L:  I feel like I tell people all the time that I couldn’t have written a better script for my professional life if I had sat down and tried to write it, and I feel like some of it was being in the right place at the right time. I also think that you make choices along the way, and things get to you because of the choices that you make.

The two, I think I talked about the law professors who started my organization.  I was working in the law office, and we were bringing, as a litigation assistant, and we were bring a law suit to stop commercial cougar hunting in Oregon, which was a horrible barbaric practice of,  you know they put radio collars on dogs, and then the hunters sit in the back of the pick up truck and drink beer or whatever while the dogs go chase down the cougar.  And then, when the cougars are treed the dogs lift their heads up to watch the cougar, and the radio collar goes off, and the hunters just come and shoot the cougar at 10 fee, 15 feet, really close range, it’s just horrible.  So we were bringing a law suit to stop that practice, to make that illegal.  And I got to know these two law professors who were involved in that case.  And so they got to see that I was organized and smart, and committed and all that stuff, so that when they, and that I knew something about nonprofit management because the lawyer I was working for was also helping groups get up and started, [unclear] one two three charitable organizations and, but mostly they saw that I was 22, 23 years old, and was smart and was going to work hard.  So they gave me an award at, there’s a public interest environmental law conference that happens here every spring, and they honor people in the community who are committed to the cause.  So they gave me an award at this conference for you know, for being committed basically and working hard, and [unclear] those same law professors started ELAW, the organization that I work with, and they knew that I had some experience with environmental law and some management experience, and was smart, and had some international experience from living in London.  And, just that at that point in my life I was ready to take on whatever anybody handed me.  So, they offered me this job, and at that point they had a half a million dollar grant and a really good idea.  But, no idea about how to do it.  You know, how do you really set up an international network of lawyers to help each other?  So they gave me a lap top and a phone line and an office, and that was you know February of 1991.  So now, this organization is more than 300 lawyers in 60 countries.  So it was clearly a gift that I happened to be there and have the respect and trust of these lawyers. 

As I said it’s a gift.  It’s just been amazing, and these people that I work with are heroes you know in their home countries, and face horrible circumstances, and some of them get thrown in jail for bringing law suits on unpopular causes, and you know just operating at such great personal risk, that you know, all along the way you don’t have much time to think about whether, "Do I have the energy to do this right now?" because what they’re facing is so much more serious than what I’m facing that you just move forward.  And they become like, they have become like, a family. So, it’s been, it’s been… great, and wonderful, and the fact that I get to work with these people everyday is just amazing.  And at the time it didn’t really occur to me to be intimidated by the prospect.  It was just what was in front of me and it was such an amazing opportunity that I just went all out.  And of course I was single and childless, so just poured everything into work, and, and it was a good idea these professors had, so it was um, bound to be successful in some ways. 

  It’s good stuff and I’m grateful all the time that I get to do it. Because, sometimes you know in this world right now with this president we have and our, in my opinion, backsliding horribly, it can feel pretty hopeless.  And, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been sitting in my office thinking, "Thank God I got to do this," because no matter where we end up I’m doing the best that I feel like I can for the planet. And 20 years ago it was a good idea, but because of communication technology it was just a whole different ballgame.

 I consider myself an organizer and an activist.  In the beginning, when we first started doing this work a lot of what I did was look for people who would fit our perception of a public interest environmental lawyer and then help them get connected to email for example so that they could communicate with the rest of the world.  That was the building the network part.  And in 1991 there were a lot of places in the world that didn’t have access to email. 

 I was hired in 1991. Now we have 10 staff people and my job is sort of fit between the administration part of things and the program part of things.  The administration part of things:   I manage the money, I write the budget, I sign the checks, I oversee our finances, I deal with the board of directors, I help raise money but that’s not my primary job.  I do that mostly by writing grants for work in the particular regions that I’m involved in.  I manage staff so I do personnel evaluations and I help, with the executive director I hire and evaluate staff and manage staff and give them feedback and help people prioritize their workloads and that kind of thing.

