Celebrating our Colleagues, January 2023: Jim Walsh

By Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director

Jim Walsh, Policy Director for Food and Water Watch

SEHN has an unwritten by-law that guides much of our work: we have a moral obligation to pass on compliments. Since we primarily work in coalitions, we get to see brilliant colleagues bring extraordinary skills to the table and make extraordinary contributions to the common good. We want to fulfill our joyous obligation and celebrate our friends and allies with this new feature in the Networker. The first person we honor is Jim Walsh, Policy Director for Food and Water Watch.

At our last staff meeting I shared how Jim had helped get a letter to the federal agency that regulates pipelines. We needed to issue a press release, get the letter into the hands of the agency and members of Congress.  A lot of what had to be done was outside of my area of expertise. Jim stepped in and with no fuss no muss got it all done. At our meeting, Sandra Steingraber chimed in with how Jim had expedited a scientists’ letter to the president. We have so many stories about Jim’s unstinting kindness and spot-on competence. Sandra wrote this about Jim:

“A curious fact about me is that I learned embroidery from my father, a World War II veteran with PTSD. My dad’s unspoken suffering was assuaged by creating, with skeins of thread, safe, comforting images of flowering trees and dancing children. The sewing skills I picked up from him went on to serve me well as a biologist who developed a knack for dissection and animal surgery.

 If you knew a rat who needed a tracheotomy, I was your girl.

Later, as a scientist who works in the public interest on the climate crisis, I began to think of scientific papers and reports as piles of embroidery thread. All by itself, science is just bundles of vibrant colors. To create the world we want to live in—a safe, comforting place—all that scientific data needs to be threaded through the needle of the law. The act of creating a picture with needle and thread is the work of policymaking.

Jim Walsh is one of the most inspired policy influencers I know. His vision for what the picture of our world should look like—a climate-stable world of healthy children and flowering trees undestroyed by pipelines and fracking wells, a world where fossil fuels are just fossils again, unexhumed from their stony graveyards—is also my vision. As a biologist, I have an intimate knowledge of the data but don’t always know what colors to thread the legal needle with at any one particular political moment or what part of the picture we need to be working on first.  Jim always does.

All this is to say, I am so lucky to have enjoyed a years-long collaboration, over several campaigns, with Jim Walsh. He continuously shows me how the science can be brought to the law to create the world we want to inhabit.”