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The evolution of Doug Foy

Boston's power environmentalist now thinks good cities are the key to saving the countryside.

It's 5 p.m. on a weekday in downtown Boston, and two men are hiking along Summer Street, then left on High Street, heading toward the waterfront. One is a reporter with a notebook, the other is a tall, broad-built man in a blue parka. Winter darkness is falling on the crowded sidewalks, and both men have to speak up as they stride along amid teeming rush-hour traffic.

"I love the city," the taller man is saying. "I like not having to drive everywhere; everything is accessible by public transit or foot or bike. I like being able to get anything I need within walking distance. Cities are vibrant, exciting places. I once wrote a piece on cities about how if I had to do it again, I would raise my children in a city."

With the writer following, the man darts across Atlantic Avenue at Rowes Wharf, jaywalking with excellent Boston form, and explains: "You never wait for the light. Crosswalk lights are so long between cycles that you stand forever." Under the rotunda and around Rowes Wharf they go, across the Fort Point Channel to South Boston via the old Northern Avenue Bridge, and past the federal courthouse to the broad snowy tundra of Fan Pier.

As the two crunch about the pier in the January darkness, a raw wind blows off the harbor. They stop at the water's edge, turn, and stand, gazing northwest at the glimmering skyline. They're half-frozen, but the man in the blue parka doesn't seem to notice.

"This is the best view of the city," he says with proud conviction. "If you wanted to show your kids Boston, this is where you'd take them." He points to the open area between the courthouse and the water's edge, where there are a few benches and planters, and in his mind it's clearly midsummer.

"That doesn't work very well," he says. "I mean, it's a nice walkway, but there ought to be things going on here. I'd rather see a skateboard park, a Ferris wheel. Chicago has a Ferris wheel [on the lakefront]; why can't we have a Ferris wheel? Or a carousel! Rowes Wharf is nice, but it's no place for kids. There ought to be something here that 12-year-olds can come to. Not just outdoors but indoors. It could be a great waterfront museum, a whaling museum, a museum that tracks the maritime history of Boston, that moves us into the harbor and the islands. There are a hundred great ideas. ... It could be a place to fly a kite."

You might think you're listening to some old Hub denizen - a veteran columnist, perhaps, or a Boston version of Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose, who always felt a little queasy in the country. But no, this is Douglas I. Foy, president of the Conservation Law Foundation, hardy outdoorsman, foe of polluters, vanquisher of oil drillers, highway builders, and dirty-power-plant operators everywhere. A conservationist on his favorite turf: downtown.

GREENING THE CITY. IT'S A SEA CHANGE FOR THE 35-year-old Conservation Law Foundation, if a gradual one, and for the man who has led it for the last quarter century. Bred of sturdy New England suburban conservationism, CLF has for most of its life concentrated on environmental mischief in the usual places: forests, rivers, oceans, the atmosphere. In the 1970s and 1980s, CLF lawsuits blocked a proposed dam on Maine's Penobscot River, a second nuclear power plant Seabrook, New Hampshire, and oil drilling on the fishing grounds of Georges Bank.

But today, more than half the organization's efforts are concentrated on cities and city life, and that number is growing. Using actual or threatened lawsuits, CLF forced the Central Artery planners to agree to improvements to public transit; forced the $2 billion cleanup of Boston Harbor; and blocked a high-rise project over the Massachusetts Turnpike near Copley Square. Most recently and publicly, CLF's threat to sue, coupled with a grass-roots campaign to build a citywide neighborhood coalition, forced developers to scale down a massive high-rise development on Fan Pier.

Those are the big ones. Lower-profile urban projects include tough lead-paint-poisoning laws, forcing the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to keep to its deadline on scrapping old polluting buses, traffic-control programs in congested neighborhoods, proposals to clean up city brownfields (buildings or lots contaminated by toxins), and the dream of building a mass-transit "urban ring," on the city's edge, which would connect the spokes of the MBTA. The Conservation Law Foundation engages in such activities in other cities in Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England, and even has a brownfields-reclamation project underway in New York City's Harlem.

Foy has been "very tough on the T, on environmental standards, getting buses that don't pollute," says Hubie Jones, assistant for urban affairs to the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "He's been like a hawk," convinced that "folks in inner-city neighborhoods don't have the same level and quality of mass transit as people living in Newton."

It seems an odd focus for an environmental advocacy group. Most such groups - the Sierra Club, say - are interested in wilderness, not stinkpot city buses. But for Douglas Foy, it's the result of a quarter-century pursuit of workable solutions to the biggest problems that the largest number of people have. Increasingly, that has led him to the cities.

