I grew up in the great American suburbs, but I became an environmentalist after college during my Peace Corps service in El Salvador. Over my two years there, I spent long evenings in a hammock strung across my porch, often reading books recommended by a friend who already had the environmental bug—books by thinkers like Herman Daly, Jared Diamond, and Amory Lovins. In the mornings, from the same spot, I could watch the sun come up over mountains that had a little less forest cover every month. Plus, my work with the local community called for promoting health and ecotourism. So theory, aesthetics and pragmatism all combined to instill a deep commitment to the environment.

I started law school intent on finding a way to go back to Central America to help speed sustainable development. But I quickly fell in love with law and just as quickly realized that the legal tools I was acquiring didn’t correspond in any straightforward way to the problems I wanted to solve in foreign countries. I decided that diving into domestic environmental law would allow me to work on the same kinds of problems that had occupied me in El Salvador, while hopefully furnishing some knowledge and skills that might someday be applied overseas. After finishing law school and a clerkship with a wonderful judge on the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, I know that environmental litigation is what I want to do for the time being. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work on some of the day’s most pressing environmental issues at Earthjustice. Whether my future ultimately lies here or somewhere in the developing world, I know that environmental work will be at the heart of it.

Neil Gormley attended Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service and Harvard Law School. In between, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador. He clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Neil has been associate attorney at Earthjustice since 2010, first in Juneau and now in D.C.