Tom Graff passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. The following is his account of opening up EDF's California office in 1971, as described in "Acorn Days (1990)".

It was sometime in mid-April of 1971, still considerably less than a year after I had ripped up my East Coast roots and taken up residence in a dynamic and pleasant-enough San Francisco law firm, that I received a letter that permanently changed my life. The letter itself was straight-forward and brief. William A. Butler, Washington, D.C., counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, had been given my name by a mutual acquaintance. Mr. Butler inquired if I happened to know anyone who might be interested in helping to open a West Coast office for EDF.

After a day or so of cogitation, I responded by calling Mr. Butler. Tell me more about EDF, I asked. And, by the way, I plan to be visiting D.C. with a client next month. Would it make sense to meet at that time?

An early morning D.C. breakfast get-together several weeks later ensued. Later, the same evening, following a full day of Washington meeting on behalf of the client, I boarded an airplane bound for Islip, which was at that time an airfield far enough out on Long Island to be thought of as rural.

I can't remember who met me at the airport. What I do remember is that I was soon ushered into somebody's living room — I'm not sure just whose — filled with six or seven passionate, articulate, and yes, slightly crazy defenders of the environment.

I surely was not at my best. It had been a long day, and just the day before I had flown cross-country with my client, trying to prepare him for what I knew would be difficult meetings with a phalanx of skeptical bureaucrats. So I can't say I had a terribly good answer when Charlie Wurster grilled me about what my scientific credentials were, or when Art Cooley and Dennis Puleston inquired patiently, was I a birder, a backpacker maybe, did I have any trace of eco-advocacy or even environmental interest in my past?

As a more or les conventional 60's liberal, I could pint to a smattering of good works on my record to go along with a solid Ivy League academic and professional pedigree. Still, my actual litigation experience consisted of one trial in a rural county courthouse (that I ignominiously lost) and a few routine motions. And my political experience, such as it was (a year as a lobbyist for New York City on Capitol Hill) had little bearing on what would be hired to do, namely, to sally forth and wage battle — in accord with EDF's then-motto, "Sue the Bastards" — against the major water and energy utilities of California and the Western United States.

Yet as I was put to bed late that night and early next morning on the drive to Kennedy Airport for my flight home, I dimly recall thinking that, despite my obvious failings as an environmentalist, Rod Cameron was giving me the distinct impression that I would be offered a job helping to open EDF's Berkeley office. Berkeley was the choice primarily because Rod thought the proximity to the university would give us more access to prop bono scientific assistance and to a free first-class law library.

That's what happened. On about August 1, 1971, with me and two professional colleagues (each of us briefly trained in an intense, week long series of encounters with the forefathers on Long Island) and an office manager/secretary, EDF-West opened its doors. My two colleagues had diverse backgrounds. Dr. Gerald H. Meral was a fishery biologist by training, a veteran canoeist and already a dedicated environmentalist as conversant as any about the river-ruining policies of the Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation. Rapids on both the Stanislaus (now hundreds of feet under water) and the Tuolumne Rives in California are named after Jerry, who was one of the first ever to paddle through them.

Michael Palmer was the other lawyer. Aristocratic in bearing, a lawyer's lawyer, and generally a cautious and somewhat introverted man, Michael complemented rather well my more plebian, political, impulsive and extroverted style.

Both Jerry and Mike had been hired independently of me and of each other. Our status was that of three equals; none of us could tell either of the others what to do. By any conventional management standards a prescription for disaster, the system worked quite well, since none of us, except maybe for Jerry, who did have a policy agenda, had much of an idea what made sense to do and what didn't, what a golden opportunity in the early days of NEPA litigation and what was a lost cause.

The first thing the three of us did agree on was who to hire to run the office. We found a recently laid-off Latin teacher named Portia Lee (modern languages were in, Latin was dead), and she proceeded to take us three neophytes under her wing, as she helped turn several dorm rooms on the third floor of a former fraternity house into the august West Coast headquarters of the Environmental Defense Fund.

As I said, we really didn't know a lost cause even when it stared us squarely in the face. The first major issue the office plunged into was the construction of the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River. Most of the early battles to Save the Stanislaus were waged out of EDF's office, in administrative and judicial litigation quarterbacked by Mike Palmer, with me as frequent understudy. The fact that New Melones was a several hundred million dollar project, duly authorized by Congress, and well into construction by the time we first sued to stop it did not faze us. What mattered to us was that the project made no sense — the waters it backed up still have not been sold seventeen years later – -and that it would drown what was perhaps California's most beautiful and popular white water river.

Several books have since been written about the war over New Melones; none suggest that we ever had a chance. Nevertheless, three years later, a statewide initiative election designed to block its construction was organized by Jerry Meral and a few colleagues. And five years after that, Mark Dubois, an early ally in the struggle and co-founder of Friends of the River (now one of the nation's leading river conservation groups) risked his life in an effort to prevent the New Melones Reservoir from being filled. By hiding himself deep in the canyon and chaining himself to a rock below what would otherwise have been the water line, Mark caused the Corps of Engineers to stop filling the reservoir that year. Unfortunately, a few years later, the spring flood filled the reservoir and mooted the issue.

