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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.

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.

The current Trump administration has made individualized exceptions and waivers one of the signature features of its governing approach.

President Donald Trump is on a rampage. He has big plans for a mass repeal of existing regulations, he’s trying to use emergency declarations to short-circuit normal environmental protections, and he’s savaging environmental agencies. He’s also at war with the rule of law, dodging court orders, ignoring statutes, and punishing lawyers and law firms that have dared to challenge him. In area after area, Trump has tried to sweep aside legal constraints. Part of the point of Trump’s “shock and awe” campaign has been to overwhelm the ability of opponents and the courts to keep up with his legally questionable actions. Trump’s attack on the bureaucracy is also an attack on the rule of law because one of the key functions of bureaucrats is to ensure that the government follows the rules.

In one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders, he eliminated a centralized system that Jimmy Carter initially set up to issue regulations governing environmental impact statements. Instead, he called on each agency to issue its own regulations, which seems to have caused the predictable amount of confusion. I’ve examined the new regulations from three agencies: the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Transportation (DOT), which happened to be the first ones that I saw. There seems to be little rhyme or reason in the variations.

There are many reasons why Senate Republicans’ recent decision to defy the parliamentarian and repeal California’s Clean Air Act waivers using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) was objectionable. But one objection that hasn’t received enough – any? – attention is how legislative gimmicks like the CRA contribute to the broader problem of congressional dysfunction.

Never before in our lifetimes has the rule of law felt so tenuous. These are not normal times for a research and advocacy organization dedicated to “harnessing the power of law and public policy to create a responsive government, healthy environment and just society.” Many of the policy ideas that we have championed — for example, worker safety protections, a fair regulatory system, climate actions that address equity concerns — have been adopted in some form. And today, these policies, as well as the democratic institutions which enforce them, are under threat.

President Donald Trump has taken some dramatic steps in the name of improving use of NEPA, the statute governing environmental reviews of projects. The goal is to speed up the permitting process and make it more efficient. The reality is that his efforts will create chaos and uncertainty, with the likely effect of slowing things down.