EDF's Tom Graff Gave 37 Years of Service; Helped Redefine Environmentalism in the U.S.

Why are you leaving Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)?

I'm moving on to a different phase of my life. It's been a long tenure-over 37 years-and my health hasn't been the best over the last year and a half. It's time to move on to more freedom and a different vantage point.

Talk a little about the vantage point you've had over these 37 years, especially in the area of water and wildlife. What has been the prism through which you've looked at developments in the state and nation?

It's interesting. I recently ran into Felicia Marcus, who used to be EPA Region IX Administrator and is now the regional director of the NRDC, and we commented that we each had our niche in developing California water policy. I would say that my principal niche was to recognize that economics could, and probably should, play a big role in environmental policy-making. Paying attention to how economic incentives influence business and personal behavior is one key to bringing about environmental improvements.

Why have those economic forces-what you call a balanced approach to water policy-been so absent in most of the NGO approaches to the environment to date? Why has that been left to EDF?

I would actually take issue with your assumptions here. Much more than when a few colleagues and I started promoting these ideas in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, many other environmental entities have come to embrace economic incentives. A current example of that is the emergence of "cap and trade" as a prominent approach in addressing climate change and global warming. The Obama Administration, many in Congress, and many other environmental groups, as well as EDF, are in the forefront of promoting a market-based approach to this most intractable of problems.

But, to be fair, as your question indicates, there is still a reluctance, in many quarters, to embrace what some characterize as "paying to pollute" in setting environmental and natural resource policies. Economic incentives are not a panacea and their use can easily be abused. Recent experience in financial markets has not made it easier to promote market incentives in the environmental context, either. We will need support and creative critiques, not just from other environmental groups, but also from the business and environmental justice communities, in order to sustain the momentum that has been generated over these last couple of decades.

Talk a little bit about the state of the Land Water and Wildlife program at EDF, and the legacies that have come out of that program or which you're most proud.

As I am walking out the door, walking in the door is a fellow by the name of Elgie Holstein, who is taking over as VP of the program. Elgie has a long history of public policy involvement in the Clinton Administration and elsewhere. The program is strong: EDF is a very different organization than the one I joined in 1971, which was then really a start-up in business development terms. We have emerged now to be a $70-80 million-a-year organization. I am not sure what the numbers were, but we were probably $1-2 million when I started. I know we were at $3.4 million when Fred Krupp took over in late 1983. We were scrambling; we were kind of making it up as we were going along. Now EDF is much more structured, even corporate.

Are there pluses or minuses to that new corporate approach?

The old approach actually got an awful lot done, especially per dollar spent. But it is hard to argue against growth, structure, and the ability to influence policy at the highest levels. The pluses outweigh the minuses for the organization as a whole.

One of the missing agenda items of the last couple of years has been a water bill and a water bond. Talk a little bit about California water and what EDF would hope to see happening in that area.

There has been considerable progress on California water. For one example, look at the governor's recent emergency drought declaration. Water transfers, pioneered by EDF over a quarter century ago, are now assumed to be a key policy tool to help get us through this year's drought. I call it a drought, at least to date, although as the L.A. Times pointed out recently, it's a lot less serous of a drought than we've already experienced in the last 30 years. In the late ‘70s and the late ‘80s-early ‘90s, conditions were considerably worse.

Having said that, the idea that the solution to our water problems, be they drought-induced or otherwise, should be passage of yet another bond measure is not a sign of progress. One of my regrets as I move to a different vantage point in the fray is that people seem to be focusing too much on bond-generated subsidies to the exclusion of other approaches that are much more important, both for ecosystem health and water supply.

It's generally acknowledged that there's a big set of problems in the San Francisco Bay Delta estuary. These are problems that defy easy solution and that require serious engagement from those in power with the interests in the Delta itself, including environmental interests, and with interests north of the Delta. And yet the principal proposal being put forward by the Schwarzenegger Administration and by interests south of the Delta is a Peripheral Canal. The Delta Vision Task Force, relying in significant measure on work done by PPIC, did a pretty good job, especially relative to other efforts, of raising environmental values and of compensation to adversely affected interests as partial offsets to the canal's authorization and construction. The Task Force, however, did not recognize the legal and, I would argue, the moral primacy of environmental values. That is dangerous. It potentially polarizes the conversation, instead of bringing people to the table in a way that might actually result in a comprehensive solution.

Is the atmosphere today better for such a solution than it was ten or 20 years ago? What is changing?

The main change has been recognition that global warming is likely going to result in higher sea level, which, combined with ongoing threats from earthquakes, will likely put more pressure on the Delta. How one deals with these threats creates the occasion for a more serious look at a canal around the Delta as a forestalling mechanism to Delta levee collapse.