It took him awhile to get there. He was and is, at 54, an outdoorsman to the max. A 1969 Princeton alumnus who cut short graduate study in physics at Cambridge University in England to attend Harvard Law School, Foy was a member of the 1968 US Olympic rowing team. After law school, he lived with his wife, Leonie (they have two children and are now separated), for more than 25 years in Sherborn, from where he often rode his bicycle 23 miles to work in Boston. He hikes, mountain bikes, cross-country skis, and snowboards, and was enough of a rock climber to scale El Capitan, a 3,000-foot sheer cliff in Yosemite National Park. In season, he rows his German Empacher racing shell two or three times a week on the Charles River.

The Conservation Law Foundation was founded in 1966 to give legal advice to local conservation commissions. But starting in 1977, under Foy's direction, it began fighting high-profile battles, in courts or before regulatory boards, to thwart development schemes that it believed would threaten the environment. Today, the group has more than 30 professional staff - lawyers, economists, and others - and a $4.7 million-plus budget. A monster of careful preparation and focused argument, Foy has so often won in court that the mere threat of a CLF lawsuit can put the kibosh on a development plan.

Gradually, Foy became drawn to city issues. Several years ago, CLF bought a building on Summer Street and made it the group's headquarters. Foy says that his metamorphosis into an urban environmentalist came about partly through the influence of staffers, especially CLF vice president Stephanie Pollack, who "hammered away" at city issues.

In 1980, he says, "Stephanie came here as an MIT intern and announced that she was not going to work on any cases having to do with trees." Pollack is from New Jersey, like Foy, but she wanted to work on the environmental problems of city people, especially poor people. After graduating, she went to Harvard Law, and ended up coming back to CLF, for law school credit, before graduating in 1986.

With Foy in charge and with Pollack and other staffers leading the charge, CLF went at urban problems with gusto. It fought for strong lead-paint laws and regulations, and Boston today has one of the lowest lead-paint-poisoning levels in the country. In the late 1970s, CLF sued to block a plan by Governor Edward J. King to convert the state's oil-fired power plants to coal, focusing the litigation (successfully) on the urban plants: Everett, Cambridge, and South Boston. In 1982, the group sued the MBTA over fare increases, arguing that ridership would fall, increasing use of cars and air pollution, and got the fares rolled back for a time from 75 to 60 cents.

In 1983, CLF won the lawsuit in federal court that brought about the cleanup of Boston Harbor. When the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project was conceived, its backers said it would relieve pollution if it were coupled with improvements in mass transit. CLF sued to force those improvements to be spelled out in the permits, and settled the suit with agreements on improved parking at suburban commuter rail stations, cleaner MBTA buses, and the new Silver Line, a bus service that will include dedicated tunnels, from Dudley Square to the airport.

"Doug has always been committed to the idea that Boston was important," Pollack says, "but his thinking has evolved. He was living in Sherborn and could ski out his back door and was a rock climber and had a hard time understanding why anyone would want to live in a city. His vision was that of course everyone, if they could, would live in suburbs, and so you needed transit to get people into their jobs. I think he had a hard time making the leap. Now, of course, he lives here." Three years ago, Foy bought a condominium on Boston's waterfront.

Foy and CLF's urban shift coincided with the rise of the "environmental justice" movement, which held that polluted air and water, toxins like lead paint, and issues of bad transportation hurt city people, especially in communities of color, more than others. "Many of the environmental concerns of people of color, of the poor, have not been adequately addressed by the mainstream environmental movement," says Penn Loh, director of the Boston-based Alternatives for Community and Environment.

On this point, Foy is passionate. He says that the early days of the civil rights movement were focused on public services like transportation. "If you have air pollution in the city," he says, "it's going to affect a larger number of people. Pollution in Boston Harbor affected a concentrated number of people. Our goal on the Fan Pier development was that we wanted 12-year-old kids from Roxbury or Chinatown to be able to go there and enjoy the clean harbor."

Foy has pushed hard on city brownfields, and CLF is working with a Harlem ministers group to try to reclaim an asbestos-saturated school on 147th Street in New York. Phillip Thompson, a political science professor at Columbia University and former New York City official, is working with Foy on the project. Thompson has found that even to some in Harlem, CLF's interest seems surprising.

