Karen Wristen, Executive Director, SPECspec.bc.ca
As a student, Karen Wristen dreamed of practising environmental law. The problem was, at that time, such a field didn’t exist.
After Wristen, now executive director for the Society for Promoting Environmental Conservation (SPEC), graduated from York University, she soon learned that the Canadian Environmental Law Association offered the only funded, non-governmental position in the country dedicated to the discipline.
“Not until I had been practising for five years were environmental departments springing up in large firms,” says Wristen. “Since corporations could afford to hire legal aid to protect them from environmental regulation, there needed to be legal protection on the other side of the equation: public-interest groups.”
Wristen grew up close to nature. While at high school in Toronto, she joined a pollution-probe club—an association with a public-interest group and that changed her life.
“We were testing water in a creek I played at as a kid—that I swam in and drank from—and discovered it was heavily polluted with arsenic from a local factory,” she says. “I realized then that environmental laws can’t protect us if they are not being enforced.”
Years later, Wristen applied her civil litigation skills to environmental cases and, eventually, to SPEC. Wristen applies her personal values to her work with the organization, combining a sense of respect with promoting lifestyle and policy changes aimed toward urban-based sustainability.
There’s an incredible ability to advance issues,” she says. “It’s always about the power and ability of citizens to work with government to create change.”
—Rob McMahon
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