He served in the front lines in Europe, including in the Battle of the Bulge, was wounded twice and awarded the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster.

[5] Convalescence at a U.S. Army hospital in Devon, England gave him further opportunity to study the verse of William Wordsworth.

[9] Sive lost one of the earliest cases under the National Environmental Policy Act, Concerned About Trident v. Schlesinger, 400 F.Supp.

[10][11] The Storm King case accorded standing to a citizens group without financial interest in the proposed power project and ordered the defendant to explore alternatives.

Other notable cases included Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, Inc. v. Schlesinger (1971),[12] argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, which attracted wide media attention to the issue of governmental underground nuclear bomb testing and its potential environmental effects at Amchitka Island, Alaska; Concerned About Trident, Inc. v. Rumsfeld (1976),[13] which established that strategic military decisions are not exempt from compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act; Mohonk Trust v. Board of Assessors of Town of Gardiner (1979),[14] a real property case that on appeal established that land owned by a trust for environmental preservation and use could be exempt from real property taxes; Citizens Committee for the Hudson River v. Volpe et al. (1970), which stopped the construction of a proposed expressway on fill to be placed in the Hudson River.

That move had the quite unintended effect of turning Sierra Club into the nationally known organization it remains and vastly increasing its membership.