Among the other projects that we began back in that first year was a piece of litigation which finally had its first substantive evidence taken sixteen years later, in the spring of 1987. Had I been able to predict that future, I guarantee that I would never have filed the suit. We also filed an action that set one of the first important precedents under the California Environmental Quality Act (California's junior NEPA) and two suits which challenged the adding of lead to gasoline, a cause that EDF has long championed, with ever-increasing success, in its Washington, D.C office as well.

Before too long, my original colleagues moved on. Mike Palmer left to resume the private practice of law late in 1973. Jerry Meral left to serve the administration of Governor Jerry Brown in Sacramento as Deputy Director of Water Resources in 1975, and Ph.D. economist extraordinaire, Zach Willey, succeeded Jerry. David Roe, lawyer and author-to-be, arrived a year later, following Dick Gutting, who was Mike Palmer's successor. David's arrival resembled mine, long on promise, short on obvious environmental credentials.

Zach, David and I have served EDF for 48 years combined. The office staff is now younger than we are, although office manager Mary Jane Gallagher has guided our office with distinction for nearly twelve years. Four times over, we are no longer the junior office within the EDF family. But the spirit which the founding trustees and early staff imparted lives on in EDF's West Coast incarnation. With a staff of 15, several of whom — Dan Kirshner, Terry Young and John Krautkraemer — have now also been around EDF for nearly a decade of more, the California office has already set EDF records for experience and longevity.

Who could have predicted anything like that in 1971? Not me.

All of us at the Environmental Defense Fund mourn the passing of Tom Graff, our leader in California for more than 35 years. A public celebration of his life will take place in about a month.

The following account of Tom’s professional life was written by longtime friend and colleague Tom Philp. Readers are invited to share memories of Tom in the comment space below.

Thomas J. Graff
Thomas J. Graff, a Harvard-educated attorney whom California Lawyer once dubbed “The Godfather” for transforming the politics and policies of California water and power through a unique style of litigation and persuasion via his Rolodex of trusted inside connections, has died after a prolonged battle with cancer. Graff was 65.

Graff in 1971 founded the California office of the Environmental Defense Fund. There, he pioneered a new style of environmental activism by hiring PhD economists and computer specialists who developed a mastery of energy and water issues that would rival their many adversaries. Whether by using the courts, regulatory proceedings, legislation or public opinion via national media contacts that he assembled over the years, Graff advanced EDF’s trademark philosophy that embraced a positive role for markets in solving environmental problems.

“If a resource is scarce, we ought to put a price on it that reflects its value,” Graff said in an interview last year. “Otherwise there’s an incentive to over-consume the resource.”

“Tom was the thought leader of a new wave of environmentalism that uses market incentives to solve some of the most intractable environmental problems.” Fred Krupp, president of EDF.

Graff is survived by his loving wife, Sharona Barzilay, daughter Rebecca Graff; son Benjamin Graff; daughter Samantha Graff, son-in-law Miguel Helft, and grandchildren Avi and Rafael Helft, and sister Claudia Bial and her family.

Graff was born in Honduras in January of 1944, the son of German Jewish refugees. He grew up in Syracuse, New York, where he excelled at both academics and athletics even before attending Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He was a clerk for federal judge Carl McGowan in Washington D.C. and a legislative assistant to New York Mayor John Lindsay before moving in 1970 to California to work for Howard, Prim, Smith, Rice & Downs, a San Francisco law firm.

Graff later would confide that his father wondered if he was “making a big mistake” by leaving a private law practice and launching the California office for the Environmental Defense Fund. But it would not take long for Graff to begin leaving his mark on state resource policy.

Graff laid the groundwork in the 1970s for California to become a world leader in battling climate change by reducing carbon emissions. Concerned about plans of the state’s largest investor-owned utilities to construct a fleet of coal-burning power plants, Graff took on the utilities by challenging rate proposals before the California Public Utilities Commission. This stiff resistance prompted the utilities to abandon coal as a major source of baseline power for California. Years later, in 2006, Graff and EDF were at the center of the effort to pass landmark state legislation (Assembly Bill 32) that would require California by 2020 to cap its total greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels.

But it was California water, from upstream battles on the American River to numerous conflicts in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where Graff arguably left his greatest mark on state and federal politics.

With Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Congressman George Miller of Martinez, Graff was a guiding force behind the Central Valley Project Improvement Act of 1991, a milestone in the environmental movement to protect the Delta.

In terms of policy, the CVPIA established a new accounting system to ensure additional water for the environmental needs of the Delta from the Central Valley Project, which captures water upstream of the Delta via Shasta and Folsom dams and diverts the supplies from the Delta to Central Valley farms and communities via an aqueduct system. The CVPIA also established important ground rules for a “water market” so that the dam and aqueduct system could be used to connect buyers and sellers of water. Graff’s hope was to encourage farmers to both conserve and sell supplies to cities as a more efficient, environmentally-friendly approach to securing new supplies rather than additional, costly reservoir construction.

