Ask the environmentalist James Thornton what it will take to protect the planet and you'd be forgiven for feeling perplexed at his response. “More lawyers” isn't the answer most people would think of. But then Thornton isn’t most people.
The soft-spoken American – and Zen Buddhist priest – is a tireless scourge of environmental transgressors. With ClientEarth, the non-profit environmental law group he set up after moving to London from the US in 2001, he has accumulated an impressive catalogue of legal victories against governments and corporations throughout Europe.
His triumphs have transformed the continent’s approach to pollution and conservation, helping safeguard its air quality, fish stocks and forests while also making it easier for individuals to bring environmental claims against the authorities and big business.
“The law has enormous power, and wielding it effectively can make a big difference to the environment,” he explains. “It helps us ensure that governments and companies do the right thing.”
Victory for cleaner air
Among Thornton’s proudest achievements is his most recent – securing a series of high court rulings ordering the UK government to overhaul its plan for tackling air pollution.
In a landmark decision in February 2018, British judges placed oversight of the country’s clean air legislation in the hands of the courts, stripping ministers of that responsibility after determining the current policy was unlawful.
“Air pollution is linked to the equivalent of 40,000 premature deaths a year across the UK but until a few years ago, people didn’t really understand the problem,” Thornton says. “Now, with our help, they do – and they’re particularly worried about how it affects the health of their kids. They also understand that the government needs to do more.”
Bringing US firms to heal
Thornton honed his legal skills while working as an environmental lawyer in the US during the 1980s and 1990s. After graduating in law from Yale, he joined the publicly-funded National Resource Defense Council in New York, where he brought 80 federal lawsuits against companies and municipal authorities for violating the Clean Water Act introduced in the 1970s by the Nixon administration.
He later went on to set up an NRDC office in Los Angeles. There, he was able to secure financial backing from several Hollywood celebrities attracted to the firm’s ecological causes. He attributes his success to a focused approach.
“It’s all about persistence, following the science and spending as much time as possible on making sure laws are implemented once enacted,” he says. “It might seem odd, but environmental lobby groups tend to switch off once laws are enacted.They don’t focus on whether laws are being implemented, which is crucial.”
As his career progressed, he discovered that the US was not the only rich economy where environmental laws were routinely flouted. The situation in Europe was far worse. Not only were there hardly any European lawyers specialising in the environment, but it was also prohibitively expensive there for non-governmental organisations to bring court cases against corporations or governments.
That’s what spurred him to leave the US and head to London. “We saw a big opportunity to change the thinking in Europe,” he explains.
Reforming Europe
It didn’t take long for him to make his mark. Just four years after setting up ClientEarth, Thornton won a landmark case that meant individuals pursuing environmental claims through the courts would no longer be liable for the other sides’ costs if they lost.
The firm’s efforts to reform Europe’s unwieldy Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) have also borne fruit. Working with the celebrity British chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, ClientEarth laid the groundwork for the introduction of new laws banning trawlers from dumping unwanted fish back into the sea.
“The CFP victory was particularly satisfying as you have huge vested interests on the other side, particularly within the Spanish fishing industry,” Thornton says.
Although ClientEarth has done much of its work in the West, its 150-plus staff are also helping shape environmental legislation in the developing world.
In China, at the Supreme Court’s invitation, the organisation worked with Chinese officials and other Western experts for more than 18 months to devise a legislative framework to protect the environment.
The recommendations Thornton’s team made – which include establishing training programmes for China’s 3000 environment court judges – form part of Beijing’s five-year, USD450 billion environmental protection plan.
“In some countries, the legal frameworks don’t exist, or the laws aren’t good enough. But if there is the will to improve them, we can improve them, and China is a very good example of that,” says Thornton. “And it helps that, in China, the drive to do this is very much a top-down effort supported by big investments.”
CAP in hand
ClientEarth’s next project is arguably its most ambitious yet: reforming Europe’s much-maligned Common Agricultural Policy, the EU’s complex web of farming subsidies. To its detractors, the CAP is the major obstacle to the introduction of sustainable agricultural practices, contributing to the loss of natural habitats. Its favourable treatment of the meat and sugar industries, meanwhile, has been blamed for lifting Europe’s obesity rate to 20 per cent.
“The CAP’s EUR50 billion of annual subsidies to the farming industry are not aligned with the environment. And it is the main reason why Europe’s biodiversity is getting trashed,” Thornton says. “If we can realign the programme, that’s EUR50billion that could be re-directed to building a sustainable system.”
Although the CAP project is still very much in its infancy – ClientEarth has yet to secure funding – developments unfolding in the UK leave feeling Thornton bullish.
The British government’s post-Brexit agricultural blueprint envisages granting subsidies only to producers that don’t harm the environment. “The devil is in the detail of course, but it could serve as a template for the rest of Europe.” Thornton says. “One thing you can bank on is that we’ll be there to make sure it gets done.”
That seems a safe bet. In his 40-year campaign to protect the environment, he has yet to lose a case.
