Environmental Warrior . . . and a Really Nice Guy : Profile: Lawyer Joel Reynolds, a gnatcatcher advocate and toll-road foe, wins respect from supporters and opponents alike.

There are at least two people lurking beneath Joel Reynolds’ bearded exterior.

One is the tough legal strategist whose David-and-Goliath battles against the San Joaquin Hills toll road and successful drive for federal protection of the California gnatcatcher have earned the wrath of Orange County developers and government officials who say his tactics have delayed projects and cost untold millions.

The other is the unassuming family man who drives an aging car, writes songs about his 2-year-old son and, even his opponents admit, is the kind of guy with whom you’d pleasantly share a barbecue.

“He’s great company,” says Hugh Hewitt, a Newport Beach lawyer, well-known conservative commentator and former Ronald Reagan White House staffer who frequently opposes Reynolds in court but still considers him a friend. “He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s very eloquent and he’s a damn good lawyer. He just uses those skills in defense of some very obnoxious principles.”

Gail Ruderman Feler, an attorney who works with Reynolds on the same side, agrees with everything but the characterization of his principles. “He’s one of the top environmental litigators in the state,” she says of the crusading lawyer. “He’s a terrific attorney who is very good at accomplishing results.”

Indeed, working for a variety of agencies since 1980 and, most recently, as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national nonprofit environmental organization, the 41-year-old Reynolds has been at the center of the some of the state’s fiercest and most highly publicized environmental battles.

He was instrumental in delaying the licensing of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo for four years. As much as nuclear opponents loved the delay, utility officials loathed it, complaining of nearly $6 billion in increased construction costs. He fought successfully for the cleanup of the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside County.

And in Orange County he has been largely responsible for two major environmental developments in recent years: the placing of the California gnatcatcher on the federal threatened species list, and the delay in construction of the proposed toll road which, upon completion, will transect Laguna Canyon.

“He’s a tenacious advocate,” says Richard Jacobs, a lawyer who has opposed Reynolds on both issues. “He knows environmental law, is committed to the interests of his clients, and my perception is that he represents them exceedingly well.”

That future wasn’t always evident in the youngster growing up in Riverside.

Born in Poughkeepsie, N. Y., Reynolds moved to Southern California at an early age with his mother and father, a professor who later founded the music department at UC Riverside. His father served as the music department’s chairman for 35 years and became the university’s dean of fine arts and student affairs before retiring earlier this year.

As an undergraduate at the university in the early 1970s, Reynolds majored in music and political science. But his interest in politics as a means of change had already been dampened by the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, one of his early heroes, Reynolds said. And as the young college student began casting about for new causes to embrace and strategies to pursue, he came upon a course in environmental law.

“I became interested in what the law could accomplish,” Reynolds recalled. His childhood interest in backpacking, hiking and playing sports had given him an early appreciation of environmental issues, he said. “I liked being in the mountains and going to the beach; I guess the environment is something I’ve always cared about in a personal way.”

After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1978, Reynolds clerked briefly for a federal judge before accepting a job with the Center for Law in the Public Interest. There, in addition to opposing the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant and pushing for the Stringfellow cleanup, he filed a lawsuit forcing the city of Los Angeles to establish a $1-million fund to restore and maintain the landmark Watts Towers.

Later he went to work for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, fighting the placement of toxic waste incinerators in low-income areas and representing poor people in their struggles to preserve their neighborhoods.

Since 1990 Reynolds has worked as a senior attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, where his most visible cases in recent years have involved the California gnatcatcher and the San Joaquin Hills toll road, a planned $1.1-billion tollway that would run from MacArthur Boulevard in Newport Beach to Interstate 5 in San Juan Capistrano.

To hear Reynolds tell it, the two cases began almost simultaneously by accident. In 1990, he says, he was approached by a group of Laguna Beach residents opposed to the toll road. About the same time, he became involved in petitioning the U.S. government to protect the California gnatcatcher, a rare songbird, under the federal Endangered Species Act.

That petition eventually succeeded in getting the bird listed as a threatened species, to the dismay of developers wishing to build in areas where the gnatcatcher resides.

