Joan Mulhern, a longtime environmental advocate and former advocate with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, died on Tuesday at the age of 51 after a long illness.
Mulhern started VPIRG’s summer canvassing program in 1985, took a year off, and then returned to the nonprofit advocacy group in 1987 as development director. Over the next seven years, she held a variety of positions — program director, legislative director, executive director — but she held none so tenaciously as her role as the policy director for the environment and public health.
Paul Burns, the current executive director at VPIRG, called her the organization’s “chief advocate.” In a statement, Burns said Mulhern tenaciously stood up to powerful interests that threatened the environment and “operated on a seemingly endless reservoir of courage.” She fought against ozone depleting chemicals, industrial releases of toxic pollution, golf course pesticides and trash incineration.
Burns remembers Mulhern as “tremendously principled” with a “fierce determination in the way she approached her work.”
“You would not want to be on the other side of the issue,” Burns said. “If you were someone who was threatening Vermont’s environment or public health and you ran into Joan, it was probably like running into a buzz saw.”
Mulhern gave regulators and industry polluters a hard time in equal measure. In a 1993 VPIRG newsletter, she wrote: “There are far too many violations and far too few prosecutions for the state’s enforcement efforts to create a credible deterrent to breaking the law. If it is cheaper for companies to ignore our environmental laws than it is to abide by the laws, there is an economic incentive to ignore the laws. Unfortunately, that’s what is happening.”
After leaving VPIRG, Mulhern went to law school and then moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a senior legislative counsel for Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm. During her 13 years with Earthjustice Mulhern advocated for clean water in Appalachian communities affected by mountaintop removal mining and in areas of Florida affected by toxic algae slime.
In 2007, Mulhern was named one of Vanity Fair’s 22 Eco Heroes.
Mulhern also worked at the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, Public Citizen, where she sought to hold tobacco companies accountable. She attended the University of Vermont and received a law degree from Georgetown University.
Mulhern, who was fighting a long-term illness, is survived by three siblings.
A link to Earthjustice’s obituary for Mulhern can be found here: http://earthjustice.org/blog/2012-december/in-memoriam-joan-mulhern
See Mulhern in action. At a congressional hearing, she testifies against mountaintop removal for coal extraction.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 2:45 p.m. Dec. 20.
