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Environmental
Guru
By Pam Droog
Frank Hackmann
Partner, Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal
One year before a party guest in “The Graduate” told Dustin Hoffman
the future is “plastic,” a party guest in 1966 told Frank Hackmann
the future is “environmental law.”
“At the Monsanto summer employees’ party, Elmer Boehm, who ran Monsanto’s
Enviro-Chem division, told me, ‘In a few years there will be a field
called environmental law, and if you get a law degree now, you’ll
be in a great position to take advantage of it,’” Hackmann recalls.
The field appealed to Hackmann, especially in those days of social
change and upheaval.
“I’ve always had an urge to make the world a better place to live
in, and I felt that law gave me a broader canvas on which to paint
than engineering,” he says. Environmental law combined public policy,
science, politics, “everything I was interested in,” he adds. “Also
it was a field that would never be completely resolved or settled.
Something always would be happening.”
So, after earning a B.S. in chemical engineering at the University
of Illinois/Champaign-Urbana, Hackmann worked for Monsanto by day,
and attended Saint Louis University School of Law at night. He joined
Ralston Purina after earning his law degree in 1972.
“That’s when all the environmental laws were being passed,” he says.
“We had to set up compliance programs and task forces to implement
them.”
Hackmann remained at Ralston until 1990, when he became a partner
at the law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. Soon after, he
found himself testifying before the U.S. Senate, and later, the
House and Senate Subcommittees, as part of an industry panel on
behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the reauthorization of
the Clean Water Act.
“That’s always a very interesting experience,” Hackmann says. “The
committees try very hard to wrestle with extremely difficult public
policy questions that spark very tough debate.”
He describes testifying before the Senate as invigorating and inspiring,
not particularly intimidating, “though maybe I was a bit more reserved
than I normally am,” he admits. “You really do feel the import of
the matters at hand and you think, this is really enjoyable work!”
Hackmann certainly finds practicing environmental law as enjoyable
now as ever. The bottom line of his practice is to “find ways to
make regulations more effective and user-friendly, and less draconian
and unfriendly,” he says. “We focus on addressing real problems
in ways that work and do not have negative, unintended side effects.”
That can be a real challenge, given the sheer volume of environmental
laws.
“One quote I like to share with groups is, there are more pages
of federal environmental regulations than there are IRS regulations,”
Hackmann says. “Very few business decisions can be made without
some consideration of environmental law implications. That gives
me a lot of ways to be involved.”
That involvement, besides representing clients, includes writing
and speaking extensively about environmental law, and actively participating
in the RCGA, where Hackmann recently completed three years as board
vice chair for environment and as a board member. He also is a past
chair of the Environment and Energy Committee and its Clean Air
Subcommittee.
“The main reason I was drawn to the RCGA in the early ’70s was that
it was dedicated to the principal that environmental quality and
economic growth can and should be compatible,” Hackmann says. He
believes the region has made great progress in addressing major
issues regionally, “less like individual principalities that are
not linked to one another,” he says. “I think we need to do more
of that if we’re going to take full advantage of all of our strengths.”
As an example, Hackmann says, 10 years ago one locality would have
fought hard to attract a certain business, “but now we realize it’s
better for that business to stay in the region rather than move
to a different geographic location altogether.” Taking that philosophy
a step farther, he’d like to see Kansas City and St. Louis work
together and see rural areas and metro areas cooperate, “to have
a more unified vision of what we want for Missouri,” he says.
Despite his duties at the law firm and the RCGA, Hackmann still
has time to serve on the board of the American Lung Association
and works with the Coalition for the Environment. He served on the
Clayton school board from 1976 to 1986, where he played a leadership
role in the voluntary desegregation program. He’s also active in
Scouting, St. Joseph Church and the Missouri Bar Association.
Hackmann and his wife, Susan, a library assistant for St. Louis
County Library, have been married for 33 years and have two sons
and two daughters. He’s a major fan of steam railroads—riding them
and reading about them. He’s lived in the same Clayton house for
nearly three decades and has no plans to leave.
“I’m Midwest born and bred,” he says. “I love to watch the seasons
change. That’s why I got a convertible!”
In the meantime, “I love what I do!” Hackmann says. “Environmental
law is constantly changing, the dynamics and the approaches. But
how we balance our desire for a certain lifestyle with the need
to preserve our heritage for our children and grandchildren, those
are the important issues. And they don’t change.”
Pam Droog is a St. Louis-based free-lance writer.
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