Atlantic States Legal Foundation Inc

Atlantic States Legal Foundation, Inc. (ASLF) is a New York chartered not-for-profit founded in 1982. Our mission is to develop and promote innovative and practical ways to preserve the environment, green the urban core, and protect water resources. We build bridges between communities, technical experts, and government to advocate for systemic improvements in environmental management, policy making, and public engagement.   For the past thirty years, ASLF has been a leader in executing complex projects locally, nationally, and internationally.

ASLF has been involved in a range of environmental issues, from conservation effort to public health and environmental risk communication to urban revitalization. We work on complex, multi-faceted urban ecological problems and have always emphasized the protection, restoration, and conservation of water resources. For decades, ASLF has championed the resuscitation of Onondaga Lake. As a result  of initial litigation against Onondaga County for its wastewater and combined sewer overflow (CSO) discharges, we helped bring about a dramatic reduction in nutrient and sewage pollution in the Lake. Fish populations are now rebounding and the Lake, once considered the most polluted lake in the Western Hemisphere, draws recreational boaters, catch-and-release fishing derbies, and other activities along the shore. 

In collaboration with community members, ASLF advocated for green infrastructure to control CSOs, providing evidence of the effectiveness of green roofs, porous pavement, rain gardens and similar projects.  Onondaga County has now become a national model for the use of green infrastructure technologies to control stormwater and combined sewer overflow (http://savetherain.us/). We are now working with the County and the State of New York to design innovative methods to tackle stubborn water quality problems in some tributaries to Onondaga Lake and with the community to ensure that vulnerable populations are aware of the continuing legacy of industrial pollution in the form of stringent fish consumption advisories that remain applicable to Onondaga Lake.

We view ourselves as facilitators of collective impact, working toward environmental sanity through creative problem solving.  Our projects integrate the input of community members with the ecology of urban areas and whole-system design to redefine challenges as solutions, capitalizing on community assets to improve the health and well-being of residents, while also improving the environmental quality and resilience of our community.

To learn more about ASLF and our current projects, please visit: www.aslf.org.