Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Alternative Energy News

Alternative Energy News Biography
Jon Devine, Senior Attorney, Washington, D.C.
Joan Mulhern, my friend, a fellow clean water advocate, and a mentor, passed away on Tuesday. I hope everyone will read the touching tribute that her Earthjustice colleague, Marty Hayden, wrote. Our community has suffered a tremendous loss, not just for the things we liked about Joan – like her wry humor and shameless Red Sox boosterism – but for the things that made us uncomfortable – like when she was telling us that we weren’t taking a strong enough stance on a given issue.

Perhaps the easiest way of describing the role that Joan played in the world of national clean water policy is the reaction that several of us had yesterday when we met to commiserate over the heartbreaking death of our colleague; we said, “now, one of us has to be the tough one.” (Actually, we used a little saltier language.) Joan was uncompromising in defense of clean water, and didn’t shy away from a fight for clean water protections, even in the face of daunting and well-funded opposition and powerful but intransigent politicians. I rarely saw Joan talk about the Clean Water Act without reminding people that its first goal – which many people today now treat as a quaint antiquity of a simpler 1972 Congress – was “that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985”.
Alternative Energy News

Alternative Energy News