LUNCH WITH JOSH KRATKA 

May 19, 2026  [via Zoom]
 

Actor, activist, attorney:  we look forward to hearing about Josh's work in the public interest.
 

As an undergrad, Josh wrote his senior history thesis on the evolution of baseball from a gentleman’s pastime to the first mass-marketed professional sport, ran the Quincy House Cinema Guild, and “brought down the house” with his “hilarious” performance as Dr. Purgon in Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid (quotes from Crimson review not checked for accuracy).

After that inauspicious start, Josh became a lead organizer in an ultimately unsuccessful two-year-long campaign to unionize the Harvard Coop. That sometimes-harrowing experience led him to Northeastern University School of Law, and then to a staff attorney position at the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, where he advocated for consumer and environmental protections before the state legislature and executive agencies.

In 1994, Josh joined the National Environmental Law Center in Boston, where he has spent the last 30 years litigating environmental cases in federal courts, at both the trial court and appellate levels. He has represented national, state, and local citizen groups in more than a dozen states in citizen enforcement suits against many of the largest corporations and biggest polluters in the country.

Major cases include a series of lawsuits to protect endangered Atlantic salmon in Maine from highly polluting aquaculture facilities and hydropower dam turbines, a Clean Water Act suit against a coal burning power plant in western Pennsylvania, and groundbreaking lawsuits to crack down on air pollution from some of the nation’s dirtiest fossil fuel plants on the Texas Gulf Coast. The latter included a 16-year fight against ExxonMobil, involving 10 million pounds of illegal pollution from 16,000 proven violations of the Clean Air Act, a three-week trial, five appeals (including to the U.S. Supreme Court), and the largest civil penalty ever assessed in an environmental citizen suit.

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The goals of ClassACT HR79 are:

• Nourish existing relationships among classmates and foster new ones, especially between reunions.
• Host Class resources. 
• Maintain a directory of classmates working on local, national, and international challenges.

We began to organize ourselves at our 40th Reunion, inspired by ClassACT HR73 and HR79's Initiative for Investigative Journalism.