ken firpo, law student

I met Ken Firpo while I was a member of the environmental club at NYU, Earth Matters! As the National Organizer for the Rainforest Action Network's Global Finance Campaign, Ken was in charge of organizing for a campaign asking Citigroup to take responsibility for their investments in environmentally abusive companies around the world. The campaign took 4 years, but it ended with Citigroup adopting a comprehensive set of social and environmental standards, setting a precedent that Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase [campaign pictured to the right] would soon follow after being targeted by RAN. During the campaigns, Ken would fly in from San Francisco, meeting with us once or twice a year and charming the hell out of everyone he encountered. Handsome Ken to his college friends, he is one of the most well-spoken people I've ever met and RAN couldn't have picked a better person to convince people to put on monkey suits or stand next to 40-foot inflatable whales. Ken is currently living in Gowanus [how cool is that?] and is a first-year student at NYU Law. I recently sat down with him to talk about how he got started at RAN, their latest campaigns, and moving from protesting corporations to reforming torts. Were you involved in activism when you were in school? It started with me not really knowing what I wanted to focus on. I did a lot of local environmental cleanups of rivers and trails. And really quickly the WTO protests in Seattle in the Fall of 1999 and A16, the World Bank protest in Washington D.C. in the Spring of 2000, really radicalized me and a whole generation of students and activists who hadn't really thought about how the environment's related to human rights or trade or capitalism or globalism. I got very involved with the movement on campus to organize people to come down to D.C. We ended up with one of the biggest blocs of affinity groups - of a school of only 1600 people, I think there were 400 people who went down and got arrested and protested. That, for me, was a really formative experience. What did you do after you graduated? I spent a year with this organization called Green Corps. They call themselves the field school for environmental organizing. You get training from experts in media, fundraising or leadership development in communities, and then you get sent out to different placements around the country to work as field staff on campaigns, mostly environmental. So I was in San Francisco, St. Louis, D.C., Chicago and Denver over the course of a year. You end up with a lot of more hard skills than you would otherwise; it's hard to get a job organizing right out of college, so it really put me in a position to go work with RAN. They offer you an amazing set of skills, and maybe they're not a perfect group, but I'm glad I did the program rather than not did it. It's not like surgery where you need special training. Most of it is stuff you'd figure out on your own through trial and error, you're just getting your trial and error out during the program. And then you started working at RAN. I started at RAN as the Grassroots Organizer for their Global Finance Campaign, which was really small when I started, just the director of the campaign, and me. I was doing trainings, organizing protests, meeting with student groups. My job was kind of just to make stuff happen. So that was a big change from Green Corps, where you're always a small part of a big thing, to being someone that was trying to delegate work to people around the country, to get things started where they lived. One of the last campaigns you worked on was RAN's campaign Freedom From Oil campaign, specifically directed at Ford. RAN's Global Finance Campaign was a very new kind of thing when it began - there weren't any other groups seriously thinking about protesting Citigroup. [In Seattle] RAN and the Ruckus Society hung that banner with an arrow that said "Democracy" going one way and a "WTO" arrow going the other way, and it was on the front page of hundreds of newspapers around the world the next day. And they got a lot of attention and credit for it, maybe even some they didn't deserve, but it really played out in RAN's favor in the years following it, because corporations were more afraid of RAN than they'd been before, because of the attention they got in the lead up and aftermath of Seattle. With Ford, there are a lot of groups talking about climate change and fuel economy. I think RAN identified the kind of added value we could bring to the debate about cars and trucks being more fuel efficient. It's hard to say what Ford thought of us with relation to the other groups they were talking to, but RAN and Global Exchange were really successful in framing and shifting the debate, being more radical and pushing the envelope with what we wanted Ford to do - and that allowed the other groups some more cover to push Ford to do more. If we're demanding no C02 tail-pipe emissions from all their cars and trucks by 2020, and some other group goes to Ford and asks for 10 more miles per gallon by 2015, then it seems more palatable for them to address the situation. I've done some organizing and it's a tough job. Did you get burnt out? I started at RAN in 2002 and ended in 2005. So including Green Corps, that was about 4.5 years of organizing. You don't just have to motivate yourself to get out of bed and get to these big problems, but you have to motivate other people to. So it's hard to even convince yourself that with all the big problems in the world, there's something you can do about it, and then to try to translate that energy to get other people to try to do stuff...It can be hard. Did you see yourself organizing for just a few years? I'm definitely not organizing now; I'm in law school. I don't want to say that organizing is a young person's thing and that older people don't do it, because that's not true, and it'd be better if there were fewer distinctions between "OK, you're an organizer, you're a fundraiser, you're an executive director," because there's room for all that stuff to interact. I think RAN's good at having those roles bleed