This is the first in a series of posts related to Teaching Environmental Law in Context, a recent book by Member Scholars Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez.
Teaching right now is no joke! This is especially true of teaching environmental law. Most of us teaching in this area have dedicated our professional lives to protecting the environment — the air, the water, the land, and of course the people who breathe that air, drink that water, and live on that land. Each day is more painful than the last as our work is dismantled in front of our eyes. Institutions that seemed solid bulwarks against tyranny are crumbling into dust.
In this moment of crisis, fellow Member Scholar Carmen Gonzalez and I set out to write a book for our fellow professors struggling to find their feet — consider Teaching Environmental Law in Context a kind of love letter to the better world we are convinced we can build together with our students. To that end, the book invites teachers to teach differently — to incorporate problems (which we provide along with answers) and fundamentally to look back, look forward, and look within.
Looking back means asking students, “How did we get here?” What were the problems that the various environmental laws were trying to solve? Understanding the historical roots of our environmental laws helps students appreciate why the laws are drafted as they are — and helps them appreciate where those laws succeeded and where they fall short.
As an example, the Clean Air Act chapter begins with a description of the Donora Death Smog of 1948. At least 20 people died and scores were sickened when a weather inversion trapped pollution from U.S. Steel facilities in Donora, Pennsylvania. Researchers at the time (again, this was the 1940s!) documented the racial and economic disparities among who were most impacted.
The chapter offers teaching tips based on the work of Harvard researcher Mary Amdur, who posed a question few had thought to ask — if short-term intense exposure to this pollution caused mortality and morbidity, what might the harms be from long-term, low-level exposure? (It is worth pointing out that she was Harvard researcher, not Harvard Professor, Mary Amdur because the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on gender discrimination in the workplace was decades away.) Amdur’s groundbreaking research on the health impacts from pollution exposure, in Donora, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, led to the adoption of health-based standards in the Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards, and Amdur served on the first CAA Scientific Advisory Committee. Highlighting her contribution can inspire students that their work can make a difference.
Looking forward means asking, “What kind of new problems do we anticipate and what kind of laws might respond effectively to those challenges?” In multiple chapters, the book highlights legal innovations that attempt to respond to climate change, cumulative impacts, and new problems like AI data centers. These chapters give examples of how technocratic decision-making rooted in narrow statutory confines can fail to protect vulnerable communities.
For example, the book provides problems built around concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to show how various statutes completely fail to account for cumulative and aggregate exposures, especially when those suffering these exposures are poor or Black. The book considers the promise of a different legal and regulatory approach embedded in constitutional environmental rights, human rights, and rights of nature theories, giving examples of successes that can inspire students and professors alike.
Finally, looking within means asking, “What kind of system do we want? What values should we center as we rebuild?” For us as authors, the answer is that everyone is entitled to a clean and healthy environment. We reject the notion that some communities can be sacrificed for the benefit of others. For that reason, the core value of the book is environmental justice, positing that we do best as a society and achieve most as lawyers when we protect the most vulnerable among us.
At multiple points, Teaching Environmental Law in Context challenges students to consider their own role in creating environmental problems and their own agency as innovators of new solutions. The chapter on the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) proposes beginning this unit with a personal waste diary — a way to give texture to Subtitle D and to highlight the somewhat arbitrary distinctions between solid waste and hazardous waste, as well as the gamesmanship along the product/waste distinction.
These chapters can be used to spark a more personal, less technical conversation about the interrelationship between waste, recycling, and consumption, and to highlight the ways that regulatory systems structure and constrain individual behavior.
