Zygmunt J. B. Plater is Professor of Law at Boston College Law School, teaching and researching in the areas of environmental, property, land use, and administrative agency law.

Over the past 30 years he has been involved with a number of issues of environmental protection and land use regulation, including service as petitioner and lead counsel in the extended endangered species litigation over the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Tellico Dam, representing the endangered snail darter, farmers, Cherokee Indians, and environmentalists in the Supreme Court of the United States, federal agencies, and congressional hearings. He was chairman of the State of Alaska Oil Spill Commission’s Legal Task Force over a two-year period after the wreck of the M/V Exxon-Valdez. He was a consultant to plaintiffs in the Woburn toxic litigation, Anderson et al. v. W.R. Grace et al., the subject of the book and movie A Civil Action. Drawing upon his work for the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Commission he researched and consulted on responses to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Dr. Plater will discuss the continuing mission of and the challenges to citizen environmentalism.