"I've come under some heat in Harlem about working with them," Thompson says. "People say, 'Why are you working for that big white organization?' "

Thompson understands the question. "I used to be the manager of the public housing authority in New York," he says, "and the biggest problem was garbage. When the Clean Air Act was passed, we had to stop incinerating, and every day we had to bag garbage for 650,000 people, with no increased funding. Staff had to be pulled back from everything else to bag garbage. The environmental movement was oblivious: They wanted clean air. That infuriated public housing people and low-income groups. Doug looks like a Boston Brahmin, and a lot of times he's a target. But he's a listener. He keeps coming back and saying we have to keep fighting for these issues."

In Foy's mind, it's not just that a clean environment is a civil right. He has another argument for concentrating on cities. In a nutshell: Saving the cities is the key to saving the countryside. "If you can solve the environmental problems of cities, along with other problems like education and housing, and make cities great places to live," he says, "you relieve the pressure elsewhere and counteract sprawl. Sprawl is the mirror image of white flight. It's the abandonment of the cities and the spreading of growth over the countryside, where the environmental damage is stupendous. You not only trash the countryside with subdivisions and megamalls, where everyone has to move around in cars, but you also have widely dispersed infrastructure needs, so you can't provide sewer or water systems in a cost-effective way."

On this, the gap between CLF and most mainstream "green" groups is apparent. "The 'enviros' get all cranked up on sprawl," Foy says, "and the irony is that they concentrate on the suburbs when the root cause of the problem may well be in the cities. Making cities work is a pivotal part of a sustainable future."

This working theory has changed Foy's and CLF's direction. But directional change followed a big tactical change. Simply put, to fix environmental problems and keep them fixed, Foy believes, it's not enough simply to oppose bad ideas. You have to come up with better ideas, and that means you have to talk to adversaries, look at things from their point of view, and sometimes make deals with them.

"I have never thought of this as a religious enterprise, a matter of preaching to people," he says. "I think of it as making the world better for people to live in." He scorns the view that greens should not make agreements with power companies "because they're the other side, they're polluters. No, they're not the other side; they're part of the problem, and we're part of the problem. Our lights are on, right? Your television goes on at night. If we all want to abstain and eliminate the need to have electricity, it would be a far different world. If you want to take that religious position, you can also take the position that we're going to have nothing to do with any power company, ever: 'I don't want to talk with them, I don't want to work with them.' But none of us are that pure."

In 1997, CLF signed on to a deal with New England electric utilities to deregulate the power industry in Massachusetts, infuriating many greens who vehemently opposed the deal as "utility-sponsored deregulation." When the New England Electric System put its nine generating plants up for sale as part of the deregulation deal, Foy shocked the enviros again by teaming up with AES Corp., a Virginia-based power plant operator, in a bid to buy the plants. Foy says AES made an ironclad commitment to shut down the five dirtiest plants almost immediately, including a coal-burning dinosaur in Salem, and replace them with superclean combined-cycle natural-gas plants.

The bid failed, but for some greens, the very idea of joining forces with a power company was disturbing, and Foy's personal friendship with John Rowe, chief executive officer of New England Electric, was galling. "Your world view is shaped by who you hang around with," says Rob Sargent, senior advocate for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, an opponent of deregulation. "I think increasingly, as Doug Foy became more of a player, he started hanging out with the big boys and less with regular folks."

But Doug Foy always hung out with big boys, which is why the deal-making was possible. In addition to courtroom acumen, over 25 years he has developed a vast network of contacts in politics and business and personal access to the high and mighty.

Vivien Li, director of the Boston Harbor Association, recalls how former governor William Weld would hold occasional meetings with an array of environmental groups. "Each organization could have one person there," she says. "Doug Foy would never come; he would send a staff person, and then if an issue came up, he would go meet with the governor himself. There are few people in this state who would not return Doug Foy's phone calls. You will never read about his political relationships in the papers. He is extremely discreet."

"Doug is the most effective environmental advocate I have ever run across," says Armond Cohen, a longtime CLF staffer who now heads the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force, "in the kind of insider advocacy that CLF is famous for: courtroom advocacy, access to movers and shakers, high-level politics, public relations. He has a seat at the table. He is part of the Establishment. He is an elder."

But that's apparently not enough for Foy. He was learning that while you can win at summitry, showing your clout doesn't necessarily change things fundamentally if less-powerful stakeholders have to wait outside. He began to think that a more inclusive strategy for winning could be as important as winning itself.