L:  The other half, the other half is what we call my program part, and I have probably worn about every hat in the department over the years, but right now I’m responsible for Central America.  We call me the Latin America Program coordinator, but the reality is most of my work is in Central America.  And, in the last 3 or 4 years most of my work, even in Central America has been confined to Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.  And, so what I’m doing is helping to build a coalition of activist lawyers who are working to protect a particular regional ecosystem, and that is the MesoAmerican Reef and the watersheds that flow from the continent to the reef, that affect the reef.  So I do that by developing multinational projects that support the work that the partners on the ground identify to be their highest priority work.  I’m going to Belize next week to have a meeting of what I call a MesoAmerican legal strategy group.  And this is lawyers from those four countries who are working on conservation strategies using law to protect the reef and also the watershed.  And the way we do that is some of them litigate cases, some of them work on policy reform issues.  They all represent communities, and people who are otherwise disenfranchised, or wouldn’t be able to get representation otherwise.  Let me give a specific example.  So, as you can imagine, right now, oil development is huge, all around the world.   Everyone is trying to squeeze every last drop out of every rock, tree, anywhere they can find it, so we can drive big cars and suck up most of the planet’s resources.  So here’s a case, a very specific example.  There’s a US oil company that has been granted permission by the Belizian government to explore for oil in this one area in Belize.   There’s been no environmental impact assessment done of the possible impact of exploring for oil in this otherwise untouched tropical ecosystem.  The area is managed by five different indigenous groups, and it’s a national park. So there are a whole bunch of things that are illegal about this plan.  But the government of Belize is so eager to attract foreign investment that they’ve just given this permission, violating their own laws to the US oil company.  So, the local lawyer decides to file a law suit to try to force them to at least do an environmental impact assessment.  So what we do is help that lawyer find the right expert, the right scientific expert, to write an affidavit to say that it’s a bad idea to look for oil in this place, because it is going to destroy the forest, and it’s going to ruin the local people’s livelihood.  So we help her get a scientific expert.  Our lawyers on staff help her analyze the provisions of Belizian law that would apply to this case, and help her formulate her legal argument.  There has, up until this point, there has only been one other case ever filed in Belize on an environmental matter, so it’s a whole new area of law.  So the lawyers help her formulate her legal argument.  Then I helped her develop a community organizing strategy because the community is these five indigenous groups who co-manage the park. And the oil company, of course, has gone down there and done a big propaganda campaign to tell the community that with oil comes prosperity.  Everybody’s going to have jobs, and it’s going to be… you know, it’s good for everybody.  When the reality is, the US company’s going to get rich, destroy, extract the oil, destroy the forest and then leave.  And, so, but they’ve been bought out.  Some of the community leaders have been effectively bought out by this oil company so, we go with the local lawyer and do community legal education workshops where we first tell people what the laws are that pertain to this particular thing, what has happened in other countries where oil has been developed in similar ecosystems and what has happened in those communities um, and then what their public participation rights are, how they can get involved in the decision.  So, in the beginning of this case the community was against the law suit because they thought you’re trying to take away our jobs, but in the end the community signed on as plaintiffs in the law suit and realized that this was the wrong thing and at the very least they needed to be afforded the right to negotiate with the company about some of the benefits.  If they are going to come in and exploit the oil that the community needs to get some of the benefits of that.  So that’s kind of a, a uh, and we helped develop a media strategy… so that’s kind of the whole ELAW treatment, you know, how we support the local lawyer. So the local lawyer’s the one who decides what’s best in his or her country at any given time, and our job is to build them up and help them get the resources they need to do their job.   Next week for example I’m going to Belize because in part, I’ve now helped that local lawyer raise money to hire a full time staff attorney to do this work all the time.  Because that lawyer was a volunteer lawyer, who was primarily a human rights lawyer, had never brought an environmental case, and has a very busy other practice.  So she said, you know what really need, because, you know, even if we chase them out of this part of Belize, they’re coming back.  At this point in time every square inch of Belizian territory has been given to some oil company to look for it, so Belize has granted oil rights for the entire country.  It’s insane.  So the local lawyer says, we got to have somebody on this, not just on oil development but on everything, all the time.  And so, um, next week I’m going to be helping that local lawyer, at her request, interview people for a new full time position.  So I helped her raise the money to hire somebody and now she’s asked if I’ll  come down and help her interview, so that’s one of the things that we’re doing.  And then the other thing is the MesoAmerican Strategy Group, meaning the lawyers from the other countries also, are meeting, and we are talking about marine coastal zone management and planning, how it’s done around the world, how it could be improved in each of these four countries, and what we can do as a group over the next year to take the next step in getting the marine coastal zone protected.  For example in Mexico, they have limits on hotel room density so when these giant 5-star resorts go in and want to build, the way that  they’re regulated is they have different hoops they have to jump through depending on the size of the development.  So, we’re looking as a strategy group at implementing similar restrictions in the other three countries, so that’s another thing that we’re doing.

