He will pass the reins to SELC’s longtime deputy director and director of regional programs, Jeff Gleason. [For years,] we were the only people in the room.”Jean “Jeanie” Nelson, president and executive director of the Land Trust for Tennessee — and a friend of a friend who became a SELC board member — said that from the beginning, Middleton built the Southern-minded organization around relationships.When he was first forming the organization, “he flew down to Nashville to see how deep my caring was for these places,” Nelson said.
And he didn’t have any competition.”Middleton saw the University of Virginia as a hub producing some of the South’s most prominent leaders, which is one of the reasons he got his bachelor’s degree there.
The nonprofit also had a hand in forming the organizations that would become the Virginia Conservation Network, an umbrella organization for many of the smaller environmental groups the SELC still represents.“It wasn’t that they had one attorney working on these.
“There’s a great love of the land and of beauty, mixed in with just a lot of people who understand the importance of environmental policy.”Middleton’s 36-year-old twin daughters were 11 when his family moved into an 1870s farmhouse just outside of town, with views of Shenandoah National Park.
He would find contacts that weren’t listed and ask how the applicant treated his or her administrative assistant — “a good indicator of what kind of person they are,” Want said.Growing up in Birmingham at a time when the city was the focal point of the civil rights era, Middleton gleaned a deep sense of place and a conviction “that it’s worth fighting for what’s right and against what’s wrong.”“You learned that, to make a place good, you’ve got to focus on correcting the bad — along with preserving the good,” he said.The same principles applied to the early environmental movement, which was weaving its way into federal policies just before Middleton returned to Alabama, a couple years out of Yale, to work in the state attorney general’s office. (Bill Sublette)Rick Middleton didn’t fancy himself an environmental lawyer when he graduated from Yale Law School in 1971. That category didn’t exist.
Rick Middleton, founder of Charlottesville-based SELC, retires | People & Society | bayjournal.com Notifications from this discussion will be disabled. Rick Middleton, who founded the Southern Environmental Law Center 33 years ago and built it into a powerhouse of environmental and legal protections for the Southeast, announced today he will retire at the end of March 2019.
Environmentalism found fertile soil there, too.The federal Clean Air Act of 1970 gave industrial facilities a few years to ratchet down emissions with a suite of new regulations, and, Middleton said, “the big question was whether people were going to enforce this new law.”A fresh face in the Alabama attorney general’s office, Middleton took on the task.
You’ve gotta be polite, you’ve gotta stick with it, and you’ve gotta show ’em you’re not crazy,” he said. But now, “there hasn’t been a day in 15 years that I haven’t had a crystal-clear view of that mountain.”Whitney Pipkin is a Bay Journal staff writer based in Virginia. Some of his fellow Yale alumni had founded another law firm, the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The SELC’s longtime deputy director, Jeff Gleason, has come out of retirement to lead the organization, headquartered in Charlottesville, VA.Three of the SELC’s nine offices are in Chesapeake Bay portions of Virginia and Washington, DC, where the nonprofit’s work on air pollution, wetland protections and coal ash waste, to name a few, have left an indelible mark.Roy Hoagland, who was a Virginia staff attorney and Virginia executive director at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation through the 1990s, recalled watching the SELC grow from a two-office suite on Charlottesville’s downtown mall into a leading litigator for Virginia’s environmental community and “a highly respected, legal powerhouse.”Hoagland said water quality advocates in the state were “pretty crippled” and unable to pose legal challenges to industrial discharge permits before the SELC’s work led to changes in the mid-1990s. After several years in Washington, D.C., he later returned to Virginia to launch SELC, which has been home to some of the best environmental lawyers in the country.Jeff Gleason (right) stands with attorneys Blan Holman and Cale Jaffe in front of the U.S. Supreme Court where they successfully argued for utilities to use the best-available technology for air pollution controls.
After graduating from the University of Virginia and receiving a law degree from Yale Law School, Middleton returned to his home state of Alabama to join the Attorney General’s office to enforce the country’s new Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
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