Growing up in Columbia, MO, chemical engineer and industry lawyer Mary Ellen Ternes spent many afternoons poring over her mother’s art books and trying to read her father’s copies of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her father, a neurologist, and her mother, an artist trained at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, encouraged her love of science and creativity. “My family’s academic focus and home environment instilled a great curiosity and endless passion for learning,” says Ternes.
Part of that environment included visits to her grandfather’s farm. “We loved the outdoors and spent our summers hiking the bluff country along the Missouri River,” she says.
Today, as a lawyer with McAfee & Taft, Oklahoma’s largest private law firm, Ternes’s corporate defense practice encompasses all facets of environmental law. She says that her chemical engineering background is integral to her success in this area of law.
In 1980, when Ternes began college at Vanderbilt Univ., environmental policy was big news. She decided that “chemical engineering best matched my interest in hazardous waste and air pollution,” she says. “In college, I wanted to save the world, one hazardous waste site at a time.
After graduation, Ternes worked as a chemical engineer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund Div. as an emergency response on-scene coordinator. “This work was gratifying, in that it resulted in tangible reduction in ‘imminent and substantial risks’ to public health and the environment. We put out chemical fires, responded to train derailments, cleaned up spills, and remediated hazardous waste sites,” she says.
Broadening her experience at EPA, Ternes wrote permits for hazardous-waste incinerators under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), and she began to appreciate industry positions regarding environmental policy and impacts of policy choices.
Leaving EPA for industry, Ternes supervised regulatory and compliance programs under RCRA, the Toxic Substances control Act (TSCA), and the Clean Air Act (CAA), and she became interested in ways to achieve more efficient policy solutions. Ternes saw lawyers as being in the best position to advocate policy approaches to regulators. Furthermore, a lawyer with a chemical engineering background like hers “would have an even better chance of developing persuasive arguments and achieving the most efficient resolution of complex issues involving science and law,” she says.
Ternes earned her law degree from the Univ. of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1995. “While I would miss chemical engineering, my greatest contribution was as a technically competent industry defense lawyer,” she says.
Today, as a legal specialist in McAfee & Taft’s Environmental Practice Group, Ternes uses her environmental law and engineering expertise to achieve the best outcomes in resolving regulatory compliance and enforcement issues, as well as real estate transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and litigation on behalf of industrial, commercial, and municipal clients.“
“My chemical engineering background in general, and combustion work specifically, is perfect for addressing issues arising in CAA greenhouse gas regulation and permitting, particularly for combustion sources such as utilities, cement kilns and incinerators,” she says. “My site remediation experience is critical in evaluating client risk arising from transactions involving contaminated property and identifying ways to assign and manage that risk.” Additionally, her prior work as a permit writer at EPA and a compliance manager in industry afford Ternes both an industrial plant perspective and a regulator perspective, both of which are necessary for identifying optimal permit strategies, compliance approaches, and enforcement defenses.
Ternes’s dedication to energy research and environmental policy finds rewarding outlets in AIChE. “Chemical engineers are a natural fit for environmental and energy law,” she says.
In AIChE, Ternes has been particularly active in the Environmental Div. In 2010, she served as Program Chair for AIChE’s Spring Meeting in San Antonio, TX, for which she helped to recruit an impressive collection of environmental and energy experts. Ternes also spearheaded the 2009 creation of AIChE’s Chemical Engineering and the Law Forum, which she currently chairs. She says that these AIChE affiliations and others—such as AIChE’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum, the Center for Energy Initiatives, and the Institute for Sustainability —keep her in tune with progressive thought and technological development in chemical engineering.
Ternes’s efforts to educate the public and policy-makers on science and the environment are tireless. She co-chairs the American Bar Association’s Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Ecosystems Committee, serves on the City of Nichols Hills Environment, Health and Sustainability Commission, lectures in the community, and writes a monthly magazine column on environmental and sustainability issues.
“As an engineer and lawyer, my goal is to contribute to enhancing policy-makers’ understanding of science and engineering applications relevant to science-based policy,” she says. “This includes teaching scientists and engineers about law and policy, and supporting increased collaboration and cooperation between regulated entities and regulators—while encouraging a greater appreciation of both science and policy by the general public.”
Reprinted with permission from CEP (Chemical Engineering Progress),
April 2011.
Copyright 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers
(AIChE).