Blog

When I teach domestic or international environmental law, I often ask students early on: Why should we protect the environment? What should the goal of environmental law be? Sometimes, they say that we should protect the environment for its own sake. The species and ecosystems that make up the natural world, and perhaps the natural world itself, should be recognized as having intrinsic value, apart from whatever value they provide human beings. This way of looking at the world has deep roots in Indigenous worldviews, and it has many adherents today. Its influence can be seen in laws such as the Endangered Species Act, which protect species regardless of whether they provide benefits in measurable, human terms. Nevertheless, students usually say that the most compelling reason to protect the environment is to protect human beings.

Those of us who teach environmental law, be it domestic or international, are compelled to revisit how we teach those courses along with how we even choose to engage our students in these perilous times. This exercise is all the more difficult given the dejection left in the wake of a debilitating bombardment of bad news stories about our field.

I wish to confirm that for environmental law teachers new and old — whatever our theological leanings — Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez have created a godsend. In a time of existential national turmoil, with previously solid legal ground as well as a host of mileposts being undermined at every turn, here is a welcome book for teachers. Teaching Environmental Law in Context reminds us that what we strive to do is essential, and Rebecca and Carmen’s lively, intricately detailed how-to manual shows how we can still do it well despite the current abysmal context.

What draws students to a class in environmental law, and after enrolling, what sustains them? The draw is surely the urgency of meeting this moment of escalating environmental and climate-based threat. The second question — what keeps students going? — points to the challenges inherent in studying the subject itself.

I don’t know how many times I have had the conversation with other environmental law professors about how difficult it seems to be to teach the subject. The usual talking point is that students come to environmental law anxious to save the world, but instead we tell them to save the PDF file of the latest National Ambient Air Quality Standard rulemaking, whose hundreds of pages they can then pore over in the next week. Oh, I try to still make it as interesting as I can by trying to ground it in something they may be familiar with, but I have also felt the responsibility to show them what the “real practice” of environmental law is like. Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking more deeply about the environmental law teaching problem. Thanks to Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez, now we can all have a resource that solves the problem of grounding environmental law into lived experiences — things that really matter to students.

In their brilliant new book, Teaching Environmental Law in Context, Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez do not let us forget the bodies — the human bodies that suffer death, illness, and heightened risk due to air pollution, water pollution, and toxic chemicals.

At the 2026 Law & Society Annual Conference, I participated in a roundtable discussion about Teaching Environmental Law in Context — both the new book by Member Scholars Carmen Gonzalez and Rebecca Bratspies and the activity of teaching environmental law to law students in tumultuous times for the field. I have taught environmental law at the University of Kansas School of Law for all but two of the last 15 years, and I have never taught it in exactly the same way twice. I’m always adjusting my approach — adding the most current events, looking for new ways to teach the wide range of complex topics to help students build skills, and supporting students to understand both the environmental law statutes and the pollution problems they are designed to address. In short, a book like this — with its focus on creative and impactful ways to reach students in the dense field of environmental law — is my kind of book.

If the role of the environmental justice scholar, as the venerable Robert Bullard contends, is to support environmental justice communities, then the responsibility of the environmental law classroom is to develop legal scaffolding to protect ecologies and inhabitants. Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez’s Teaching Environmental Law in Context succeeds as an indispensable reference and support tool for classrooms and others seeking a deeper understanding of environmental protection, law, and policy. Within the book’s immersive take on a suite of pressing environmental issues, the Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) chapter stands out for its methodical approach to framing quantitative aspects of environmental decision-making.

In Part 1, I provided an overview and some of my topline reactions to Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez’s excellent new book, Teaching Environmental Law in Context. In this part, I explore some specific environmental laws that Rebecca and Carmen include in their text and their creative approaches to teaching them.