 We do coastal zone management.  So I’m taking with me you know models from the US.  I’ve just recruited a law professor from the University of Florida who happens to also be an oceanographer and has developed coastal zone management plans for the country of Panama so he’s going to help us through this.  So, basically whatever the local partners perceive to be their highest priorities.

Most of America really doesn’t want to think about it (environmental issues)right now.   But this country is the problem. I mean in other places people get it, because there aren’t any fish out there, and there’s no water, and it’s dirty and polluted, and people are sick.  And, and they, you know there governments are corrupt, so… You know in MesoAmerica we’re working with people who have worked in industry but who are trying to create an eco-tourism industry in the alternative.  There’s one group that I worked with in Belize where the guy who founded the group was a commercial fishing guide I think, and now he runs an NGO and takes, has developed tourism around sport fishing, and it’s catch and release, and so, you know, in other places I think it’s more in your face in some ways.  In this country it’s really hard, because we’re so disconnected from where our food comes from, from where our water comes from.  I mean I think starting with kids, I love the way my kid’s school is teaching them for example, geography is they’re learning their water shed and where their drinking water comes from.  And, so I mean that’s an important thing, integrating it from the beginning. Um, finding ways to make it relevant to their lives, you know why does it matter to me?  Well, because the future looks different if you care so bringing it home is the thing, you know, making people understand why it matters in their lives or the lives of their children. 

In the region that I’m working now, in the MesoAmerican reef region, there’s a lot of drug trafficking, so cocaine and other drugs from Columbia come up the Caribbean side sometimes and pass by that gulf of Honduras so there’s a very powerful drug mafia that really doesn’t want any government intervention in that area.  It’s the wild, wild West there, even though it’s the east coast of Central America (laughs).  But they really don’t want any government oversight of any activities in that region.  Partly there’s some growing happening there, but it’s mostly they just don’t want law enforcement in the area.  And so what we’re trying to do is promote better enforcement of environmental laws and that means more oversight.  In Guatemala there were two public prosecutors, lawyers who were posted in that state, in eastern Guatemala, and their job was to bring enforcement actions against people who were breaking environmental laws, and within four months they were both murdered.  So those were people who work for the government, and the government ostensibly affords you some security.  So the people who are in the NGO community have even less security.  I just last week in Belize I was meeting with that regional strategy group, and my partner from Honduras came, and the first thing she handed me was an article about another environmentalist assassinated.  In those cases it’s fear of people killing you, people threatening your family, and sometimes it’s personal risk, sometimes it’s professional risk.  And we just try to keep track of people.  And try to bring them some safety by affiliation.  But we have really strict protocols about what we do because sometimes it can endanger them further when an international organization comes in and intervenes on their behalf.  But, we have protocols about… we never do anything without asking the partner or their contact people about what they want us to do.  So that’s an example of the risks that they take, putting themselves on the line politically, personally, professionally, and putting themselves in danger. 