The two cases became linked when Reynolds, citing the fact that some of the songbird’s prime habitat lies directly in the path of the proposed toll road, began using the new listing as a major argument against the project, a tactic that led critics to charge that the whole listing process had been a cynical ploy aimed at furthering his anti-toll road goals.

“I think he views the gnatcatcher as a vehicle for stopping the toll road,” says Laer Pearce, executive director of the Coalition for Habitat Conservation, which represents major developers in the area. “The entire listing was unnecessary. I think it’s a shame that the Endangered Species Act gets exploited. Reynolds has done a good job of slowing down the toll road and, in the process, slowed down development in Southern California.”

Reynolds denies that his petition to protect the gnatcatcher was motivated by anything other than pure concern for the songbird’s welfare. As for the toll road, he said, “It’s a terrible project. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do from the perspective of environmental protection, transportation policy, urban design and habitat preservation.”

But the debate over the project’s merits has also raised divisive philosophical issues regarding species’ preservation.

On one side is the state and various developers involved in the toll road and other projects who opposed the original gnatcatcher listing. Instead of such listings, they say, the protection of threatened and endangered species ought to be accomplished through a state-sponsored program under which developers voluntarily preserve crucial habitat in exchange for permission to develop on land considered less essential to various species, including the gnatcatcher.

“We are trying to make a major change in environmental policy, away from the reactionary single-species approach of the Endangered Species Act to a more anticipatory multi-species approach,” said Andy McLeod, the state’s assistant secretary for resources. McLeod’s office oversees the project, called the Natural Communities Conservation Plan.

On the other side are environmentalists who see the plan as a thinly veiled effort by developers to gut the Endangered Species Act.

And generally siding with them is the NRDC and Reynolds, who says he favors the state plan but views it as unworkable without the supportive federal protection statutes. “The (threatened species) listing is the engine that drives the process,” he says of the state conservation plan. “Without it, developers won’t enroll in the program.”

As the debate rages, meanwhile, work on a major portion of the San Joaquin Hills toll road has been put on hold.

Since 1991, Reynolds says, he has filed six lawsuits challenging the project on various environmental and procedural grounds. One of them--an action challenging the federal government’s approval of the tollway--is scheduled to be heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in September. Until then, a court injunction prevents any further construction along a 3.4-mile section of the tollway from El Toro Road to a point just north of Newport Coast Drive, as well as on 1.7 acres within the UC Irvine Ecological Reserve.

Mike Stockstill, a spokesman for the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which is planning the project, said the group still hopes to open the toll road as scheduled in spring 1997, despite idle weeks that could add $10 million to the final price tag. “Delay has been their No. 1 tactic,” he said of Reynold’s legal strategy. “This has all been extraordinarily unnecessary.”

Reynolds disagreed. “We are not bringing lawsuits for the sake of bringing lawsuits,” he said. “We are trying to enforce federal law.”

When he’s not busy enforcing federal law, the lawyer said, he likes to spend as much time as possible with his wife, Susan, and their 2-year-old son, Samuel. The family owns a big two-story house built in 1920, less than a block from the beach in Venice. There, Reynolds keeps his collection of 150 trees, plays the violin and composes choral pieces describing the life of his son.

Earning about $77,000 a year from his legal work, he drives a 1989 Hyundai with 80,000 miles on it.

“I’ve never been interested in the law as a process,” says the lawyer, who admits that he could earn more money in private practice. “I’m interested in what the law can do ; I’ve never taken a case that I didn’t believe in.”

A measure of his eclectic passion can be gleaned from a visit to Reynold’s cramped office in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles.

There, on a low shelf under a window, a long aerial photograph of the San Joaquin Hills toll road project area sits next to the feathered model of a gnatcatcher. A photograph of Reynolds standing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he once argued a case, lies near a likeness of Robert F. Kennedy walking his dog on a barren Oregon road.

Then there is the picture of the hard-hitting environmental lawyer dressed up in a purple dinosaur suit at his son’s second birthday party. And the photograph of him singing a duet with a colleague at a recent legal gathering.

“Obviously I’ve made a choice,” Reynolds says of his career. “It’s an economic choice and a lifestyle choice. Clearly, this is a different kind of work.”