Environment, Science And Technology Eco-Defender

aybe if Earl Stockdale had received the results of his bar exam earlier, he would have made a fortune as an attorney in private practice. Instead, the western Pennsylvania native took a job with the Army while awaiting the results of the exam. Three decades later, rather than filing lawsuits, he's writing laws and brokering deals to permit the $8 billion restoration of the Florida Everglades.

"When I got out of law school, the last thing I ever thought I would do was work for the federal government," says Stockdale, 55, the Army's top environmental lawyer. "But I took a job with the Army because I figured it was better than getting coffee or copying papers until I received the results of the bar exam."

Stockdale passed the bar, but he hasn't left government work. His first job was working as legal adviser on real estate matters for the Army Corps of Engineers in central Pennsylvania in 1973, just as environmental issues were becoming a priority for the federal government. He spent the next 20 years mastering environmental law and, in 1992, was named the Army's deputy general counsel for civil works and environment. In that Senior Executive Service post, he oversees the work of 500 lawyers who respond to thousands of legal opinions each year on topics ranging from cleaning up military ordnance to privatizing Army family housing.

But Stockdale's most challenging project has been coming up with the legal framework for the largest environmental restoration program ever undertaken-the 30-year remaking of South Florida's ecosystem, the Everglades.The effort is designed to turn back the clock 50 years and restore water quality to what it was before the Army Corps built 1,000 miles of canals, 720 miles of levees and nearly 200 water structures, helping Florida become one of the fastest-growing states.

"Everyone knows about the Everglades, but people don't understand what they used to be," says Stockdale. The Corps' "re-plumbing" of the Everglades decades ago spurred development, but cut its size by half and severely degraded the quality and flow of its water. Now, the Corps wants to reverse some of that work to preserve the remaining 2.4 million acres of the Everglades and save its 68 endangered and threatened species, while still providing enough water for commercial use.

That requires buying back land from developers, building underground wells, redirecting waterways and constructing reservoirs. Stockdale created the legal framework for this process, known as the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. The plan, approved by Congress in 2000, sets up cost-sharing agreements among multiple federal and state agencies and establishes a regulatory framework for the reconstruction effort.

Forging such agreements involves balancing the competing interests of developers and environmentalists, not to mention the concerns of local, state and federal agencies and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes says Stockdale's "very genteel, but consistent" manner has allowed him to bridge differences between the various interested parties. "He's a good broker," Haynes says.

It helps to be "almost a stupidly optimistic person," Stockdale says. And he relishes having found a project worth being optimistic about. "I never want to give up on this because this is the right thing to do," he says.