Eight floors up in the nondescript Security Building in downtown St. Louis, a small legal team has been engaged in public service work for over two decades at the Great Rivers Environmental Law Center.
Last summer as part of the St. Louis Fellows Program, Jordyn Ederer ‘26, a Goldman Fellow, worked out of the firm’s book-laden office on North Fourth Street and interned under the guidance of Bruce Morrison, the General Counsel of Great Rivers, and a WashU Law alumnus. John Yeldham ‘25, an Aaron Naparstek and Joanne Nerenberg Fellow, also worked with Great Rivers last summer, and is featured in the Gephardt Institute’s new St. Louis Fellows video.
Great Rivers is Missouri’s only public interest law firm focused on tackling the environmental and public health crises facing people Missouri and Southern Illinois through legal avenues.
Since its inception in 2002, Great Rivers’ lawyers have provided pro bono counsel to their clients across a wide range of environmental issues.
The organization centers its legal advocacy and programs in the spheres of climate and energy, water quality, wetlands and floodplains, sustainable lands, and air quality. And increasingly, Great Rivers’ legal action is carried out with an overarching goal to advance environmental justice.
Morrison has been with Great Rivers since before it it became independent from a larger law firm where it began, and he has been instrumental in steering its mission to emphasize environmental justice.
Much of this environmental justice work stems from a connection that Morrison made with Rod Chapel, the President of the Missouri NAACP, almost a decade ago. Chapel asked Morrison to chair the MO NAACP’s environmental justice committee in 2016, and he has served in the role ever since.
“It took around a year [after starting as chairman] to not look at environmental justice as just a tool in the box, but to look at it first, and to look at all of our work through an environmental justice lens,” Morrison said.
To bring in support for the small firm’s work, Morrison keeps asking to partner with the St. Louis Fellows Program, and the Fellows, including Ederer, keep coming.
“St. Louis Fellows have been really quite brilliant,” he said, noting that interns often carry out certain digital tasks faster than some more experienced legal professionals.
As part of her internship, Ederer identified and synthesized Missouri based environmental justice issues to present to local NAACP branches, and she built environmental justice model legislation.
Ederer came to WashU knowing she was interested in environmental policy. And while she had known about Great Rivers even before arriving to WashU, her first direct exposure to the firm was through a Gephardt Institute Civic Café panel discussion.
As part of the talk, a Great Rivers lawyer discussed the firm’s work to support community members who had been negatively affected by Pruitt Igoe, a failed public housing development project in St. Louis.
“They felt productive in a way that I hadn’t really experienced in my time with [a different] environmental justice organization,” Ederer said. “It was really motivating and encouraging that this work can be done and there are processes to kind of amend this in some ways.”
What Ederer saw that day—communication between the firm’s lawyers and community members— is nothing out of the ordinary for Great Rivers. Morrison said that he grounds the firm’s environmental justice efforts in listening to community members about their needs, which can take longer than traditional lawyering.
“As long as it may take, we are doing our best to engage community…community lawyering takes a lot more time, and it takes patience,” he said. “But we do want to listen to what the community has to say.”
An added hurdle for Great Rivers, and other environmental law firms, is that their work is subject to the changing regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“It’s been three steps forward, two steps back every year for 36 years now,” Morrison said.
He noted that he continuously finds his work rewarding, even through setbacks, when he can see the impact that Great Rivers has on communities, individuals, and habitats.
“We’ve done our part to preserve vast amounts of habitat wetlands that otherwise would have gone away [and] park spaces that would have been converted to fast food restaurants; solar arrays that are up instead of additional fossil fuels being burned,” he said. “[Those successes] allow lawyers like me to keep on going.”
Ederer said she appreciates how the lawyers at Great Rivers focus their narratives on ways their work impacts people, as opposed to talking exclusively in “legalese”.
“I’ve noticed that in team meetings, the lawyers center the experience on the people they are helping…which is really motivating,” she said.
She also referenced the firm’s discourse surrounding the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Chevron decision, as an instance when Great Rivers’ lawyers infused a difficult situation with hope for the future; this decision curtailed the ability for executive branch agencies to regulate the environment.
“When we had a meeting that day, they were just talking about how this decision makes the work done here a lot more important,” Ederer said. “So, I do feel like I have a lot of work ahead of me to be done, which is nice because it’s always scary when it feels like there’s nothing to be done.”
The St. Louis Fellows Program is offered annually to select WashU undergraduates and is made possible by generous donations to the Gephardt Institute. If you would like to make a gift to support the St. Louis Fellows Program, please contact Stephanie Kurtzman, Executive Director, at GephardtAdvancement@wustl.edu.