Longtime Leading Environmental Lawyer Ed Lloyd Died

Ed Was A Friend, Public Servant, And Leader With Courage And Integrity

Fitting that its a gray cool foggy dank day here on the Salish Sea, as I just learned that longtime friend, colleague and environmental lawyer Ed Lloyd died – for the facts, see David Wildstein’s obituary. [Update – Pinelands Commission statement. [Update: Murphy DEP Commissioner LaTourette issued a statement. [Update – Columbia law school statement.]

Ed was a friend, colleague, and had a long history of leadership and work on virtually every environmental issue, campaign, and battle in NJ for the last 40 years. Ed’s wife, Janine Bauer, was also a lawyer and activist deeply involved in transportation, housing, environmental, and land use issues. My heart goes out to Janine and the family.

Ed left Trenton the same year as I joined NJ DEP, 1985, when I immediately became aware of his kick ass work as Director of the NJ Public Interest Research Group (NJ PIRG). From 1974 to 1985, Ed was executive director and staff attorney of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group. That was when NJPIRG, the Ralph Nader outfit, still had balls and ran hard hitting corporate and government accountability campaigns, like the one that produced the NJ Clean Water Enforcement Act, the strongest clean water law in the Country.

Under Ed’s leadership, PIRG ran hugely successful grassroots issue campaigns as well as traditional litigation, like the one that convinced Gov. Florio to terminate garbage incinerators and transform NJ’s solid waste policy to an emphasis on source reduction, recycling and composting, again the leading policy and program in the nation.

Ed’s work helped produce the NJ Pollution Prevention Act, again the leading national program that pioneered policies of toxics use reduction and the concept of pollution prevention.

When I was forced out of DEP by Gov. Whitman in 1994 for whistleblowing and joined the NJ environmental community, Ed was hugely supportive. Ed became a friend and colleague and I can’t exaggerate how supportive he was to me personally at a very difficult time in my life.

Shortly thereafter, I worked closely with Ed in drafting legal briefs challenging Gov. Whitman’s DEP massive rollbacks of DEP’s clean water regulations, dubbed the “Mega-Rule”. We lost that legal case, but we won the war and stopped that rollback.

Ed’s lawsuit to block the Ciba-Geigy ocean outfall toxic discharge established groundbreaking legal precedent for the “anti degradation” provisions of the Clean Water Act that had systemic and longstanding impacts to NJ DEP’s clean water programs.

The list of Ed’s huge accomplishments is too long to write.

Most importantly, on top of being an excellent lawyer and tireless activist and professional mentor, Ed was a decent human being.

He was committed to public service.

He had integrity and the courage to take controversial public positions and stand by his principles and beliefs. Ed would stick his neck out and take risks.

It’s extremely rare to find so many virtues in one man.

I’ll mention just two more personal examples that illustrate those virtues.

1. During the at times angry debate over a proposed gas pipeline through the NJ Pinelands, Ed opposed the pipeline as a Pinelands Commissioner. That courage brought retribution and disgraceful attacks by Gov. Christie.

But behind the scenes, Ed’s leadership and integrity were even more important to me personally than his public stance in opposition to the pipeline.

Specifically, I publicly testified to the Commission and strongly criticized the regulatory review practices of the Commission’s staff, including the conduct of multiple secret “pre-application” meetings as creating bias and “agency capture”. For that testimony, I was severely criticized personally by the Commission’s Executive Director Nancy Wittenberg in the Commission’s off the record Executive Session.

Someone at the Commission leaked a tape recording of that Executive session discussion to me.

Ed was the only Commissioner who stood up and openly disagreed with ED Wittenberg’s attack and explicitly said that he agreed with what Bill Wolfe said (paraphrase, but close to verbatim quote: “I wish I could have multiple meetings with the Judge before I try a case. The pre-application meetings, at best, create bias and put the public at a disadvantage”.). Thank you Ed, for sticking your neck out and telling the truth!

2. Ed did something very similar, and I’ll close with this example of Ed’s leadership and integrity.

I wrote about it in October 2015:

Climate Change

At the conclusion of the meeting, Pinelands Commissioner Lloyd urged the Commission to step up and play a role in climate change and consider the climate implications of fossil infrastructure like pipelines: (Ed Lloyd said:

I’d like to followup on an issue Mr. Wolfe raised with respect to climate change … I think that there’s nothing more important for us as an agency to do to protect this planet. I agree with Mr. Wolfe. I don’t have a full legal analysis  but I think we have the opportunity and the jurisdiction to do that…. This effort is related to the other discussion we had this morning with respect to pipeline infrastructure. … In my view we shouldn’t be investing in pipelines, we should be investing in renewables.  ~~~~  Commissioner Ed Lloyd (watch at the very end, at time 1:32:30)

Rest in peace Ed, you were a good man who did many good things.

Your irreplaceable work lives on.