Thursday, May 22, 2025
Carol Annia Meyer Yannacone and Victor J. Yannacone Jr. were more than a married couple for many decades — they were a Long Island-based team in the environmental movement here and beyond. Sadly, Carol died earlier this year, at age 90.
“My wife of 66 years passed away,” Victor emailed the couple’s many friends. “She was an extraordinary woman who did much for many and she will be sorely missed.” Indeed, she will be.
One of their important crusades was a legal challenge in the mid-1960s of the spraying of the pesticide DDT by the Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission. The commission had for decades been dousing wetlands with massive amounts of DDT.
In 1965, Carol, a science teacher, came upon a huge fish kill in Upper Yaphank Lake. She had grown up near the lake, and swam in its waters. Victor, with a law practice based in Patchogue, where the Yannacones also lived, brought a class action lawsuit in Supreme Court in Suffolk County. Its lead plaintiff: his wife.
The Long Island History Journal relates, in an article titled, “Long Island Women Preserving Nature and the Environment,” that the lawsuit was later to be dismissed in Supreme Court, but it “won while losing” by “publicizing the problem” as “Suffolk County suspended, then banned DDT.” Then, “New York State banned DDT in 1970 … and DDT was banned nationwide in 1972.”
Out of this battle came the Environmental Defense Fund, based for many years on Long Island, in East Setauket, and now an international organization headquartered in Manhattan. “EDF was Carol’s idea,” said Victor. “She conceived the idea in Atlantic City at a meeting of the Audubon Society” at which Victor gave what became noted as the “Sue The Bastards Speech.” She and Victor were two of the 10 founders who signed the certificate of incorporation of the EDF.
The initial judge in the DDT case was D. Ormonde Ritchie, and it was in his court that what became the legal term “environmental law” was born. Justice Ritchie “was asked by the attorney for the county, ‘What’s the basis for this lawsuit?’” Yannacone recalled. Then “the judge turned to me and asked, ‘Where should your adversary look this up?’ I said, ‘Try environmental law.’”
The New York Times and other media covering the case described this as a new concept in law, which since then has become the name used globally for a legal specialty.
Another important case that Victor and Carol were involved in was litigation over the use of the herbicide Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. In 1979, Yannacone filed a lawsuit against the chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange.
Meanwhile, an essay on the Yannacone law firm’s website details, “Carol Annia Yannacone listened to and counseled the Vietnam combat veterans dying from the illness and disease resulting from their exposure to dioxin … But it was not just the veterans who looked to Carol for counsel and support, it was their wives, girlfriends, parents, and children.
“Carol,” it continues, “conducted intake interviews on more than 3,295 individual veterans, opened and managed their claim files, consulted with doctors and expert witnesses throughout the country and helped develop and maintain the CHAOS (Case Histories of Agent Orange Survivors) from which the information used to negotiate the [1984 $180 million Agent Orange] settlement was ultimately derived.”
The Yannacones traveled several years ago to Hawaii to visit their son, Victor III, for Thanksgiving. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, “and we were quarantined …
We never got home … So now we’re stuck here in paradise,” Victor was telling me over the phone from Maui in 2022. And, in his mid-80s, with arthritis, “I don’t want to get on an airplane” with this condition and fly back. So they remained in paradise.
Carol died in a hospice in Maui on Feb. 23. She is survived by Victor; their son, Victor III; a daughter, Claire Yannacone, of Patchogue, a science teacher in Riverhead; and three grandchildren. And by good environmental works over many decades.
Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at SUNY Old Westbury, host of the TV program “Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman” and the author of six books.
