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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.

On the morning of December 30, 2021, the Marshall Fire ignited in Boulder County, Colorado. Driven by hurricane-force winds and fueled by vegetation desiccated by years of drought, it burned more than six thousand acres and destroyed over one thousand homes in a matter of hours — the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. Boulder County’s lawsuit against Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil Corporation, filed in state court in 2018, seeks to recover those costs from the companies whose products allegedly caused them. The suit rests not merely on the claim that fossil fuel combustion drives climate change, but on the more specific and more serious allegation that the defendant companies spent decades concealing the relationship between their products and climate harm while actively marketing those products to a public kept deliberately uninformed of the consequences.

For the average law student, climate change looms as an existential threat, appearing simultaneously catastrophic and oddly invisible. Teaching Environmental Law in Context by Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez documents the federal government’s failure to adopt comprehensive climate legislation and, to the extent that prior administrations had adopted measures under existing laws like the Clean Air Act, the Trump administration’s evisceration of those measures. Can the states pick up the slack? Given most states’ history of weak environmental regulation, driven by their fear of losing economic development and their lack of resources, what can we expect?

When Carmen Gonzalez and Rebecca Bratspies invited me to comment on their recent textbook Teaching Environmental Law in Context, their gesture signaled something vital: perspectives that environmental law has too often excluded — such as my work on Black Queer Feminist Ecology — belong in the conversation about how we train the next generation of environmental lawyers.

We’re living through a moment when questions about government power over where people can live, work, travel, and belong have become too important to ignore. At a glance, the topic of migration/immigration might seem far removed from climate change. It isn’t; I wouldn’t be writing this if it was. I recently completed my Master’s thesis […]

My book with fellow Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies was inspired by an article written by former UN Special Rapporteur (and Member Scholar) John Knox (and co-author Nicole Tronolone) evaluating U.S. environmental law through the framework of international human rights law. With several noteworthy exceptions (such as climate change), Knox and Tronolone concluded that the U.S. (at the end of the Biden administration) generally complied with the substantive and procedural requirements of the right to a healthy environment. However, they described the government’s failure to address environmental injustice as nothing short of “catastrophic.” Far from remedying these shortcomings, the current administration is reinforcing them, as regulatory rollbacks proliferate, equity-based initiatives are dismantled, and coordinated political campaigns seek to ban the teaching of "divisive concepts" such as climate change and racial justice.

Last year, Governor Josh Stein created the North Carolina Artificial Intelligence (AI) Leadership Council to chart a roadmap on AI leadership and policy in the state. The roadmap report published by the council leaves many important areas unaddressed and falls significantly short on others, including harms like high bills, lost jobs, pollution, drought, mass surveillance, and more.

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.

It’s August here in western Washington State, which means two things: (1) I’ll soon be packing up for my return to New Orleans (class starts soon), and (2) the smoke blowing in from regional wildfires is making my nose burn. Appropriately, the news here is full of stories about personal loss, evacuation routes, fire-suppression strategies, and the brave firefighters who put their lives on the line to keep us safe. But there’s a deeper story: Our broad approach to handling wildfire in the United States was designed for a climate that no longer exists. We must do better.