L:  One thing that I think is important, and is increasingly important, is this idea of community legal education.  In the beginning of ELAW what we did was support lawyers who were bringing lawsuits to court.  Now we still do that, but we help a lot more broadly, in part because the partners have asked us to.  So we’ve had to evolve and change the services we provide to meet the evolving needs of our partners.  And, and I, the community legal education piece, the reason I think it’s important, and it’s and I’m coming to realize that it’s been a thread throughout my professional career.  When, when I worked before ELAW with lawyers one of the things that I did, and one of the things that was important to me, was making sure that the communities who were affected by the decision were involved in the decision that was being made.  And now, it seems so important to me, in this world, where increasingly multinational corporations are making decisions about people’s lives that people have to understand the law, and they have to understand that the law belongs to them and not to the multinational corporations (laughs) and they have to feel empowered to do something about their lives.  Um… I mean, It’s a problem in this country, but it’s a problem everywhere. The people that are most affected by pollution and degradation of natural resources are the people that have, in some cases, the least access to participation and decisions about those natural resources.  So in the region that I’m working in, fisheries along that coast line support people.  I mean they completely support the economies of those countries.  And if we give Belize away to oil companies, and they destroy the forest, and there’s sedimentation landing on the reef that is killing the reef that feeds the fish, people need to know that that is going to happen.  And they need to know that they can do something about it.  Because for me, even, you know you win, if you win a victory in court and you set aside a wilderness area that if you haven’t involved community in that process, you haven’t really won. 

  I feel increasingly like educating people about the law, encouraging them to participate in legal systems, is going to be the thing that has potential to change the world.  I did a workshop, I tell this story all the time, so I might have told you already.  We did a workshop in Honduras, on the north coast of Honduras, on an island called Rowatan, where we first published a guide to public participation in environmental decision making with a local lawyer in Honduras.  And we did a workshop with this community to you know present the guide and help them get involved.  And the community members walked us around and showed us the problems they perceived, like, there was a big resort being developed in one area and people didn’t want it there, and it was hurting the coast line, and they were drudging sand, and it was hurting the reef.  And, um, and then we talked to them about, ok , well that’s happening.  Here’s the provision that allows you to speak up and participate in this decision.  And at the end of that workshop these two women who were probably in their early 70’s and they were Garifuna.   They’re mostly African descent of people who were brought over centuries ago to be slaves in British Honduras but were then freed and they became kind of like the indigenous population of that coast line, so they’ve been there longer than anybody else with the possible exception of the ancient Mayan civilization.  And these two older Garifuna women stood up and said, you know, "nobody’s ever asked my opinion about how my island develops, and here you are telling me, that not only do you want to hear my opinion but you’re going to help me make the outcome different."  And she said, "I from this day forward you know I’m forming a vigilant, a committee of vigilance to try and engage people in this community in deciding how this island develops."  And so those moments to me are way bigger than the judge handing down a decision. See what I mean?  Because I can walk away from that community and feel like that woman is on it!  (laughing) and, and it’ s her island, it’s not my island.   That’s why over the last several years I have felt like one of the most effective things that we do is this community legal education. 

 Right now I have an intern who’s working on the community legal education program with me, who is an international studies student and is interested in cross-cultural communications and how people train people, what kinds of materials they use because a lot of the--- a lot of that work, you know if you want fishing, illiterate fishing communities to stay in compliance with laws about what fish you can take when, you have to teach them what the rules are first, and if they can’t read then you have to make visual materials, and so some of our partners are doing that, are like translating the fishery laws of Guatemala into both written indigenous languages and into pictures and designs, and so this intern is helping me compile and categorize all of the community legal education information from all of our partners, all the different things that  they do, and it’s a huge mass of stuff right now, so her job is going to be, with my supervision to figure how to categorize it, how to distinguish the different kinds of things people do.

L:  I grew up in a fairly progressive Presbyterian family, but kind of threw out the baby with the bath water on religion when I was in my teens, because the definitions I was being handed about religion and about God, I didn’t agree with.  I remember vividly a moment where someone suggested to me that people in other places who had never heard of Christianity were still going to go to hell or something horrible because they hadn’t accepted Christ into their life.  And of course most Christians don’t believe that but at the time that was what I heard and I thought, I have no use for this at all.  And, later… and so I just, I blew off the whole thing, didn’t do any religion at all…

 I took a class called um, parents as resident theologians and spiritual guides at the Unitarian Church because I wanted to be thoughtful about what my kids received.

