The Best Defense

When Abigail Dillen, president of the legal advocacy firm Earthjustice, first saw the electoral map light up red on Election Night, she had one assuring thought:

“Thank goodness we’ve grown the organization.”

Dillen, a career environmental lawyer, has overseen Earthjustice’s fastest growth spurt in its 54-year-history, tripling its size since she took over leadership in 2018. Now, with a team of more than 200 attorneys, she’s guiding the largest US environmental law nonprofit through the end of the most decisive decade for climate action.

“We did not want to be caught unprepared for a [second] Trump administration,” said Dillen, on the months leading up to the 2024 election. “And so, we really pushed ourselves to imagine everything that they might do.”

In preparing to defend against future attacks on environmental protections, Dillen said, it was important to first reflect on the past.

“In 2017, our goal was to prevent any structural harm to the framework of legal protections that guarantee us everything from clean air and water to appropriate action in the face of a climate emergency. And we were extraordinarily successful.”

“Of course, we lost precious time in addressing climate change and our accelerating biodiversity crisis. We can never get that back—but we didn’t stand still.”

Look at Earthjustice’s track record and the numbers add up. Though some cases are still pending, the organization has won 85% of its 135-plus lawsuits filed during Trump’s first term. And other legal advocacy firms are quick to highlight a similar trend.

“During the last Trump administration, we achieved some of our most significant victories,” said DJ Gerken, executive director for the Southern Environmental Law Center and a close ally of Dillen’s. “We’ve been here before—and we’ve won.”

Still, Dillen says 2025 is a whole new world for environmental attorneys. Courts are tougher to navigate; the scope and scale of litigation has ballooned; and irreversible climate impacts are imminent.

“We’re at the halfway mark of a decade that I’ve been looking toward for my whole career,” says Dillen. “We have to keep moving forward over the next five years. We’re so incredibly behind.”

While a “hold the line” approach may have worked during Trump’s first term, Dillen argues environmental lawyers can’t afford to take on that same mindset today.

“We can’t just be on defense waiting for a better day to come. Everything needs to have an offensive dimension.”

Nearly a month into a second Trump administration, Dillen’s pre-election imaginings are starting to pan out. In response, Earthjustice is planning to file legal challenges to block President Trump’s attempts to cut off federal environmental funding and open up more areas for offshore drilling —all while pushing forward existing court cases to defend climate and health protections now threatened by Trump’s executive orders.

On the surface, these lawsuits may look defensive in nature. But from talking to Dillen, it’s clear that each action she takes is just as much about blocking dangerous policy agendas as it is about creating new environmental protections.

“The Supreme Court has made moves that really put a lot of the law from the last 50 years in question. And so, every time we’re in court, we are lawmaking as well as just defending against bad policy.”

Earthjustice’s “super-expert Supreme Court practice,” a strategy Dillen’s team has been developing for the past six years, falls into this territory. In short, their lawyers consider past Supreme Court decisions to identify cases from the start that could substantially strengthen environmental law, develop these cases into viable lawsuits and help others in the legal field to do the same.

A key place for Earthjustice to play offense will be in Alaska, where they’ll be picking up a decades-long fight to defend public lands such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—a key target of Trump’s drilling and mining agenda. Their legal partners on the ground there, like Trustees for Alaska, are resolved in their approach.

“We will call out corruption. We will stand with Alaskans protecting the places vital to their livelihoods and ways of life. We will sue,” said Vicki Clark, executive director for Trustees for Alaska.

Another emergent strategy for environmental lawyers, Dillen says, will debut in “sleepy local forums”—less visible bureaucratic spaces where influential local and statewide energy and climate decisions tend to fly under the radar.

After all, in Dillen’s opinion, “There is no national energy policy.”

“Donald Trump can [declare] an energy emergency—but the truth is, we make our energy policies state by state, and we make them kind of trial by trial,” says Dillen.

“How much can a utility charge you? Where is it going to get the energy to give you your electricity? How do we site the infrastructure we need? All these things—regular people who pay bills have a voice in.”

But while Dillen’s eager to explore all the newer, sharper interventions lawyers can take in Trump’s second term, she doesn’t think legal action is a silver bullet.

“I truly believe, after having done this for 25 years, what people are willing to talk about is what decision-makers are willing to act on. We [lawyers] could bring in whatever statutory code we want, we could bring in whatever fancy scientist—but if it doesn’t feel like we’re arguing for the right result for people in real life, we will lose.”

Time will tell whether activists and lawyers alike can protect the foundations of environmental law while progressing more expansive policies in the new Trump era. For now, Dillen’s betting that a good offense—one that takes no opportunity for granted—will be their best defense.