to a permit that would work in disproportionate impact.
00:42:14
Speaker
And that was never before allowed. Folks try to achieve the same thing in the 90s using the Civil Rights Act, for example, and other mechanisms. And it failed major-leading courts. It needed legislative power. So when I first came to GDP, we had a senator, Senator Troy Singleton, who took up the cause of this environmental justice bill that was originally spearheaded by someone else. The first meeting that I took in 2018, I came to the agencies with the senator.
00:42:41
Speaker
about this bill, and it wasn't right. Like, he feared what he wanted to do right, but the bill itself wouldn't have done the thing it needed to do. So for two years, we worked together with his staff, with experts, with advocates, with folks in burdened communities, and in the corner of the building, we were ready to go. And as COVID hit, and the C just laid bare these systemic inequities that while
00:43:09
Speaker
that the communities that are facing a disproportionate burden of COVID are the same communities that have worsening medical pollution. And that's not causal. It's correlational, but it's structural nonetheless. And so when that was just laid in front of the public, it gave this bill an opportunity to
00:43:33
Speaker
and it became law, and now we are doing what regulatory agencies do, making rules to implement laws. It sounds rather unsexy, but it's really, really uneven. Right. But that's how the work gets done, right? It's not all sexy. It really isn't. Yeah, yeah. And in particular, when you talk about legislation and policymaking, watching how that sausage gets made is not something that most of us would particularly enjoy.
00:44:01
Speaker
But that's the work that has to happen in order for us to get to the outcomes that we want. Well, let me shift gears a little bit in the time that we have left.
Balancing Professional and Family Life
00:44:10
Speaker
You and I are both in our homes and we both have kids. And so one of the things that I think women in law often get asked about is, how do you balance work and children?
00:44:24
Speaker
And men frequently don't get asked that question, but I think it's certainly a question worth asking. So I don't know exactly how old your kids are, but I think that you had kids when you were still in big law and then transitioned to working for the government. So I will never ask anybody how they meet that perfect equilibrium between home and the office because there is no such thing. And there certainly isn't any such thing in the world where most of us, our homes have become our offices.
00:44:54
Speaker
I would just really love to hear your thoughts about how, frankly, how we as a profession really have done in terms of making this a profession that is caregiver-friendly, whether it's kids or aging parents, and what we could be doing better or should be doing better. We don't do a good job. Societally, we don't do a good job, whether it's a legal profession or any other profession. So I have 10-year-old trainers, and I have them minorities. I live in Milwaukee.
00:45:24
Speaker
it was very clear to me that I was not going to be able to sustain that level of performance and be the kind of present parent that I wanted to be. And so, you know, that was part of what motivated me to move on to another environment. And that's not a reflection on latent inductees. They have great programs to be supported
00:45:49
Speaker
of working families, many, many law firms do. So the problem isn't the law firm, the problem is us. But the problem is stepping back and seeing ourselves and our colleagues as whole people that have lives that exist beyond the work product. And that when we support one another in serving those lives, we also serve the world.
00:46:17
Speaker
And I think that's a hard thing, particularly in a very white, very male-dominated profession, where it's very binary, it's very type A, it's very gendered. And I mean, I can remember in my time at my last law firm before going into government, I was
00:46:40
Speaker
on partner car, right? And I had one day I'm getting ready at five o'clock to run for my train so I can get to the parking lot, to get into the car, to pick up the kids from daycare before the six o'clock mark in order to avoid being charged an extra dollar per minute per child. And I'm leaving out the door and the whole associate sees me packing outside and says to me, half day?
00:47:11
Speaker
Wow. Wow. And I just chuckled. Yeah. But that's the culture. Yeah. Right. The culture is the problematic culture is one where we derive our value from our not even actual productivity, our perceived productivity. Right. And
00:47:33
Speaker
This individual had no idea what I was working on. I had no idea that I'd be on calls with clients and on the train and writing a book when I got home. No clue, right? But it's so indicative of the culture that we all need to work together and change. We need to support working fathers the same way we support, or it is purport to support working mothers, which that alone has been hard for. We can do better than this. But why is this to do better?
00:47:59
Speaker
is for people at the top to see them, to see their role, and to want to change it. And not just to want to change it because it's great for talent acquisition, or it sounds good in a glossy trifold that would get out on OCI recruiting day, but because you actually need it. So that's my perspective. Yeah, yeah. And there are so many things that are potentially going to be different as we come out
Post-pandemic Workplace Changes
00:48:27
Speaker
of this.
00:48:27
Speaker
pandemic and one of the things that we have the potential to do is really rethink a lot about the structure of our workplaces and creating more flexibility for people. As you say, respecting the fact that we want folks to have whole lives and we want them to be actually productive, not just performing productivity because seeing you sitting in an office somehow says you're doing really important things when you could be
00:48:55
Speaker
watching YouTube videos and all sorts of other things that people do when they're sitting behind their computer at their job. Well, fingers crossed we're getting closer to that. We'll see what the next several years bring. And fingers crossed we're getting closer to a place where we're really going to be responsive to climate change in the way that we should be. One of the things that I certainly think about and I think a lot of people who are parents think about is
00:49:22
Speaker
I'm not going to be here X number of years from now, but I sure hope my kids and my grandkids are, and that we are leaving them a world in which they can actually live. And hopefully that's something that everybody can get behind. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. This was a really wonderful conversation. The work that you're doing is
00:49:41
Speaker
so necessary and so vital. And I'm grateful to you for doing that work. And hopefully some of our Rutgers students will end up following in your footsteps in the years to come. So we'll keep a dynasty at the DEP. That would be fantastic. And thank you again for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you a bit. And I hope you have more opportunities to get to know one another sometimes together.
00:50:09
Speaker
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