Kate Sinding. Image Credit: NRDC.
Kate Sinding is a Senior Attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council for the New York Urban Program. She has lived all over the world, spending her childhood years in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Kenya, as well as various locations in the United States. She studied women’s rights and international development at Barnard College. Sinding went to law school at New York University, where she earned a joint degree in law and public policy at Princeton. She started her environmental career at Sive, Paget & Riesel and dedicated herself to the firm for 10 years. Upon becoming a partner with the firm, Sinding remembered her desire to do non-profit environmental work and left the firm to pursue a career at the NRDC.
Early on in her career at the NRDC, Sinding worked on fighting five Las Vegas-style casinos that were proposed for the Catskill region of upstate NY. The NRDC’s stance was that such an intense land use was inconsistent with the region’s large system of drinking water reservoirs. Those reservoirs supply approximately 90 percent of NYC’s drinking water. This source of clean, unfiltered water is maintained thanks to partnerships between the State, City, local municipalities, and environmental organizations that keep the watershed untouched by development through watershed agreements intended to preserve large swaths of land around the reservoirs. Though the casino projects have been successfully fended off thus far, Sinding and the NRDC quickly learned that there was another looming threat to NYC’s drinking water.