This is how we got introduced to the Unitarian Church actually is that we took this class.  It was full of people like me who had thrown out the baby with the bath water and decided in a somewhat hostile way in some cases, and in my case some of the time, I have no use for this religion, it’s garbage, I don’t believe the tenants, and it’s done more bad for the world than good. And there were you know, mostly Christian, but different branches of Christian people in this class, who had started to have a yearning for a spiritual life and were trying to put one together for themselves outside of organized religion.  And it was, the class was great because it was an exercise in thinking back about the religion of your youth and figuring out if there were things you wanted to keep from it, and then looking at how you perceive your spirituality in the present and whether there was any overlap between those two things.  Had you unwittingly brought some things forth in other words, and what do you want to impart to your kids, that was the whole. It was wonderful, it was just a facilitated fun class.  And the thing that I remembered, the word that I most associated that I wanted to keep from the Presbyterian upbringing was service.  Because the church that I was raised in focused a lot on service work, and so that opened a door to me.  You know, getting acquainted with the Unitarians.

 It’s very wide open.  There isn’t any religious dogma associated with Unitarian Universalism. It’s, there are principles that they practice, but they’re not about belief systems, they’re more about, so within our church there are 500 different with 500 different ideas about what God is.  Some of them don’t believe in God, some of them are Buddhists, some of them are Christians, some of them are Atheists, some of them--- but they’re all, they all seek a spiritual life and want to share a path with community, with other people.  So that to me, was a little bit of a microcosm for how I feel the world needs to be a little bit more.  Because religion is so divisive in our world now.  I just started to feel, this was maybe you know, ten years ago, that as activists we need to bring people of different faiths together because if we’re going to change the world, it’s going to take all of us.  So for those two reasons, one because it’s a divisive thing instead of a uniting thing right now, but, but also we have to transcend differences and if we can do it there, we can do it anywhere. 

 Once in a bar in Mexico, (laughs) with, you know I work with a lot of people in Latin America and the Catholic Church is dominant in Latin America and is vastly more progressive than the Catholic Church here and in Europe.  Liberation theology is from Latin America and there are just a lot of progressive Catholics who take a very expansive view of Catholicism.  And, so I was in a bar in Mexico with some people that I work with and we got to talking about, imagine what we could do if we could get the Catholic Church in Latin America to get involved in caring about environmentalism and saving the planet, so we challenged each other to go off and do some work to rally some people of faith to get involved in the cause, and as I explained to you earlier what I did, was just last year I came back and organized a big reading of an author, but deliberately did it, he’s a political author, but deliberately did it in such a way that it brought five different communities of faith together to talk about the challenges that we face collectively.  And so I’m just looking for ways to infuse that in the day to day work, and in that way introduced whole new communities of people to ELAW’s work.  And um, and I just, it’s like what I was saying earlier about, if I’m just going to work, work, work and not be present then what’s the point; it’s the same thing.  If I’m not going to do it on a spiritual path and, you know a way that’s honoring and respectful of that part of all of us, then I’m missing some of the point.  You know, that’s a midlife thing.  That’ll happen to you in 20 years maybe.  (laughs) I started to read a lot of things about midlife when I hit 40 and it’s a common thread with people that they start to seek a spiritual path.  A lot of people get born again at that point, a lot of people are um, doing… you know whatever, get involved with their own spiritual practices.  I also practice Yoga, so Yoga’s union and cohesion and balance, and so, it’s all part of the same thing.  But I, I don’t think—I came upon Yoga because of my life and that that’s a spiritual practice too.  But activism is a spiritual practice too.  I mean what’s the point, I’m never going to make a lot of money.  It’s, it’s right livelihood.  I don’t know if you use those words now, but right livelihood is the idea that you, um, you try to do work you feel good about and honorable about, and that isn’t about making money, it’s more about other things.

L:  Well right now we have a partner in Ethiopia who is in prison and has been for two years and is facing the death penalty.  Because he, Ethiopia as you probably know has complicated politics and a few years ago they had what was supposed to be a democratic election, a presidential election, but there was a lot of corruption and some NGO’s were monitoring the elections, and the Ethiopian government in an attempt to not allow their local people to monitor the elections passed a law saying that no domestic organization was allowed to monitor the elections, only international monitors could.  And this organization challenged that law, filed a law suit challenging the constitutionality of that law, and won.  And gained the right to monitor the elections.  Did that, and then following the elections there was a lot of unrest and upheaval and demonstrations and protests because they weren’t held democratically and a hundred and some people were arrested in connection with those demonstrations, not at the time but later (in unison)  were arrested and they were imprisoned.  And Netsanet is our partner’s name, was not one of the people who organized the demonstrations, but because he had been involved earlier in the lawsuit about election monitoring he was arrested with a lot of other opposition people and the charges against him are affectively sedition although it’s not called sedition against his government and he’s been held now almost two years and um, the penalty in Ethiopia for sedition, for this act, is the death penalty.  And so, he did nothing violent, he did nothing wrong, he didn’t even do the things they’re angry about and he’s in jail, but just because he’s trying to uphold democratic ideals.

