Luke Cole

Luke Cole is director of the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment in San Francisco. He is widely recognized as one of the creators of the legal piece to the Environmental Justice Movement. He represents low-income communities and workers who are fighting environmental hazards, stressing the need for community-based, community-led organizing and litigation. Through the Center, he also provides legal and technical assistance to attorneys and community groups involved in environmental justice struggles nationwide. Cole has worked with dozens of community groups in local struggles across the United States. He represented Kettleman City residents in their successful efforts to stop Chemical Waste Management from building California’s first toxic waste incinerator in their community. Current cases include representing residents of the Inupiaq Village of Kivalina in northwest Alaska in a suit against the world’s largest zinc and lead mine, which has polluted the village’s water supply for years, and representing the Village in the recently-filed Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil, a ground-breaking suit seeking damages for global warming caused by the nation’s 24 largest greenhouse gas emitters. Other recent cases include representing South Camden Citizens in Action of Camden, NJ, in the a historic civil rights suit against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection; and Communities for a Better Environment in a civil rights challenge to California pollution-trading regulations. Cole has been instrumental in halting the proliferation of mega-dairy farms in California’s Central Valley, and a key player in forcing local jurisdictions in California to study dairies’ environmental impacts and mitigate them. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Cole has also taught environmental justice and environmental law at Stanford Law School, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, and UC-Hastings School of Law, where he is recently taught a seminar on the legal implications of climate change. His many publications include, with Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (NYU Press).