“The biggest risks have the biggest benefits,” says Reed Zars. It’s something he’s learned in his Wyoming-based private practice, where he specializes in environmental citizen-suit cases. Reed has been a consistent underdog, taking on behemoth corporations in David-and-Goliath match ups — and winning. Over the course of his career, he has brought, and successfully concluded, environmental cases against Texaco, Conoco, PacifiCorp, Southern California Edison, Tennessee Valley Authority, Lehigh Cement, Public Service Company of New Mexico, Salt River Project and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, to name a few.

In the 1990s, when he brought suit against the Public Service Company of Colorado, Reed  broke new legal ground. “We asked to use the plant’s own opacity monitors, which examine the darkness of the plume of emissions, to enforce the Clean Air Act. It had no support in existing law other than it made sense,” he recalls. When the judge agreed, “it sent a shock wave through the industry,” says Reed, now considered one of the nation’s leading environmental rights attorneys. “The case eventually settled with an agreement to install $150 million worth of pollution control equipment at the plant.”

“We have an obligation to future generations to tread lightly on the land,” says Reed.