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The Trump administration recently repealed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding—the scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare that has anchored federal climate regulation for nearly two decades. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin called the finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.” Within weeks, a coalition of more than 20 states filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse the repeal. The legal battle that follows will help define American environmental policy for a generation. Brigham Daniels and I did not plan the timing of our new book, Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law, to coincide with this particular legal conflict. But we could not have chosen a more clarifying moment for its release. The endangerment finding repeal is not an aberration—it is a recognizable recurrence in a history that stretches back centuries. Law has always been the primary engine of both environmental exploitation and protection in the United States.

As the release date of my forthcoming book, Unlearn Power: Strengthening Communities in the Age of Environmental Crisis, approaches, naturally, I've been asked, "What's the book about?" But given the amalgamation of ecological devastation across the planet, with fallout and stakes unevenly felt across socioeconomic lines and underscored by political forces that engage in climate denialism and assaults on democratic institutions, I urge that "Why Unlearn Power?" is the more apropos question.

The 56th Earth Day may also be the bleakest. Wave upon wave is crashing upon our system of ecological protections. But having spent years studying the full sweep of American environmental legal history, we can say with confidence: the bigger the wave, the stronger the undercurrent.

Maryland’s 2026 legislative session represented a challenging playing field for advancing climate and environmental legislation, marked heavily by the dual considerations of budget shortfalls — driven by the federal government’s abandonment of funding critical programs and sowing chaos among the numerous federal workers who live in Maryland — and uncertainty as to long-term energy reliability and affordability placing a pall on energy planning in the state.

This Earth Day, environmental advocates are looking backward as well as forward. With the U.S. federal government so dramatically overhauling environmental policy, history shows how American social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to preserve public lands and pass laws protecting human health. “I’ve been trying to look through the history of the United States to understand how we’ve gotten where we are,” said Alejandro Camacho, a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and co-author of Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of U.S. Environmental Law, which comes out on Earth Day, April 22, 2026. “Prior generations did meet the moment and at least partially addressed some of the major problems that were in front of them.” Camacho discusses the book in this lightly edited transcript.

A fan of place-based education, every year I haul my students to Louisiana’s Maurepas Wildlife Management Area to paddle the swamps and learn about coastal law. This semester, I had ten students with me, each paddling a kayak on the swamp’s shimmering water. Bits of salvinia, a free-floating aquatic fern, eased downstream at an almost imperceptible rate. Stories on the bayou are always changing. This year, the narrative wrestled with a choice the state is making about what the Maurepas Swamp will become — an ecological jewel or a carbon-capture dump. The community is torn.

We mourn the lives of all Iranian civilians and U.S. service members lost in the illegal preemptive strike on Iran, and that of all civilians killed and hurt in subsequent strikes in the region. This war is continuing to fuel broader conflict and instability in the region and around the world. We join every American who objects to this war. Our planet can be a beautiful place, and stewarding and protecting all of its inhabitants and its natural resources is our noblest calling.

Data centers are increasingly making headlines for the serious problems they create for the communities where they are proposed and built, as well as for the resistance from people who live there, who refuse to accept the rising energy bills, noise and air pollution, and strains on water infrastructure that inevitably accompany these new neighbors. On Tuesday, February 10, I moderated a webinar, “From Community to Congress: Advocating on AI Data Centers,” that broke down the (de)regulatory landscape of data centers.

To the extent that people think about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at all, they likely think of an institution that works to safeguard our health and well-being, and that of our environment. So, The New York Times made quite a splash recently when it reported that the agency had adopted a new policy under which it would stop considering the health benefits of two of the most harmful and pervasive air pollutants: fine particulate matter and ozone.