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.
Built on complex statutory and regulatory frameworks, environmental law classes demand a level of comfort with complicated risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses that, as a practical matter, are often impossible to calculate with any assurance of accuracy.
Students look to their environmental law teachers for help in navigating these learning challenges, which are equally teaching challenges. ln Teaching Environmental Law in Context, Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez offer invaluable resources for teachers to support, engage, and sustain their students. As I reflect on this excellent book, I draw on my own teaching experience, specifically in an environmental law-adjacent course in urban land use and, more broadly, on years of teaching, mentoring faculty colleagues, and developing curricula in a range of contexts — simulation-based, writing-intensive, seminar, doctrinal — each presenting learning challenges and opportunities.
As the authors emphasize, the body of environmental law covered in a standard survey course doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The federal statutes forming the backbone of the course, as well as environmental rules adopted by some U.S. states and international bodies, have a social and economic context that provides crucial insight into why these laws were needed and long overdue: social movements galvanized by industrial development’s cumulative harms to health, safety, and ecosystems ultimately led to a legislative reckoning in the U.S. during the last third of the 20th century that produced a suite of remedial statutes and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce them.
For students working through the rigors of environmental law, having access to this context deepens understanding of the social and economic harms associated with development that, too often, have been justified as the price of progress. As accomplished scholars and teachers of environmental law, Bratspies and Gonzalez recognize that context provides a powerful motivation for students to persist, to learn to work with environmental law’s current legal tools and imperfect standards while striving to improve upon them. With that goal in view, the authors provide rich source material that illuminates context, shares an array of imaginative suggestions for assignments that use multiple modalities to support learning, and models strategies for connecting issues and reinforcing the themes that animate environmental law.
Examples abound, and I’ll highlight a few. As the authors sketch out the movement “[f]rom common law to legislation and back again,” they recommend showing students The City, a film produced by the American Institute of Planners for the 1939 World’s Fair. Highlighting the pollution produced by urban enterprise, the film offers visual evidence of a pre-statutory legal landscape wholly inadequate to contain the harmful consequences of burning coal. As Bratspies and Gonzalez note, the film’s proffered solution — turning to suburban development — can itself be used to guide a discussion among students of how redlining (and exclusionary zoning) would complicate a suburban option for city residents of color (and, it should be added, how suburban sprawl would produce its own negative environmental impacts).
For contextual lessons on the harrowing effects of toxic waste disposal before enactment of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation , and Liability Act, the authors suggest linking the dramatic struggles of two local communities with toxic waste landfills: (1) the Love Canal neighborhood in the City of Niagara Falls, where housing and an elementary school had been developed over the site of a landfill formerly used for dumping industrial chemical waste, inflicting serious health consequences; and (2) the unincorporated community of Afton, North Carolina, whose predominantly African American residents valiantly but unsuccessfully resisted the construction of a hazardous waste landfill after hundreds of demonstrators were arrested for attempting to block trucks transporting the waste into Afton. The authors also direct us to graphic resources providing visual and narrative reinforcement: the PBS video Poisoned Ground on developments in Love Canal,and the University of North Carolina’s online exhibit “We Birthed the Movement,” referring to the role of the Afton protests in galvanizing the movement for environmental justice.
As the context of the Afton protests makes clear, it’s critical to illuminate for students the inequity that environmental law must confront and that, as future advocates, students can strive to eliminate. By weaving examples of environmental racism throughout the topics of the book, the authors provide a roadmap for teachers to demonstrate that discussions of environmental justice are inseparable from the substance of environmental law.
To deepen learning and encourage critical perspectives on U.S. environmental law’s frameworks and standards, the authors recommend placing students in the role of regulators in realistic hypothetical cases that call for standard setting amid conflicts in data and scientific uncertainty. And to provide some experience in advocacy and drafting, the authors suggest assigning students to draft a shadow report (modeled after submissions by civil society organizations) to an United Nations human rights body assessing whether a member state’s environmental law complies with the imperatives of environmental justice, a project that couldn’t be more timely.
Providing opportunities for role-based, situated learning complements and reinforces the authors’ focus on richly contextual lessons. At a time of retrenchment and deep uncertainty about the prospects for responsible environmental stewardship, a time when we need students to remain hopeful, focused, and motivated, Teaching Environmental Law in Context delivers a text that will be richly rewarding for teachers and deeply sustaining for students. And for that hopeful, generous act, we can all be grateful.
Andrea McArdle, Professor of Law at City University of New York School of Law, teaches a variety of experiential courses, including seminars she designed in judicial rhetoric and in urban land use and community lawyering.