With memories of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill fresh in everyone's minds, we had already gone to court several times in the 1970s to demand adequate environmental impact statements before drilling leases were issued in coastal waters off Louisiana and several northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. When the Department of the Interior expanded its leasing program in 1974, we grew more and more concerned about the potential impact on major fisheries. What worried us was not only the risk of one-time disasters like Santa Barbara but also the more insidious effects of chronic low-level spills and discharges from drill rigs and platforms as well as from tankers bringing the oil ashore.

However, no one was prepared for the magnitude of what was proposed by President Reagan's secretary of the interior, James Watt. Immediately after his confirmation, Watt wrote to the governors of California and Oregon announcing that his first priority was to increase domestic oil and gas production. Accordingly, he proposed to auction off drilling leases on the continental shelf off the beautiful northern California coast, in areas that had been withdrawn from the leasing program after the Santa Barbara blowout. That disaster had been the impetus for California's coastal protection law (passed despite then governor Reagan's objections) and then for the federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972. Watt was known as a vindictive man, and it seemed as if he had singled out the state of California, and its association with one of the main symbols of the modern environmental movement, for special treatment.

Although a federal appeals court ruled against Watt's proposals, he announced an even more sweeping plan in June 1982 that would open up a billion acres of the continental shelf -- an area equal to almost half of the entire continental United States -- to drilling over the next five years. The total extent of all drilling leases approved since 1953 was 95 million acres, and that was mainly limited to the Gulf of Mexico. Under the new plan, no section of our coastal waters would be spared. Some of the world's most important fisheries, such as the Georges Bank in the North Atlantic and the southeastern Bering Sea, would be imperiled. The leasing area off Alaska would be larger than the state itself. Oil rigs would sprout as little as eight miles off the coast of Maryland and Delaware.

Writing in NRDC's new Amicus Journal, Sarah Chasis and Frances Beinecke denounced Watt's plan as "one of the most callous and irresponsible public lands decisions ever made." Joined by six other environmental organizations as well as the states of Alaska and California, we took the secretary of the interior to court, citing the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1978, which called for a balance "between the potential for environmental damage, the potential for the discovery of oil and gas, and the potential for adverse impact on the coastal zone."

Watt's drilling plan also alarmed Robert Redford, who had been working closely with NRDC for several years, and he decided it should be the focus of a conference at his Institute for Resource Management. Sarah Chasis and I flew out to the meeting, which was held in Morro Bay, California. Bob had also invited the oil companies, and although I was deeply skeptical about what that was likely to accomplish, Sarah and I were astounded by what ensued.

"The differences were pretty apparent," Sarah remembers. "The oil executives were a generation older than we were and dressed in suits, while we were in khakis and down vests. The first evening we took a boat ride out in Morro Bay. We had some wine, and then the water got quite rough, so we were all swaying back and forth together. Redford joked that it was his way to make sure we ‘got closer.'"

Bob laid down a challenge for the group: Was there any room to negotiate on offshore drilling? He suggested we take a particular area that we all cared about and see if we could reach some agreement. We chose the Bering Sea, bordering Alaska. These are some of the roughest waters in the world, and we thought it was crazy to drill there. The risks were high, and the oil reserves were marginal. Although we didn't have detailed scientific data in those days about ocean ecosystems, we did know -- because local fishermen and native Alaskan people told us -- that these fisheries were among the most productive in the world.

At our first meeting to discuss the Bering Sea, Doug Foy, then the director of the Conservation Law Foundation of New England, held up a map and said to the industry folks, "If our priority areas overlap all of yours, then we have a problem. But at least we will know where our problems are. We can throw out the other 90 percent and stop fighting over the stuff nobody cares about."

Each side agreed to draw circles around the areas of the Bering Sea it would fight for. If we wanted an area but the oil companies didn't, we would jointly recommend to the Department of the Interior not to include it in the five-year leasing program. If an area was of lower environmental concern, it could be considered for leasing and included in the planning schedule (although it would still be subject to further environmental review before a final decision was made). In areas where the interests of the environmentalists and the oil companies overlapped, we either negotiated or agreed to disagree.

As we looked at the map, one oil executive pointed to an area we had circled and said, "Are you saying that if we give up drilling in this area, you will give up trying to stop us over here?"

I leaned forward and said, "Yes."

"When I saw this," Redford told us years later, "I realized that we were breaking through. It was a defining moment." Shortly after, we reached an agreement about which areas could go into the five-year leasing program and which would be protected.

I could see even then that the work we were doing would have major implications for NRDC's future. Our coastal project, run by Sarah and Frances, was still quite modest in scale. We had begun by opposing James Watt's plans for offshore oil drilling, and we were on the verge of becoming a major player in determining the health of the nation's fisheries. If we continued down this road -- and I was convinced that we should -- it would mean more money, more staff, and the capacity to work simultaneously on the East Coast, on the West Coast, and off Alaska. Over time, it would mean transforming our modest effort into a much more sweeping program to protect the world's oceans.