“There were only two lawyers at the organization at the time and I worked on all the briefs,” he recalled in a 2004 LawInterview.com interview , and they faced off against a platoon of oil company and US Justice Department attorneys. “It was a real David versus Goliath situation and we were winning at every turn.”
Peter Shelley was a night student at Suffolk Law School in the late 1970s when he interned at the Conservation Law Foundation and joined its battle to prevent oil and gas drilling off the Georges Bank fishing grounds.
A few years later, when Mr. Shelley was in his home state of Pennsylvania getting legal experience as an assistant attorney general, CLF’s then-president Doug Foy asked him to return to the organization and take on what would become a career-defining case: forcing the government to clean up Boston Harbor. At the time, via two treatment plants, 43 Greater Boston municipalities were pouring more than 450 gallons of treated sewage and 100 tons of sludge into the harbor daily.
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“I filed the first legal papers in July of 1983 and in March of 2016, the case officially came to a close,” Mr. Shelley wrote in an essay on CLF’s website after the final federal court rulings in a multibillion-dollar effort that turned Boston’s notorious “dirty water” into a memory many now only know through the line of a song they sing in Fenway Park.
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Mr. Shelley, whose lawsuits also addressed overfishing off New England’s coast, died Oct. 13 in Care Dimensions Hospice House in Lincoln. He was 77, lived in Marblehead, and had been diagnosed with cancer in April 2022.
Federal court rulings Mr. Shelley secured to clean up Boston Harbor bolstered anti-pollution efforts in other harbors along New England’s coast, said Foy, a former CLF president and chief executive who now is an entrepreneur with businesses addressing climate change.
But those cases were most resoundingly felt in Greater Boston, where some 40 years ago those who fell into the harbor or the Charles River water were advised to seek quick medical attention.
“Now you can swim in the river and not get a tetanus shot,” Foy said. “That’s part of the legacy of that case that has ripples everywhere.”
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Mr. Shelley’s work extended beyond the courtroom when he and the foundation took on overfishing in the Gulf of Maine 30 years ago as key fishing stocks teetered close to collapse.
A groundbreaking lawsuit he filed in 1991 forced federal regulators to increase protections for cod, flounder, and haddock. Several years later, victory in another lawsuit seemed poised to help key fish species recover.
But while reading the judge’s ruling, he realized the stringent restrictions could eliminate a way of life in the fishing community that he had hoped to put on a sustainable course.
“It broke the fishermen’s back,” he told the Boston Globe in 2003. “That’s not what we wanted.”
So he worked with environmentalists, fishermen, and officials to persuade the judge to relax the ruling – an uncommon compromise for an environmental advocate to seek.
By then, he had seen life on a fishing boat firsthand. Encouraged by a fishing family to personally experience the hardships of life on the waves, he spent 13 days on a boat alongside fishermen, opening shells and shucking scallops.
“Fishermen work hard and they withstand tremendous danger,” he told the Globe.
Though addressing Georges Bank oil and gas drilling, fishing limits, and Boston Harbor were his highest-profile cases, his work extended beyond the stories that drew the biggest headlines.
“He was really the heart and soul of the organization for a long time, always exhibiting just the best qualities of an environmental advocate,” said Priscilla Brooks, CLF’s vice president for ocean conservation.
But Boston Harbor remained a career capstone, partly because it rose to the level of presidential politics in 1988. The campaign of George H.W. Bush, the Republican vice president, called it “the dirtiest harbor in America” in TV ads attacking his Democratic opponent, Michael S. Dukakis, who was then the governor of Massachusetts.
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“In court, Peter ultimately secured a comprehensive cleanup at a cost of more than $18 billion, restored ecosystem services valued at more than $100 billion, and transformed the harbor from a foul embarrassment to an ecological jewel and an engine of Boston’s economic renewal,” Brad Campbell, CLF’s current president and chief executive, wrote in a note to the organization’s staff after Mr. Shelley died.
“There is perhaps no individual,” Campbell added, “whose advocacy has had a larger imprint on New England’s land, waters, and living resources.”
Born on Aug. 21, 1947, Mr. Shelley spent much of his youth on a farm in Bedminster, Pa., and attended a one-room schoolhouse in his early elementary school years.
The farm had been in the family of his mother, Virginia Shaw Shelley, who is known as Ginger. His parents divorced when he was entering his teen years and his father, Duke Shelley, became a successful commercial artist.
Mr. Shelley graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut and received a bachelor’s in economics from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y.
While he was a student at Hobart he met Stephanie Gowans, a student at Wells College in Aurora, N.Y. They married in 1970, the year after he graduated. She was a clinical social worker with adoptive children and families and then worked in bioenergetics therapy with adults.
“We just really believed in trying to help the world be a better place, he through his environmental work, and me helping other people,” she said.
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Mr. Shelley was senior counsel at CLF when he became ill. Formerly, he was the organization’s Maine director from 1996 to 2003, Massachusetts director from 2003 to 2010, and interim president for several months, beginning in December 2014.
Although his work consumed much of his time, “I regarded him as a Renaissance guy,” Stephanie said.
Along with taking on nearly every home repair, “he could knit, he could sew,” she said. “He sewed all the curtains in our house.”
He also baked themed birthday cakes for his grandchildren based on their requests.
“And he had a well-developed sense of humor,” Stephanie said. “Before his first brain surgery, he said to his surgeon, ‘The one thing I ask is that you don’t take out my sense of humor.’ The first thing he did when he woke up was crack a joke, so they didn’t.”
In addition to his wife and his mother, who lives in Ithaca, N.Y., Mr. Shelley leaves two sons, Luke of North Conway, N.H., and Ethan of Las Vegas; a sister, Mary of Ithaca, N.Y.; a brother, Jim of La Mesa, Calif.; three granddaughters, and one grandson.
A gathering to celebrate Mr. Shelley’s life and work will be announced.
Along with a legacy of court victories that will reach far into New England’s future, he helped create the legal framework for the Phoenix Island Protected Area in Kiribati, an ocean nation in the Pacific between Hawaii and Australia.
In 2021, he was still working to keep Boston Harbor accessible to everyone by taking on developers and officials.
“Public access to Boston’s beautiful waterfront won today,” he said that April when a judge ruled against the state’s attempt to allow construction of a proposed 600-foot tower close to the water.
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No matter the case, Mr. Shelley brought to the battle what colleagues called “a quiet charm” that drew respect from adversaries.
Mr. Shelley, Brooks said, “was the ultimate example of an advocate driven by principle, heart, humility, and passion.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
