Summer 2009 Volume 74 Number 4

BY E. B. BOYD

Courtesy of Kassi Siegel '95 

Kassi Siegel '95 and her partner and fellow activist Brendan Cummings pose with endangered polar bears in the distance.

Not a single global warming rally takes place, it seems, without someone dressing up as a polar bear. For that, you can thank Kassie Siegel '95, the attorney who got the polar bear officially recognized as an endangered species due to melting Arctic ice -- and in the process made it the poster child for global warming.

Siegel pursued the effort as an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), a Tucson, Ariz.-based advocacy group that tries to save threatened wildlife by getting them put on the Endangered Species List. Now Siegel is taking on an even larger role as director of CBD's new Climate Law Initiative.

"When you get immersed in the science," Siegel says, "you realize that if we want to protect plants and animals, we have to solve the climate crisis."

At William and Mary, Siegel studied anthropology and economics. Unsure of what she wanted to do after graduation, she headed to Alaska, where she had spent a summer doing independent study as a Monroe Scholar. Her time guiding adventure trips convinced her she wanted to focus on protecting nature.

Shortly after arriving at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, she met a CBD attorney and started volunteering for the organization. The attorney was Brendan Cummings, who became not only her colleague, but also her life partner.

"In the mid-1990s, he was saying global warming is going to be this really huge problem," Siegel says, "and that we should really do some [Endangered Species List] petitions for species who are threatened primarily by global warming, to bring attention to this issue."
Together, Cummings and Siegel, who went to work for CBD after law school, mulled over their options. "We were thinking about the polar bear early on, but even in the late '90s, there weren't that many published scientific articles talking about extinction risk from climate change," she says.

Instead, they filed a petition to protect the Kittlitz's Murrelet, an Alaskan seabird. But few people had ever heard of the bird, so it was hard to drum up support. By 2005, however, enough evidence had accumulated to demonstrate that two-thirds of polar bears could disappear by 2050 due to warming temperatures. This was the "charismatic" animal CBD was looking for.

Sure enough, within hours of announcing that CBD was petitioning to get the bear listed, reports started appearing on news Web sites around the world. Polar bears soon became the favorite mascot of global warming demonstrators. Even Siegel keeps a polar bear costume in her office, which she's named Frost Paw. She sometimes comments on blogs under his name when she's promoting CBD initiatives.

Public attention was key to the subsequent legal fight. "The Bush administration did not want to list the polar bear," Siegel says. "But there were over 750,000 public comments -- a record for any Endangered Species Act listing -- the vast majority of which were in favor of listing."

The fight nevertheless still took three years. The petition failed, so, following standard procedures, Siegel filed suit. A year later, the administration agreed to list the bear. But actually getting it on the list took another year and a half -- and another suit against what Siegel called the administration's delaying tactics. The bear was finally put on the Endangered Species List last year.

Siegel's strategy suffered a setback in May, however, when the Obama administration announced that the Endangered Species Act would not be used to force companies to lower their carbon emissions. Siegel has stayed chipper through much of the fight. But she says the gloom that affects many who work on climate change issues is starting to hit her. "In 2007, there was less ice in the Arctic than more than half the models say will be there in 2050," she says. "The ice melt is going much, much faster than projected. It's very quickly going to be too late."

On a personal level, Siegel and Cummings are doing what they can to lower their own carbon footprints. Their Joshua Tree, Calif., home is well-insulated and solar-powered. But when she's asked what's the most important thing a person can do, Siegel points to something else entirely.

"Political action is more important than personal action," she says. "Our decision-makers don't seem to feel that they are under political pressure to solve this problem. And they have to be."