John H. Adams Photo by Steffen Thalemann

I sat on a bench in Battery Park in lower Manhattan, eating a liverwurst sandwich. As the Hudson River flowed by, I idly watched lumps of raw sewage float right in front of me. It was outrageous to me that this could be happening in the greatest city in the world. My parents had come here from Ireland in the 1920s in search of a new life, and I had been born here. The city had been good to me; I had worked at a Wall Street law firm and after that had been in the U.S. Attorney's office for four years.

It was 1969, and concern about pollution was building across the country. January had brought the massive Santa Barbara oil spill, just off the coast of California. In June, an oil and garbage slick on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio had caught fire. David Brower, the outspoken head of the Sierra Club, one of the country's oldest and best-known conservation groups, had just left the organization to found Friends of the Earth after years of battling to block dams on the Colorado River. The most talked-about of his Grand Canyon battle ads had asked, "Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?"

But I wasn't thinking about the raw sewage in the Hudson as a "cause." There was no strong professional avenue at that time for someone who wanted to address pollution issues, and what I was looking for was a new direction for my career. I knew I was ready to leave my job. I'd worked with U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau in the Southern District of New York, and after that I'd been special attorney with the Joint Strike Force on Organized Crime and Racketeering. I loved being in court, thinking on my feet, the daily interaction with a multitude of people. However, it was a job most people do for only a few years, and I was ready to move on.

The problem was, where was I going to find work as exciting and alive as being an assistant U.S. attorney? The freedom I felt, and the collegiality I'd found with a group of brilliant, like-minded colleagues, would be hard to duplicate.

Expecting our third child and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, Patricia and I were also looking for an alternative to life in the city. If our young children -- Kate, who was 5, and 2-year-old John Hamilton -- slept by an open window in our apartment, they would wake with soot on their foreheads. Patricia read that a New Yorker breathed as much poison each day as someone who smoked a pack of cigarettes. She said, "It's one thing for me to choose to breathe such air -- but what about our children?"

One day I saw an advertisement on the back of a city bus, just above the diesel exhaust pipe, a picture of beautiful, snowcapped mountains. The caption read, "Take a deep breath -- and then fly Swiss Air to the Alps." We knew the Swiss Alps weren't the answer, but we did think about moving upstate, where we owned an old farmhouse in the Catskills. I had grown up just a few miles away, on a small farm in Callicoon Center, with cows and chickens and surrounded by miles of open woodland and fields. There was a strong back-to-the-land movement in the late 1960s, and we briefly considered trying farm life. But in the end we couldn't convince ourselves to leave the city. Patricia was still in graduate school at the City University of New York, and I couldn't imagine practicing small-town law.

One thing we both knew, although we didn't put it in specific terms, was that we wanted a life of public service. I had put myself through college at Michigan State and then law school at Duke by working summers for the company that was building tunnels to bring drinking water from the Catskill reservoirs to New York City. Unions and labor issues were very important to me. Patricia, meanwhile, had grown up in the southern Appalachians, where she spent lots of time camping with her father, who was a forester and Boy Scout leader, so wilderness was important to her. We talked about the political causes that were roiling the country at the time -- the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, the women's movement -- but none seemed to provide the right professional fit in terms of our backgrounds.

As we considered our options, I couldn't get images like the raw sewage in the Hudson out of my mind. Some close friends from Duke, Jim Moorman and his wife, Brenda, used to visit us in Beaverkill, and over plates of spaghetti and cheap red wine, with interruptions to put children to bed, we would have passionate discussions about environmental issues. One night the conversation turned to the cutting of redwoods in California. Another friend, who had a forestry degree from North Carolina State, argued that the best way to manage our forests was by clear-cutting and harvesting old-growth trees. Jim was adamant that this was sacrilege -- destroying 2,000-year-old trees to make picnic tables for suburbia! These early discussions were emblematic of future confrontations over competing visions of society's relationship to our natural environment.

Jim had just started work in Washington for the Center for Law and Social Policy, which was founded as a public interest law firm in August 1969 by Charles Halpern, with the assistance of former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg. Public interest law was a new idea, and the initial focus was on women's rights and health care for the poor, but environmental protection was also on Jim's agenda. Urban pollution, dead rivers, clear-cut forests, destroyed canyons, an oil pipeline through Alaska -- as our conversations continued, all these things came together in my mind until they reached a kind of critical mass. And in Jim's Center for Law and Social Policy, I had my first glimmer of what we might do about the problem.