Mission

Our Midwest wild and natural areas are, too often, threatened by logging, mining, sprawl and other harmful activities. ELPC works with grassroots groups throughout the Midwest to protect special places that are our environmental heritage and to ensure that fragile ecosystems and habitat are preserved.

 

ELPC files brief with U.S. Supreme Court in Exxon Valdez case

January 24, 2008 - The Environmental Law & Policy Center is filing an amicus curiae brief on behalf of Trustees for Alaska and 15 other Alaska and national environmental groups in a U.S. Supreme Court case involving $2.5 billion of punitive damages assessed against Exxon for its role in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster. The groups' brief urges the Court to uphold the federal Clean Water Act's goals of restoring and maintaining the nation's waterways and prevent Exxon from using the Act as a "shield" to avoid full liability for its role in the spill.

 

Proposed water regulations will clean up Iowa's rivers and streams

January 17, 2008 – Senior Staff Attorney Albert Ettinger testified before the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission about the need to revise Iowa's antidegradation rules. Stronger rules would ensure that new pollution allowed into Iowa's rivers, lakes and streams would not harm existing water bodies, in keeping with the social and economic goals of Iowans.

 

Federal regulators find violations at BP facility in Indiana

December 3, 2007 - After an inspection by the U.S. EPA, the BP facility in Whiting, IN is in the news again. Regulators found the plant to be in violation of several Clean Air Act provisions that increased the pollution emissions for the plant. ELPC's Executive Director weighed in on the situation, "BP can and should be an environmental business leader, but if they're going to talk the talk, they're going to have to walk the walk when it comes to reducing air and water pollution."

 

ELPC is currently working on a range of issues in an attempt to preserve the Midwest's remaining wild and natural places. ELPC's advocacy work ranges from fighting to preserve the Driftless Area, one of the top biodiversity "hotspots" in the Midwest, to preventing a dam on Sugar Creek proposed by the City of Marion that would destroy more than six miles of one of the last free-flowing streams in Illinois. Blocking extensive timber harvesting efforts in Wisconsin, collaborating to protect and enhance water quality in the Mississippi River and its watershed, and working to maintain the health of the largest surface freshwater system on earth - the Great Lakes - are just a few of ELPC's other active projects.