We have Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker, George Miller as a high ranking Congressman, and the Obama Administration. Have the politics at the federal level changed and does that influence what the result may be in California?

I hope so. One of the things about water is that it tends to be determined more by regional rather than partisan factors, although who holds high office obviously is significant. I expect the federal government and Congress to play a constructive role in offsetting some of the southern California and San Joaquin Valley bias that, with few exceptions, has pervaded California water policy for over half a century.

I have a bit of a confession on my part, and I think on EDF's as well. Despite my role in defeating the 1982 referendum, we are open to conversations about a Peripheral Canal. What is most critical this time around is that the environment and, especially, the fish get the preference that they have long been promised but have never actually received. The legal guarantees and associated institutional mechanisms charged with operating the canal must be ironclad. There recently has been a lot of back and forth among some of the old-timers who witnessed water policy being developed as far back as the ‘60s. Many of the issues are the same now as they were then, but the fish are worse off today than they were in 1982.

The problems we saw in the legislation that became subject to public vote in the 1982 referendum were that, in our judgment, there were insufficient assurances for the San Francisco Bay and the Delta built into the Peripheral Canal authorization. Jerry Brown, who was as environmentally oriented Governor as I have experienced, was in office at the time, as was Jimmy Carter in federal office. Carter was gone after the 1980 election, when the legislation had passed but the referendum had not been voted upon.

I have always believed that Jerry Brown and his top water administrators erred in excluding Delta interests and EDF from the group that negotiated the basic terms of the deal to authorize the canal. Ultimately that turned out to be a fatal decision. It resulted in the qualification of the referendum, a previously little-used policy tool at the state level and one neither Brown nor the Legislature accounted for when they loaded up the canal bill with the usual set of expensive and counter-productive earmarks that turned out to be easy targets when it came to a public vote.

What's different today given that you're at the table?

The science is different. We're sort of at the table. The Schwarzenegger Administration's approach has actually not been that different from Brown's. It too has sought to split the environmental community. Now you have The Nature Conservancy endorsing the canal, and an environmentally oriented group of expert scientists and economists at U.C. Davis, working with the PPIC, embracing the canal as well. So there are supporters with real environmental credentials promoting authorization. But, I should point out, as you implied in a prior question, Speaker Pelosi, Congressman Miller, and more broadly the Obama Administration, could cause this strategy some problems. The governor is trending toward lame duck status; the state's fiscal and budget affairs are a God-awful mess; and the proponents of water infrastructure are not all focused on the canal. Some still think subsidized surface storage is what we need most.

What was it about the early 1970s that led to the creation of EDF, the Trust for Public Land, etc.? What was in the water, and is it still in the water 35 years later? Is there something about the time and the opportunity to converge?

One of the concerns that predated the emergence of the environmental movement in approximately 1970 was the largely unchecked degradation of our nation's waters and air. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was a big motivating factor for EDF to get organized. Shortly after I came aboard in 1971 I was called upon to get involved in a couple of cases challenging Corps projects in Arkansas that threatened both rare species and unspoiled habitat. EDF's principal pro bono lawyer in those cases at the time, Richard Arnold, had been called to D.C. as chief of staff to Senator Dale Bumpers. Richard, a brilliant lawyer and advocate, surely would have been President Clinton's first U.S. Supreme Court nominee if his health had not abandoned him.

EDF was formed as a result of three factors. It was a dedicated group of volunteers who incorporated EDF, initially to work on Long Island to stop the spraying of DDT to kill mosquitoes. They then branched out to other habitat problems, like those caused by the Corps, and then more broadly to other water, air, energy and toxic chemical issues. One of my first cases was to try to get lead out of gasoline in California. If memory serves, we beat the U.S. in reaching that objective by several years. The second big reason the professional environmental organizations flourished was that funders emerged, among which the Ford Foundation was originally the most prominent, to help make EDF and others financially able to sustain significant litigation and policy reform campaigns. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the environmental problems were becoming more obvious to the whole body politic. Remember, President Nixon signed several of the most significant environmental bills in American history and Governor Reagan protected California's wild and scenic rivers, all in the early ‘70s.

You're a Harvard Law grad and you went to the London School of Economics. What attracted you to an NGO start-up like EDF at the time?

It was the times. The go-to groups that many among the more idealistic in my generation of young lawyers gravitated toward were clustered around neighborhood legal services. I was in a private law firm in 1971 when I got a letter from the general counsel of the then-fledgling EDF asking if I might know some people who would be interested in opening an office in California. From my point of view at the time, the environment was an excellent place to try to launch a public interest career. Serving the interests of the poor, as many of my friends were doing at legal services, had just not grabbed me as what I wanted to do with my life. On the other hand, I had no idea when I started at EDF in 1971 that I would still be at it in 2009.