This post is part of a series related to Teaching Environmental Law in Context, a recent book by Member Scholars Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez.
These are challenging times for environmental management because we are losing our social cohesion and are increasingly detached from the lives, both human and more than human, around us. Political scientist and sociologist Robert Putnam has been diagnosing and re-diagnosing this problem in his books like Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. We no longer have common purpose with repeated interactions either with each other or with our environment. We have what former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy referred to as “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” as well as what journalist Richard Louv labeled the “nature deficit.”
Pediatricians suggest that children should be spending one to three hours in outdoor free play. The reality instead is that children are mostly indoors spending on average no more than an hour a week in unstructured outdoor play, with some age groups (12-17) spending less than four minutes a day. This matters because as Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum reminds us, “In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.”
Even as we are increasingly alienated from the natural world, we are increasingly divided as humans. Some see environmental protection as a divisive and polarizing interference with business as-usual economic activity. Others, particularly environmental defenders and communities that see the sacred in the environment, view environmental protection is a source of common vision and purpose. To create the “bridging social capital” needed to address these divides, we must embrace the legal principle of solidarity and its related principle of ecological solidarity as normative principles guiding decision-making and legal practice across jurisdictions.
It is in this time where we need to be reconnecting with our neighbors and learning from nature at large that the engaged teaching materials in Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez’s Teaching Environmental Law in Context offer a real opportunity for environmental studies students, law students, and lawyers to reflect on how we can grow in solidarity through shared knowledge. Bratspies and Gonzalez remind us that federal statutory environmental law in the United States is a relatively new direction for addressing pollution, habitat loss, and other complex environmental changes. There is indeed room for improvement of these laws, but these reforms will require thought, not the wholesale nonchalant dismantling condoned by current federal administrators. The most important message of their book is that environmental justice has to be at the heart of every class on law and the environment.
Bratspies and Gonzalez have designed numerous teaching activities across numerous topics, including water quality, air quality, and waste management, using multiple media including databases, graphic novels, and videos that ask students to think critically about who gets to make decisions impacting communities and what role there is for citizen action.
Even if it isn’t realistic to teach environmental law classes outdoors to address our nature deficit, the learn-by-doing activities in the book offer students the chance to take a journey outside of their classroom to reflect on contemporary topics that need to matter (e.g., colonial roots of plastic waste trade, ongoing disposal of waste in vulnerable Global South and U.S. communities, the substantive right to a healthy environment) if we ever hope to generate the conditions for building real solidarity in today’s mixed up world.
