It was the year of the first Earth Day. The year President Nixon formed EPA. The year the Clean Air Act was passed—and the year Jerry McCarthy was appointed the first executive director of the Governor’s Council on the Environment by Governor Linwood Holton. It was 1970, and environmental change was everywhere.

 

According to McCarthy, the council was more than a government group—it was a public outreach effort. “The Council on the Environment was formed with an executive order to coordinate all of the work of about a dozen or so separate environmental agencies of state government at the time, and get them all running in the same direction at roughly the same speed. We held public hearings in Roanoke, Richmond, Norfolk—with large turnouts and front-page news for each of them—and our purpose was just to listen to what the public had to say,” he says.

 

The Governor’s Council on the Environment became the Council on the Environment, and McCarthy became chairman of the council and director of its state staff.

 

A few years later, in 1977, the contamination of the James River with the pesticide Kepone led to a federal trial. During the trial, evidence linked the discharge of Kepone to Allied Chemical Corporation, which pleaded no contest to more than 940 counts of polluting the James. The judge fined the company $13.2 million, the largest water pollution fine ever imposed at the time.

 

Glamorgan Foundry, 1970

About $8 million of the money was used to establish the Virginia Environmental Endowment, and McCarthy was named executive director. Since then, the endowment has used that seed money and matching funds to award grants valued at more than $63 million to improve Virginia’s environment.

 

“After we were created under this unique circumstance, we looked around and thought, OK, now what do we do? We have all this money, what are we going to do with it? We resolved first that we would be forward-looking, not backward-looking. We very quickly decided that we weren’t giving money to institutions; we were giving money to people. We think we’ve had some significant effect on things over the last 31 years.

 

“We really made our first significant investment in the idea of creating what eventually led to the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia in 1981, where there were multiple parties and very complex issues that were not amenable to simple win-lose litigation-type tactics.

 

“Most of the things we have done, others have gotten interested in, whether it’s Virginiaforever, or Southern Environmental Law Center, the James River Association, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Save Our Streams Program, the Elizabeth River Project—I could go on and on about all the groups that we helped get their start or helped to expand,” he says.

 

“But it’s not rocket science; it is fundamental —clean air, clean water. When you start trying to improve it, it’s very controversial. I understand that there is no perfect solution politically; everything is a compromise in one way or another. Standing on principle alone is a fool’s game. Compromise, trying to accommodate various points of view, is the way to get things done. But I’m telling

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you, we’re a heck of a lot better off than we were. This stuff takes a long time to do.”