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The only thing that environmental laws regulate are environmentalists.” ~ Thomas Linzey, 2014 Earth at Risk conference

Thomas Linzey co-founded the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in the early 1990s to help communities seeking environmental justice as they fought against factory hog farms, fracking, and pipelines moving into Pennsylvania.

At the 2014 Earth at Risk conference, Linzey laid out how he and his team of lawyers wasted 10 years thinking that American environmental regulations were the best in the world and just needed more lawyers to enforce them.

As he worked to help communities — free of charge — he found that the laws related to pipelines, huge hog farms and fracking had been written by the very groups he was fighting. High-paid lawyers for the 20,000-hog farm and the pipeline thanked him for finding flaws that allowed them to bill more hours and write more…