Katherine Coffey
Associate Attorney
Katherine works on the Water, Forest, and Land and Community teams. A lot of her early work focused on preventing downstream communities from bearing the burden of forever chemicals or PFAS contamination from industrial polluters. This has involved tracking and analyzing data on PFAS available from state and federal sources, commenting to Virginia Department of Environmental Quality on water discharge permits, and assessing opportunities for further state action to reduce PFAS pollution. With the Forest team, she has provided comment on projects proposed in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, so that natural resources that belong to all of us are protected.
“When I went to law school, I knew I wanted to practice environmental law in central and southern Appalachia,” Katherine said. “It’s important to me to support environmental movements and environmental justice in my home region, and SELC’s focus on place-based work provides an amazing opportunity to do that, especially in collaboration with communities facing huge environmental harms.”
SELC’s environmental justice work is particularly meaningful to Katherine, who is from Roanoke, Va., and now lives in Charlottesville. “Especially in our region, there’s no divorcing environmental degradation from historic exploitation of people and resources,” she said. “Our work does the most good when it’s led directly by affected communities.”
The Bent Mountain community in Virginia holds a really special place in Katherine’s heart. “Folks there are so welcoming, and there are several beautiful swimming holes along Bottom Creek that I try to go to at least once every summer with friends and family,” she said. “It really keeps the places and people we work for in the front of my mind.”
- Columbia Law School; managing editor, Columbia Human Rights Law Review
- B.A., University of Virginia