"There's been an evolution in Doug's and CLF's style," says Pollack, "and part of it is that urban focus. We negotiated the Central Artery settlement, but the other transportation advocates in Boston, instead of standing up and clapping, said, 'Wait a minute, you didn't include us.' It was using power and leverage to get ourselves to the table. One change we have made is that we are now committed to using the same leverage to get other people to the table."

On the Fan Pier project, the Pritzker family of Chicago last fall agreed to scale down the size and density of its $1.2 billion, nine-block development in the face of determined state opposition and CLF's threat to sue. Earlier, the Pritzkers had made local appearances and shook what they thought were all the right hands. Mayor Thomas Menino and the Boston Redevelopment Authority were on board, and Menino had made an agreement (later rescinded) with South Boston leaders, giving that neighborhood the bulk of financial goodies in return for its support of waterfront development plans near their neighborhood. It seemed that the Pritzkers had a classic Boston deal.

But while CLF was firmly opposed to the plan, the state was less definite. So Pollack (along with other activists, including Hubie Jones of UMass) went to neighborhood groups all over the city and argued that it was their waterfront, too, their newly clean harbor, that they had a right to a say in the way it was developed and should come to hearings to be held by Bob Durand, state secretary of environmental affairs. They came and spoke up loud and clear against the Pritzkers' plan. As a result, Durand's resistance stiffened, even in the face of the Pritzkers' threat to take their billions and go home. In the end, the final agreement included the grass-roots groups as well as the elites.

Pollack says that Foy resisted the temptation to cut a bilateral deal - "a Doug Foy/Tom Menino deal or a CLF-BRA deal, which he could have done" - while encouraging other concerned people and groups to influence the outcome.

It was so un-Foylike that some insiders could not quite believe it. "We would be in meetings where people in power would say to us, 'What do you want built on the Fan Pier?' " Pollack recalls. "We would say it doesn't matter what we want; what matters is to get a good process. And they would say, 'We know you say that publicly, but what do you actually want? How many buildings?' They wouldn't believe that we wanted a process that included all the neighborhoods. That was foreign; Boston is a city where deals are made."

Foy says with satisfaction: "That a lot of neighborhoods, Roxbury to East Boston, found a way to get engaged and will continue to be engaged is very helpful."

Early in the struggle, Foy startled everybody by hatching a scheme with adjacent waterfront landowner Frank McCourt, proposing a joint development plan with the Pritzkers, which would have connected McCourt's land with theirs and shared some of the infrastructure costs. The plan was DOA. The Pritzkers rejected it outright, and Menino, whose dislike for McCourt is well known, was aghast.

But Foy, as usual, is unrepentant. "It was an opportunity to point out that there were other ways to skin the cat financially and accomplish something with a public purpose," he says. "Just resisting a project instead of trying to develop a better set of ideas, as with so many of the other projects we get involved with, is never going to get the job done."

Searching for the way to get the job done, Foy has led CLF down a path that has opened an even wider gap between him and the mainstream environmental movement. At his urging, in 1997 CLF set up a separate branch called CLF Ventures, which seeks to create "green enterprises" - profit-making businesses that will help the environment. The businesses must be self-sustaining, and the earnings go back into CLF's operating budget. In the fiscal year ending this July, CLF Ventures' gross revenues will total about $3 million, up fantastically from last year's $630,000.

One CLF Ventures operation involves auto insurance. Insurance is one of the biggest costs of operating a car. Foy reasoned that if you could offer drivers lower rates in return for driving less, it would have the effect of cutting air pollution. His theory is that people who drive less have fewer accidents and therefore present lower risk to the insurer, justifying lower rates. So CLF Ventures teamed up with Plymouth Rock Insurance, owned by former state insurance commissioner James Stone, to create the Environmental Insurance Agency. Its purpose is to cut down on unnecessary driving, and this year it's expected to earn up to $200,000 for CLF Ventures.

More controversially, in some eyes, CLF Ventures will team up with other companies that tackle environmental problems - for a fee. CLF will get a $1.5 million fee from AES Corp. for legal and consulting services in helping to get a new superclean, gas-fired power plant built in Londonderry, New Hampshire. The plant has received all necessary permits and is under construction, despite intense neighborhood opposition.

Foy says CLF Ventures was mostly his idea - "me pushing the envelope, saying 'give me another tool,' trying to get people to think in a different way." He acknowledges that there were some intense meetings over it within CLF and on its board. Some people just couldn't buy it, and one was Armond Cohen, a Foy protege who ended up leaving CLF.