L: I think I told you the story of the woman in Malaysia, did I?  At the beginning of  ELAW story?  So that woman was held in prison for 43 days in solitary confinement with no charges against her because the government of Malaysia didn’t want her to chase Mitsubishi out of the country.  They wanted foreign investors, and, so they perceive her to be a threat.  And came to her house, took her away, put her in jail.  And, so sometimes the people that threaten our partners are their governments.

 It takes a certain a kind of person too.  I’m thinking of an Indian friend.  This is kind of a melding of the last couple of question you’ve been asking me.  I have a very dear friend in India who is an amazing leader.  He won a Goldman Environmental Prize, he’s brought law suits in the supreme court of India that for example shut down all development on the coastline within 500 meters of the high tide line, in one fell swoop kind of thing, he’s just so powerful his, and he’s, and just audacious, he’s just decided this is how it should be, and he’s persuaded the court that this is the way the law is and you just have to acknowledge that and at one point he was so compelling they set one day aside a week to hear his cases because he was so changing the way the court had seen the law to that point, that they viewed him as that important.  But, so on the one hand he’s this intense powerful litigator, on the other hand, he said to me, “Lori, you study 25 years, you work 25 years, and you reflect 25 years.” (pounding fist on table) “This is what you have to do.”  And I’m thinking how do I reconcile this because people like him make you want to go out and work work work work, but at the same time he’s telling me, and what he’s doing now, in his, because he’s just past 50, is he’s mentoring young lawyers in South Asia and he’s built an Ashram, what he’s calling an Eco-Ashram, so he’s building a sustainable Ashram with solar and all kinds of stuff, and, and training people to pick up the baton and people are begging him to keep working, but he says, you know, what would be the point, this is what I’m supposed to do.

 In the US you get to the point where you have a certain expectation of feminism, like there’s  a 101 level that we’ve covered here, right?  And you don’t have people make remarks to you about certain things, and you, you know, I think anyway, you just take some things for granted and I don’t take those things for granted in other places.  And in fact I was just telling Meche, my Peruvian dear housemate that there’s this one man I work with in X, who every time I see him, he’s in his 60’s, and I’ve seen him a million times we’ve worked together quite a bit, but every time I see him you know I say, “you remember me Mr.X I’m Lori” and he always says, “oh the beautiful Lori” and starts to make comments about my appearance.  Okay, and I would never tolerate that here.  I would say, you know, “That’s not really appropriate to make that kind of...”  I mean he says things, not just you’re beautiful, but quasi lewd sexual comments, that I would never let somebody get away with here, but I do with him, because it’s his culture.  He’s different than I am.  So that’s a challenge sometimes when you know the hair stands up on the back of your neck when someone makes a comment like that.  And you have to decide what the balance between deference and respect for that person and respect for yourself.  So that’s sometimes delicate.  But, you know I know I have to work with this guy, and I like him, he does good work, I just don’t like this one aspect of how he, you know is kind of a lewd… man. (laughs) So, so that’s sometimes a thing.  But and that, specifically Latin America and Africa sometimes too. 

We have one partner in X who every time he comes to a meeting brings a person who he says is his wife, but it’s been a different person? A number of times.  And there are a few Latin men who have done that, but I think they travel with their affairs, and so do the African men, same thing.  And so, so for American women sometimes that pushes some buttons.  (laughs) but again that’s an example of where, um what we’re doing together is trying to do this environmental work so I’m going to just leave that piece over there and  keep my eye on what, what our shared values are, even though, I mean that’s what it’s all about right?  We all have different values around different things and we find the things we want to do together and move forward, and honor, um other difference and let them go. Even though it bugs us sometimes.