Luke Cole, co-founder of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in San Francisco, has died in a vehicular accident in Uganda. Known to many as a birder.
Cole graduated from Stanford undergrad and then from Harvard Law School.
The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment is a national environmental justice legal organization with offices in San Francisco and Delano, California. We provide legal and technical assistance to grassroots groups in low-income communities and communities of color fighting environmental hazards.
The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment is an environmental justice litigation organization dedicated to helping grassroots groups across the United States attack head on the disproportionate burden of pollution borne by poor people and people of color. We provide organizing, technical and legal assistance to help community groups stop immediate environmental threats. In the 16 years that CRPE has been helping the poor and people of color resist toxic intrusions and protect their environmental health, among our many victories we have beaten toxic waste incinerators, forced oil refineries to use cleaner technology, beaten a 55,000-cow mega-dairy, stopped numerous tire burning proposals, helped bring safe drinking water to various rural communities, stopped a garbage dump on the Los Coyotes reservation in southern California, and empowered hundreds of local residents along the way.
From Legal Planet:
Cole was well-known for his work on numerous leading environmental justice cases, including as counsel for the Native Village of Kivalina in its pathbreaking case seeking damages from large greenhouse gas emitters from the melting away of their Alaskan village. He was also a prolific writer, and co-authored an influential book with Professor Sheila Foster From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (NYU Press 2001). He taught courses in Environmental Justice at UC Berkeley, UC Hastings and Stanford Law. Berkeley’s Ecology Law Quarterly honored Luke in 1997 with its Environmental Leadership Award. He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and his son Zane.
He will be missed.