Cohen says that after 13 years, it was time to go, anyway, but that CLF Ventures was one of the reasons. He explains: "I felt that CLF, precisely because it often bucks conventional wisdom and operates at a fairly elite level, needs to be free of any perception of taint. You need people to believe that you are working in their best interest, and for CLF to put one foot in the developer's camp and take a financial interest in a power plant erodes the capital that you have with your base. It gives your opponents too easy a reason to discredit you. I felt there was a potential for the appearance of conflict."

Despite plenty of praise for Foy's achievements, Sargent of Masspirg has similar concerns: "Supposedly there's a Chinese wall between their fee-for-service arm and their advocacy arm, but there's a lot of question about it. My feeling is, you're either a consultant or an advocate. I'm not sure you can be both."

Lawyer Martin I. Gross, chairman of CLF's New Hampshire advisory board, supports the Londonderry deal but adds: "When the time comes to make decisions about other plants, CLF has to be careful that its stake in the AES plant does not lead it to use its position to beat on potential competitors. If you have a stake in the outcome and the stake is dollars, you've got to be careful about internal decision making, so that the dollar interest does not unconsciously become the driving force."

Foy responds in his customary energetic, argumentative way: "There's nothing unusual about a nonprofit having earnings. Harvard charges tuition, Massachusetts General Hospital charges for surgery, National Audubon charges admission to its sanctuaries." He sees little danger in charging fees, principally because each venture and its finances is fully disclosed and must be approved by the CLF board and the entire staff. "There is no way anybody could pocket this money," he says.

However CLF Ventures may serve to solve particular environmental problems, it also liberates the parent organization from total dependence on foundation support.

Like any business executive or sports coach, Foy craves results. "Ideas are not enough," he says. "We've got more great ideas than we have execution. We've had 25 years of the Clean Air Act, and the power plants in New England are older than the act, and they're as dirty as they ever were, and some are dirtier. We've used the four traditional tools: regulation, legislation, negotiation, and litigation, and we still have a fleet of dirty plants poisoning people and the environment. We concluded that you had to figure out another way."

Likewise with city brownfields, where CLF Ventures will get fees (up to $300,000 this year) for helping to pull together development dollars to reclaim sites. Foy notes that "there are thousands of brownfields in Massachusetts alone: old gas stations with leaky tanks, paint factories, old schools with asbestos. Our conclusion was, the only way to get these sites cleaned up is to bring market forces to bear, to get into the role of being, or helping, responsible developers to bring these sites back. And if you don't do that, these neighborhoods are going to be doomed to live with these things forever."

Through it all, Foy remains wary of the label "environmentalist" ("I've never been a fan of the term"). He was drawn to environmental problems partly because they appealed to his scientific/mechanical interest, his interest in tools and tinkering. As a college student, he rebuilt an ancient motorcycle and rode it all over Europe. He has built furniture and rebuilt a house. "If I weren't a lawyer," he says, "I would probably build homes or own a hardware store."

The Conservation Law Foundation has changed and grown in the last quarter century, and because Douglas Foy has been at the helm for most of that time (he became executive director in 1977), it's hard to imagine the place without him - like the Boston Pops without Arthur Fiedler. His drive made CLF a muscular litigator, his tactical gifts and access made it a political player, his imagination and arguments changed it from a charity-dependent group to an increasingly self-supporting powerhouse.

He is looking ahead eagerly to new challenges in Boston: on brownfields, surface uses of the completed Central Artery, planning for the new MBTA urban ring (which he says would cost about $2 billion), air-rights development on the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension from the Back Bay to Chinatown. There's a lot to do.

Still, if you succeed in building a powerful organization with a formidable staff, internal stresses can build up over time. One state official from the Michael Dukakis era says: "In a nonprofit, you should leave after 10 years, even if you're doing a great job. You have imposed a certain perspective; you have hired people in your own image. What does it do for the next person when you stay so long?"

"When you're in your 50s," says Foy's friend John Rowe, former president of New England Electric and now CEO of Chicago-based electric utility Exelon Corp., "there's a question of what you do to keep it fun, to take it to the next step. It's hard in a group like CLF, where your best people naturally want to move up."

All this Foy knows, and it's one topic he's not argumentative about. "I agree," he says. "You have to worry about staying too long, and I have stayed a lot longer than I imagined." Other opportunities, he says, "come across the radar screen, but I have no plans. I'm hoping I have enough smart people around me who'll say, 'Hey, it's time to pass into the sunset.' "