into each other. So I'd love to go back into a group like RAN or start my own organization and work somewhere to use what I'm learning in law school to be a more strategic and effective organizer, campaigner, rabble rouser, whatever, and not just exclusively one thing. I don't want to be a lawyer for the rest of my life. Why law school? It's sort of a long story, but in terms of my career, I think RAN is really on to something with their kinds of campaigns against big companies, but I think we're kind of limited by the tools we have to get companies to do stuff, and to get them to commit, follow through and not go back on their word. With Citigroup, all we have is their word, the pressure of the marketplace and consumer protests if they go back on their word to clean up the environment or not invest in certain types of projects anymore - all a whole slew of environmental and human rights groups have are these non-binding, corporate, internal commitments. So I was like, "I need to go to law school" and figure out how to hold companies more accountable in a more enforceable way, so that it's not just their word against ours, but it's actually something that might be more legally binding, or at least a set of commitments that can be enforced in a more transparent way. So it's not just people at Citigroup sitting on one side of the table and a couple people at RAN on the other, but turning it into a more public commitment. It's not just RAN that's struggling with it; governments are regulating less and less, the UN isn't very powerful right now in dealing with problems like global warming, the Kyoto Protocol. So all of that is to say that in 5-10 years, I want to be in a position where I can start actually influencing that and working with campaigning tools, the stuff I did at RAN, but also bringing legal tools into the mix. That's kind of a big load to carry, and someone might say, "Why don't you ask someone?" instead of going yourself. At the end of what you were just saying, you kind of said that you wanted to be that guy. I'm young and my perspective on the whole movement of corporate abuse is pretty limited; I don't know everything that's going on, but I don't see a whole lot of people from my world, with my background of organizing and leading corporate accountability campaigns, who also understand the law. So I thought I could fill that niche. It is a big load to carry and I don't expect to be the leader or the only guy, but where I see my interests and where I see a need in the movement, that's where it all comes together for me. That's the plan at least, I don't know if it's going to be successful. When you applied to law schools, did you sugar coat your activism background? Actually, it was surprising. I wrote my essay in a way that I thought was pretty realistic about what I had done. I got this fellowship to go to NYU for public interest law, and I feel super lucky to have gotten it, but in the interview process when you have to sit at a table with 8 people and explain your background, why you want to go to law school, I talked specifically about, you know, dressing up in the orangutan costume we used at Citigroup protests, and how that translated into action on Citigroup's part - I don't think I did sugar coat it very much. Not every lawyer on the interviewing panel supported that necessarily, direct action, but the larger 'what the campaign represented' idea, I was surprised at how supportive the people were. There probably aren't many people in law school who have locked themselves to the doors of a bank. My impressions have changed a lot after coming here. I'm 28 and a lot of people are right out of college. It is a school and people come with backpacks, but there is a certain level of seriousness or decorum about the whole thing, just walking in the door. Undergrad is just two doors down, but it's definitely very separate. I'm sort of dismayed by how few people are committed to public interest or activism, but on the other hand, surprised at how many of us there are at a place like NYU, which is one of the best law schools in the country, but still there's a huge commitment to public interests. We're not the majority by any means, but there's still a lot of folks that want to do it. But to come from RAN in San Francisco to NYU law in New York City, it's a big adjustment. My impression of law school has always been that you learn about what is or isn't legal, but there isn't much discussion of why. It's not a sociology or philosophy or ethics class, so the whole system where the laws are made by the people who control society and are powerful, those assumptions are all sort of implicit. I'm sure there are upper level classes that might address those kinds of issues, but not in the first year curriculum. I've been surprised by how little talk there is about classism or racism or sexism or any of the things that you talk about in an undergrad sociology seminar - they don't get brought up in a law school class. You're reading actual cases about really messed up things that happen in real people's lives, and they happen because the law is that way for a whole set of reasons that isn't talked about in class. Do you have summer plans? I'm going to Ecuador. Over about 20 years, Texaco dumped, by some estimates, dozens of times more oil, sludge and waste in the Amazon than the entire Exxon Valdez spill; people are calling it the single biggest environmental disaster since Chernobyl. There's a law suit from 30,000 local and indigenous people who are impacted everyday by this toxic pollution in their backyards, whether it's ruining their drinking water, or babies being born with birth defects. The lawsuit's been going on a long time, but this semester I've been volunteering on the legal team that's representing these people, so in the summer I'm going to go to Ecuador to work more directly on the issue. The big thing is getting Texaco, which is now Chevron, to pay for the clean up, which is going to cost about $6 billion. That, for me, is a great example of how social movements all around the world and the law can come together. Photo of RAN banner by Dang Ngo, 1999.