Keeping It Real

When Kate Sinding heard NRDC was looking for a new attorney, she knew the timing was bad. Just five months earlier she had made partner at a prestigious New York City law firm. She was feted at the firm's posh Christmas party; her new salary was four times what the NRDC job would pay. Somehow none of that mattered. Environmental or not, corporate law wasn't really what she wanted to be doing with her life. What she really wanted, she says, was to make policy.

Three years later, Sinding is now deputy director of NRDC's urban program. Working at her "dream job," she spends her days trying to prevent environmental problems rather than picking up the pieces when things go wrong. Ten years in the private sector proved to be superb training. At her old firm she represented clients of all kinds, from activist groups to the food giant Kraft. When the New York village of Hastings-on-Hudson wanted to redevelop its PCB-contaminated waterfront -- to make it truly Hastings-on-Hudson rather than Hastings-near-the-Hudson, in the words of one town official -- Sinding mediated the competing interests of environmentalists and developers, honing skills that now help her defend NRDC's policy goals from legal challenges.

Her latest challenger is the electronics industry. Last February, NRDC helped to shape and pass a New York City law that makes manufacturers, rather than consumers, responsible for recycling old electronics. "Right now, all the incentives are to design for obsolescence," Sinding says. "They're not thinking about any of the costs on the other end." The industry has filed suit against the city, and NRDC, with Sinding in the lead, is stepping in to aid in the defense. She aims not only to defend the New York City law but also to expand it to cover the entire state.

Colleagues say that Sinding's effectiveness as an attorney and a policy maker is a product of her legal moxie and innate people skills. "Kate can disarm opponents and cut them down to size in the same meeting," says Mark Izeman, director of the urban program. "Not every environmental lawyer has that level of emotional intelligence."

Sinding began to develop those traits early in her childhood. When she was 4, her parents, both foreign-aid workers, moved the family to Islamabad, Pakistan, where Sinding remembers learning to take off her shoes at mosques. Later they lived in Kenya, the Philippines, and Arlington, Virginia, where sophisticated suburban teenagers provided the biggest culture shock of all, she recalls. Sinding went on to Barnard College and New York University School of Law before earning a master's degree in public policy at Princeton University. She now calls New York City home, but only during the work week.

On weekends she takes off for the wilderness, sometimes as far away as Washington's Mount Adams, for a taste of the pristine natural places she is working to protect. She hikes to the summit of Mount Adams, rides her snowboard 4,000 feet down along its glacier, hikes back to the rental car, and hops on the red-eye back to New York, just in time for work on Monday.

"That intense physical exertion involves 120 percent concentration and focus," Sinding says, not unlike some of her legal efforts. In both, "it helps to be a little type A." She pauses a moment. "Monday morning is hard."

To preserve those natural spaces before they are despoiled, Sinding and NRDC's urban team are pushing the New York region toward policies based on the principles of smart growth, the idea that development should be planned to reduce driving time, promote compact communities, and encourage walking, biking, and public transit (see "Redrawing the American City"). "This is about not having to get in your car every time you need a quart of milk or your kid goes to a soccer game," Sinding says.

Sinding and her New York colleagues hope to replicate a California law that funds regional smart growth projects that aim to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The law provides incentives for towns and developers to design walkable communities. The NRDC team is also looking to develop state legislation that would require auto insurers to offer pay-as-you-drive insurance rates: the fewer miles you log each year, the less you pay in premiums. And they are hoping to popularize a new green building standard called LEED-ND (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development), which addresses how a building fits, or doesn't fit, into the surrounding community.

If the smart growth initiatives take hold, Sinding will fulfill her personal goal of making policy that succeeds on a grand scale, and she'll see the wild places she loves preserved. "I feel most in touch with my spirituality when I'm out in those places—more connected, more in awe of it," she says. "Something about the outdoors drives me."