Terry O’Rourke grew up in Houston in the 1950s when “smokestacks were a source of pride.” “I can actually remember watching Dragnet and learning that Los Angeles had smog, so we thought Houston could be proud to have smog too,” O’Rourke says.

In 1958, his family moved to a home near Bray’s Bayou. All the kids played in the bayou, even though it was contaminated. “We played in the Poor Farm Ditch, and it was polluted even back then,” O’Rourke recalls. “I saw all the things that floated down because of upstream construction – oil, grease,debris – and somehow at an intuitive level I knew it was wrong.” O’Rourke also remembers the contamination of the Gulf Coast from oil and gas refineries.

Perhaps it was the contrast of a summer camp experience at age eight -- swimming in the pristine Guadalupe River -- that sparked O’Rourke’s desire to study water and law. “It seemed right for rivers to be clean,” he says. “I was able to literally swim with the fish,” he recalls.

Rachel Carson’s classic book on the environment, Silent Spring, and her lesser known work, The Sea Around Us, also influenced Terry O’Rourke at a young age. “I was fascinated by her writing,” he says, “and now realize I was present in the first generation of awareness of global contamination and the genesis of the modern environmental movement.”

While other kids attended high school, Terry worked as a page in the U. S. House of Representatives and in the Senate. “I served in Washington during Camelot in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated,” O’Rourke explains, citing that experience as a major influence on the career choices he made.

O’Rourke entered Rice University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in business administration, followed by a master’s in hydrology. His thesis bore the title “Pollution vs. the People.” He went on to earn a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

During his ten years as Senior Assistant Harris County Attorney and two years as Texas Assistant Attorney General, O’Rourke championed the enforcement of state law to protect the air, water and soil. His quick, tenacious and often fierce defense of the environment prompted both admirers and adversaries to resurrect the nickname he’d earned as a middle-school quarterback: El Tigre, the tiger.

It is no surprise that when Terry O’Rourke threw his hat in the race for the Texas Railroad Commission in 1976, he ran on a platform that called for more use of alternative energy sources and conservation. What he didn’t know at the time was that the idealism that lost him the race for Railroad Commissioner in Texas would help him win an appointment in the White House with Jimmy Carter, who was elected President that same year. While serving under President Carter, O’Rourke helped set up the Department of Energy and then worked as White House staff counsel on issues regarding inflation, alternative energy and conservation.

One of O’Rourke’s major tasks in the Carter Administration was conducting diplomatic briefings. He met with the energy and environment ministry officials of China, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf countries, the European Community and Ghana. “Working at the interface of conflict between increasing energy production and enhancing environmental protection, I ended up doing lots of international law,” O’Rourke remembers.

When President Reagan was elected in 1980, O’Rourke left the government and started a hydroelectric company financed by a small Texas oil company. O’Rourke bought the generator from the Peoples Republic of China. He calls seeing the Bailey Creek Hydroelectric Plant start up “one of the happiest moments of [his] career.” Located on the western side of California’s Mount Lassen, the plant continues to provide energy to San Francisco today.

Currently, O’Rourke practices law in Houston and teaches international law at the University of St. Thomas. He remains passionate about both caring for the environment and social justice. One of his more recent opportunities to serve the latter cause came through one of his students. She told him that the Honduran Consulate was working on the cases he was talking about in class – Honduran nationals on Death Row -- and asked O’Rourke to go and talk to the consul. The meeting led to O’Rourke representing the government of Honduras in its efforts to protect Hondurans charged with capital murder in the United States. “I work to keep the State of Texas from breaking international law by executing foreign nationals without informing them of their rights,” O’Rourke says.

O’Rourke says he became involved as a board member for CLEAN out his admiration of Jane Owen for her courageous op-ed pieces in the Houston Chronicle . “I appreciate the kind of compassion Jane stands for in asking for accountability at the corporate level regarding the environment,” O’Rourke says.

He adds that through Owen’s leadership, CLEAN is in a unique position to bring about change. “Mayor White has been influenced by the climate of possibility CLEAN represents,” O’Rourke says. “He’s a big picture guy and really understands that Houston can’t be the best city in the world without a clean environment.”

O’Rourke lives and works out of his home on Brays Bayou, just a few blocks from where he grew up. His hobbies include gardening, birding and writing. The first two come together in his home garden where he grows native Texas plants that attract migrating birds and butterflies. The most recent expression of the third is a real-life thriller he’s writing about his experiences representing Texas separatists who holed up in the Davis Mountains. Thanks to O’Rourke’s nimble and imaginative thinking and the media savvy he developed in public life, he prevented the standoff from becoming another Waco or Ruby Ridge. He also enjoys the “cosmic beauty” of astronomy.