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.
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Anastasia Telesetsky | September 10, 2026
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.” 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.
Robert Verchick | September 9, 2026
I’ll say this up front: I love rockets. So you’d think I would welcome the announcement that SpaceX plans to build the world’s largest spaceport on the Louisiana coast, less than a three-hour drive from my house. I want to love this idea. But I don’t.
Lisa Heinzerling | September 8, 2026
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.
Zsea Bowmani | September 2, 2026
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.
Adelind McGoldrick | September 1, 2026
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 […]
Uma Outka | August 31, 2026
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.
Lemir Teron | August 26, 2026
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.
Amy Sinden | August 24, 2026
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.
Amy Sinden | August 24, 2026
Teaching environmental law has always been hard. The problem is, it’s about things our students care about. It’s about what Exxon knew, and the BP oil spill, and birds soaked with oil, and little kids with asthma or lead poisoning or cancer because wealthy people in corporate boardrooms were indifferent to the suffering of Black and Brown communities. It’s about Native Americans marching in protest to protect sacred lands their ancestors have stewarded and protected for millennia. I suppose this varies by region, but here in north Philadelphia, students come into class energized, outraged, and ready to defend the powerless and speak truth to power.