The "citizen suit" has become indispensable in protecting the public from violations of environmental laws. Photo: Shutterstock
For decades, there wasn’t much a private citizen could do when a factory belched smoke into the air or dumped toxic chemicals into a river. Citizens stood by as rivers caught fire and overhead skies darkened with soot.
But after Congress passed new environmental laws in the 1970s, things changed. Suddenly, private individuals whose health and well-being were threatened by toxic pollution had the power to hold both individuals and government agencies accountable through the “citizen suit” provisions of these laws. Those provisions allow anyone affected by a polluting person or corporation to sue them for violating federal statutes like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. They also allowed citizens to sue state and federal government agencies for failing to enforce state and federal rules protecting clean air and water.
A Tool To Protect People
Today, citizen suits are a critical tool in protecting people and the planet. They act as a potent lever to ensure that corporations, individuals, and agencies follow the law. And for environmental organizations like CLF (where approximately 80% of the suits we file use these provisions), they are a fundamental way to make government, businesses, and individuals clean up pollution.
Case in point: In the 1980s, when city and state leaders violated the Clean Water Act by allowing raw sewage to be dumped into Boston Harbor, CLF sued the state using a citizen suit. Forty years later, we used a citizen suit to sue the EPA for failing to regulate stormwater runoff from private property owners abutting the Charles, Mystic, and Neponset Rivers in Massachusetts. Our current suit against Cooke Aquaculture, one of the largest aquaculture companies in the world, also uses the citizen suit provision. Cooke has been fouling waters off the coast of Maine for years, threatening the coastal ecosystem, wild fish species in the area, and the people relying on them.
A Provision with Big Results
With the ability to sue using the citizen suit provision, we have seen big results. Water bodies across New England, from Boston Harbor to Casco Bay to Narragansett Bay to Lake Champlain, are cleaner because of it. So are neighborhoods formerly sullied by tailpipe exhaust and particulate matter from coal plants.
The citizen suit provision is so fundamental that CLF has pushed to include it in state laws, as well. That provision has been critical for the enforcement of laws passed in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts to reduce the carbon pollution overheating our planet. In Vermont, CLF has sued the state’s Agency of Natural Resources for its failure to take the steps necessary to keep the state on track to cut its carbon pollution, as required by the law. As Vermonters grapple with flooding caused by the quickening pace of extreme storms, there could not be a worse time to slack off in reducing emissions.
While some people dislike the power that the citizen suit gives everyday citizens to stand up for themselves, the truth is that, without this provision, we’d be living in a different world — a world of dirtier water, dirtier air, and less healthy communities. We need to celebrate this essential tool.
