Local lawyer named environmental hero

Don Stack fights for the 'moms and pops' threatened by pollution

September 8, 2006
Mary Landers | Savannah Morning News

Lawyer called environmental hero Don Stack fights for the 'moms and pops' threatened by pollution

About the award

The Ogden Doremus Award for Excellence in Environmental Law recognizes a Georgia lawyer for his or her contribution to cleaning up the state. Doremus, who serves as a Judge of the State Court of Candler County, is considered one of the fathers of the environmental community. He was author of state environmental laws during Jimmy Carter's governorship and helped found several environmental nonprofits, including the Georgia Conservancy, Isaak Walton League in Georgia and the Center for Law in the Public Interest, which sponsors the award in his name.

Source: Georgia Center for Law in the Public Interest

By Mary Landers

Once a park ranger, Savannahian Don Stack now helps neighborhood groups in Georgia save their own backyards.

His name is connected with controversies ranging from Wal-Mart in Sandfly to proposed bridges at Emerald Pointe.

Stack will be honored next week in Atlanta with the Ogden Doremus Award for Excellence in Environmental Law.

He was an obvious choice for the honor, said Justine Thompson, executive director of the Georgia Center for Law in the Public Interest, the group presenting the award.

"The nominations were filled with heart-warming stories about average people who had been impacted by illegal pollution and had no place to turn," she said.

"Don Stack helped them stop the pollution."

From parks to plaintiffs

An incident in which Stack had to shoot a menacing dog was what ultimately led him out of the parks and into the courts.

He was serving as a park ranger in Saguaro National Park in Arizona in the early 1980s, when three trained dogs, including a Rottweiler and a German shepherd, attacked him on a walking trail. He shot and killed one of the dogs in self defense.

His supervisors punished him by sending him home for a day, not for killing the animal, but for trying to avoid killing it by first firing a warning shot.

"I violated park policy by not shooting to kill," he said.

The dog incident was the last straw in Stack's growing frustrations with his Park Service work, which had taken him from the Florida Everglades to Arizona's Sonoran Desert.

The work was not without physical dangers.

"I was tired of being shot at and stabbed," he said.

He had also realized his most satisfying work, including law enforcement and land acquisition for the parks, kept coming back to legal issues.

Stack, 53, graduated from the University of Georgia law school in 1986. He is managing partner of Atlanta-based Stack & Associates P.C., a firm he founded in 1993, which has grown to seven full-time and three contract or part-time attorneys. Stack lives at The Landings and works in Atlanta part of the week. He expects to open a Savannah law office in 2007.

Work enough for 20 lawyers

Locally, Stack may be best known for his losing efforts to help Sandfly residents keep Wal-Mart out of their neighborhood.

"From a practical standpoint, it was a defeat. There's a Wal-Mart and a Sam's Club at what could've been a true community center," Stack said. "But the victory was in making people aware of growth and environmental issues and making them look at elected officials and say 'What are you doing to help manage growth in this area?' There are a lot of people out there, I'm finding, who don't want us to turn Chatham County or coastal Georgia into Atlanta."

Leroy Maxwell was president of Save Our Sandfly during the litigation, much of which Stack handled pro bono.

"He put up a real good fight," Maxwell said. "You couldn't have asked more from a legal mind."

Stack had more direct success in the Emerald Pointe case in which a developer wanted to build bridges across the marsh to connect a series of three small islands. The case was the first time anyone challenged a permit issued by the Coastal Marshlands Protection Committee, Stack said.
Two subsequent cases resulted in similar findings, directing the permit-granting committee to look more broadly at the effects of developments on the marsh.

It's the mom-and-pop groups such as Sandfly and the neighborhoods adjacent to Emerald Pointe that Stack went into law to represent.

"Everybody else who practiced environmental law, they were all defense oriented," he said.

They were looking at how to get around the regulations, how to find the loopholes. What I was finding throughout the state was the more we developed it, the people left standing on the side of the road were the people who lived here a long time who were watching their property get ruined."

Deborah Sheppard, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper, has seen Stack stick up for those residents in the nine cases he's worked on for that nonprofit.

"Don has a keen sense of integrity and commitment to ensuring that the law works for all people, not just ones with the most money and power," she said.

Another continuing focus for Stack is the growth of riverkeeper organizations in Georgia.

Stack balances a busy legal practice with an equally full home life. He and his wife, Ann Marie, who is also an environmental lawyer, have five children from 19 months to 13 years.

He founded the Canoochee Riverkeeper by making initial funding for it a requirement of the settlement of a pollution case with Claxton Poultry.

That river group has grown to become the Ogeechee-Canoochee Riverkeeper. He also helped found the Satilla Riverkeeper.

Stack's work is far from done.

Increasingly, preventing pollution requires private citizen involvement to make sure environmental protections are enforced, he said.

A recent drive made that clear.

"I counted 14 subdivisions being built from here to Bluffton," he said. "Not a single one had a single silt fence. I could have 20 lawyers, if I didn't have to worry about paying them, just addressing every one of the erosion and sedimentation cases."