Center for Land and Soil Security
The Center for Land and Soil Security (CLASS) is a free standing center dedicated to advocacy for land and soil security in New York City to address our legacy of more than 150 years of unregulated land pollution. Read our Bill of Rights to read about our goals. Join the CLASS Coalition to show your support for our work. There are no obligations but your support will go a long way to helping us achieve our advocacy goals to improve public policy, investigation, remediation, communication and resources to reduce the potential for human exposure to legacy pollutants. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, visit our Contact Page and send us a message.
Dr. Daniel Walsh is the Executive Director of the Center for Land and Soil Security. Dan has been a fixture in environmental protection in NYC for more than 30 years. He has directed environmental quality programs in NYC for New York State Department of Environmental Conservation including the Superfund, Brownfield Cleanup Program, Solid Waste, Hazardous Waste, RCRA and others. He was founding director of the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation and also founded the NYC Voluntary Cleanup Program, the nation’s first city-run land cleanup program and now one of the largest land cleanup programs in the nation. In these roles, Dan has been responsible for cleanup of thousands of polluted land sites in NYC including cleanup of Fresh Kills, the largest landfill in the world. He has played a major role in response to numerous environmental crises, including the environmental response to the World Trade disaster and Superstorm Sandy.
As an appointed environmental official in the Mayor’s Office beginning in the administration of Mayor Bloomberg, Dan founded many other environmental programs including the NYC Clean Soil Bank and PURESoil NYC, first-of-their-kind programs to provide sustainable local recycling of clean soil and clean waste materials (compost, etc.) to reduce exposure to pollution in community gardens, expand wetland and dune habitats and improve climate change resilience. Dan is an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and the Climate School where he dedicates his research to the history of pollution in cities and public policy to improve government response to modern-day risks from legacy pollution. Dan is Principal at Walsh Environmental Solutions, an environmental consulting firm.