But in terms of politics, the CVPIA represented a new alliance in political power between the environmental movement and the urban water community, particularly the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Both supported the CVPIA and the concept of water markets.

The CVPIA was staunchly opposed by Central Valley agriculture and would have likely been vetoed by then-president George Herbert Walker Bush had it been a stand-alone bill. But Graff and its authors maneuvered the CVPIA into a broader piece of legislation that was known to be popular with the president, assuring its package. It was one of many moves that develop Graff’s mystique as a master of both politics and policy.

Closer to home in Alameda County, Graff fought his own water provider, the East Bay Municipal Utility District. With its primary supply from the Sierra Nevada’s Mokelumne River, EBMUD had sought a second source above Sacramento from the American River, known for its crystal blue water and abundant fall salmon run. Concerned for the health of the river, Environmental Defense Fund filed suit against EBMUD. Seventeen years later, a landmark decision would designate a baseline environmental flow need for the American River that stands to this day as a benchmark in river policy.

The utility eventually abandoned its effort to divert water upstream on the American River and is now in the final stages of constructing a diversion facility downstream on the Sacramento River with Sacramento County, which along with Environmental Defense Fund had fought EBMUD for years.

Graff spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Sacramento River diversion facility in May of 2007, battling at the time a scratchy throat condition that would later be diagnosed as cancer. In that year he was awarded the Jean Auer Award for a lifetime of service to protecting the Delta, among his many honors. An endowed professorship is in his honor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had been a guest lecturer.

The years of activism taught Graff that it wasn’t necessarily about winning wars, but avoiding them. “We can not repeat the water wars of the past,” he said in an interview last year. “We have to find a way to work together, or we’ll all lose.”

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Other words of tribute to Tom:
“Without Tom Graff, whose good sense and judgment guided its path, there never would have been a major reform of California’s water law in 1992, the Central Valley Improvement Act. He was also a personal friend and a very special human being.”
Senator Bill Bradley

“On the Central Valley Improvement Act, no person was more important than Tom Graff. It wasn’t just his knowledge of water. It was his knowledge about the stewardship of the environment and what this state had to consider if it really thought about its future.”
Congressman George Miller

“Tom Graff was the architect of the best aspects of California water policy. I hope that his vision on that water policy becomes reality as part of his legacy.”
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom

Ann Hayden is a Senior Water Resource Analyst at EDF.

It’s been a long time coming for the San Joaquin River, but yesterday marked the beginning of the return of both the river and the salmon runs that it once supported.

Congress overwhelmingly approved the project as part of a landmark wilderness bill (sponsored by Senators Feinstein and Boxer) that will require river flows along the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam, re-watering a 63-mile stretch of the river that has been mostly dry for decades. In addition to mandated river flows, the legislation includes provisions to restore riparian habitat as well as measures to help valley farmers. This deal is in no small part due to the tireless efforts of fishing and environmental interests, led by NRDC, who first took the matter to court in 1988, showing that sometimes persistence and hard work does indeed pay off.

Additional flows on the San Joaquin will surely help the imperiled Delta ecosystem as well and will be factored into efforts to create a Bay-Delta Conservation Plan as well as Delta-related activities within the California legislature.

Victories like this are few and far between—giant kudos to our colleagues who worked so hard for so many years.

Ashley Rood is a Research & Outreach Associate with EDF.

Last Friday, close to 400 EDF staffers gathered in offices across the country, thanks to the evolution of video, to celebrate Tom Graff’s 38 years of service to the environment. As Tom said, the video conferencing equipment wasn’t quite up to par when he opened the EDF California office in the attic of a fraternity at UC Berkeley in 1971.

As colleagues from coast to coast paid tribute to Tom with their personal stories, the celebration was a reminder that Tom’s work reaches far beyond the battles of the Western Water world for which he is best known. In 2006, Tom was on Treasure Island with Governor Schwarzenegger and a phalanx of other elected officials and dignitaries for the signing of AB32, California’s landmark global warming bill. 20 years ago, Tom was on the front lines of the fight to reduce acid rain. Before that Tom sat across the table from California’s biggest electric utilities to ensure that they abandoned construction of large coal and nuclear plants, supporting conservation and cogeneration as cleaner AND cheaper alternatives. And Tom kept his finger on the pulse of transportation and land issues throughout the state over the decades.

But Friday wasn’t just a celebration of Tom Graff as the environmental hero - it was a celebration of Tom as a leader, mentor, colleague and friend to all of us at EDF, even to those who never had the opportunity to work with him directly.

Here are just a few of the words that came up time and time again to describe Tom’s unique style: funny, witty, humble, enthusiastic, compassionate, inspiring, strength through knowledge, soul of the organization.

I know I couldn’t have found a better initiation into the world of environmentalism than working by Tom’s side—among other things he showed me the power of the pen and the importance of humility and kindness—luckily for us, he won’t be too far away.