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ARTICLE · 19 APRIL 2022

Earth Week Series: Imagine A Day Without Environmental Lawyers

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On this 52nd anniversary of Earth Day, I am not writing yet another, typically not very funny, riff on one of Shakespeare's most famous lines.

United StatesEnvironment
Gabrielle Sigel
Gabrielle Sigel

On this 52nd anniversary of Earth Day, I am not writing yet another, typically not very funny, riff on one of Shakespeare's most famous lines.1 Instead, I am inspired by one of the most popular of our blogs, written in 2017 by our talented former partner, E. Lynn Grayson, "Imagine a Day Without Water." To start our Earth Week series of daily blogs by our firm's EHS department, I offer words of hope and gratitude for the vast amount of work that has been done to improve and protect the environment - work done by lawyers, scientists, policy makers, and members of the public, to name a few.

Imagine what lawyers and scientists faced in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. There was oppressive soot and polluted air throughout urban and industrial areas in the United States. The Cuyahoga River was so blighted it had caught fire. Although there was a new federal Environmental Protection Agency and two new environmental statutes - the National Environmental Policy Act

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