City of Dust

4. Raising doubts

Not far from the EPA’s formidable granite headquarters on Broadway, another office focuses single-mindedly on environmental issues and the frightening impacts those situations can have on the people who live and work near them. Their similarities, however, end there. After 9/11, these two offices became locked in a battle over science and fact, largely because of a rumpled hobbit named Joel Kupferman. Kupferman is the crusading attorney who heads the New York Environmental Law & Justice Project, an in-your-face legal hit squad that isn’t afraid to be called radical. Its offices, on the fourth floor of an old Broadway commercial building, are a world apart from the federal building’s grand formality and impressive architecture. ...