Green Living: Green Living Guides
Environmentalism, Then and Now
| |
|
Kaid Benfield
Director, smart growth program
Year joined NRDC: 1981
Then: "In the last days of the Carter administration, I left private legal practice in Washington to accept my dream job -- an environmental policy position at the Department of Justice. While there, I became acquainted with and impressed by NRDC, and when Reagan took over and a job opened in NRDC's Washington office, I jumped at the chance. In those days, getting a job at NRDC was a bit of an endurance run: I had interviews with 22 separate people and had to make three trips to New York before getting an offer. Once I was finally hired, I took over our work on forestry and agriculture, along with an attorney in the San Francisco office named Trent Orr. We litigated a number of national forest logging cases, many of them in partnership with The Wilderness Society. And we were able to set several important precedents as the National Forest Management Act was being implemented. Later, I became the first director of NRDC's land program."
Now: "In the mid-1990s, I volunteered to work on transportation issues. But I realized that you couldn't really think about transportation without thinking about land use. So I moved our focus away from traditional transportation to a broader thinking about sprawl and smart growth. I love working on this issue because it's kind of like solving a big puzzle. It's spatial and it's visual in some ways. It's as much or more about making friends -- collaborating with communities and developers to help them grow in better ways -- as defeating enemies, and it appeals to my pragmatic side."
Back to introduction | Previous page | Next page
Photo: Top, Robert Rubic
|
last revised
4/17/2003
