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A Step By Step Look At Uarg V. Epa: A New Layer Of Greenhouse Gas Regulation, Kevin O. Leske

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Tribal Environmental Programs: Providing Meaningful Involvement And Fair Treatment, Jeanette Wolfley

Faculty Scholarship

Tribal governments are developing and implementing federally authorized and/or approved tribal environmental programs in the areas of water quality, air quality, and solid waste. As part of this federal delegation process there are federal requirements relating to due process and fair treatment of the public and stakeholders who may be affected by the tribal environmental laws and regulations. This article explores and examines public participation and due process within the tribal context and proposes tribal institutions are in the best position to articulate the tribal cultural and social norms of public participation and fair treatment. It is through this process …

Keynote: Sustaining Society In The Anthropocene Epoch, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This paper explores the argument that human transformation of Earth's systems is eclipsing the international law-making of nation states. Globally the processes of trade law or environmental law often progress transnationally, with little direction by national governments. Intergovernmental and non-governmental international organizations act with autonomy, apart from nations. To be clear, nation states still are the major players in world order, but trends of sustainable development or social networked communications transcend individual nations. Whether viewed as environmental law or sustainability law, this body of law exists at once globally and locally; it is different in kind from the Westphalia legacy …

Human Rights And The New Reality Of Climate Change: Adaptation's Limitations In Achieving Climate Justice , Zackary L. Stillings

Michigan Journal of International Law

In 2005, the Inuit of Canada and the United States filed a petition with the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that their respective governments had violated their human rights by failing to mitigate climate change harms. The Inuit alleged violations of several specific human rights, including the right to enjoy their culture; the right to enjoy and use the lands they have traditionally occupied; the right to use and enjoy their personal property; the right to health; the right to life, physical integrity, and security; the right to their own means of subsistence; and the right to residence …

Banning Lawns, Sarah B. Schindler

Faculty Publications

Recognizing their role in sustainability efforts, many local governments are enacting climate change plans, mandatory green building ordinances, and sustainable procurement policies. But thus far, local governments have largely ignored one of the most pervasive threats to sustainability — lawns. This Article examines the trend toward sustainability mandates by considering the implications of a ban on lawns, the single largest irrigated crop in the United States.

Green yards are deeply seated in the American ethos of the sanctity of the single-family home. However, this psychological attachment to lawns results in significant environmental harms: conventional turfgrass is a non-native monocrop that …

The California Offset Game: Who Wins And Who Loses?, Alan Ramo

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Symbolic Politics For Disempowered Communities: State Environmental Justice Policies, Tonya Lewis, Jessica Owley

Articles

No abstract provided.

Weathering Nepa Review: Superstorms And Super Slow Urban Recovery, John Travis Marshall

Faculty Publications By Year

Delays in implementing long-term neighborhood housing recovery measures following urban disasters profoundly disrupt a city's revitalization and resurgence. Following recent large-scale urban disasters, some blame the National Environmental Policy Act environmental and historical review requirement for greatly slowing the long-term recovery process. They claim that the National Environmental Policy Act review is ill suited for the exigencies of disasters. Finding effective ways to advance urban disaster recovery as quickly as possible, while not compromising key environmental quality objectives, is a central challenge to implementing effective post-disaster recovery plans. This Article addresses how best to balance necessary regulation with critical disaster …

Hispanic Communities And Environmental Justice: A Comparative Study Of Mobility And Exposure To Air Toxics In Houston, Maricarmen Hernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Environmental justice research has focused too little attention on immigrant communities. This study extends from the premise that themes of immigration and mobility among racial/ethnic minority communities must be more carefully analyzed by environmental justice (EJ) scholars. By clarifying why Hispanic people live where they live, and what factors shape their exposures to cancer risks from hazardous air pollutants, this study aims to contribute to the existing EJ body of knowledge. The analysis employs qualitative methods, implemented as part of a larger National Science Foundation-funded study. In-depth semi-structured phone interviews were conducted with randomly selected Hispanic individuals, some of whom …

Symbolic Politics For Disempowered Communities: State Environmental Justice Policies, Tonya Lewis, Jessica Owley

Journal Articles

Environmental law is riddled with symbolisms of protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the environment in which we live. Sometimes these symbols are simply inherent characteristics of the legislation or policy as their very creation symbolizes or represents the politico’s stance on an issue. Other times, the legislation or policy is used primarily as a symbol, without ever addressing the issue or effectuating change, sometimes referred to as symbolic politics. In this research, we apply the theory of symbolic politics to New York State’s decade-old policy on environmental justice and postulate that although the policy has …

Comeback Of Community-Based Forest Management: The Need To Revamp Strategies To Promote Decentralized Environmental Governance In India And Brazil, Naysa Ahuja

Florida A & M University Law Review

The governance of forests and their resources has always been a contentious issue. It has created a divide between developing and developed countries, as well as within them. With the increasing recognition of forests as valuable commodities in the global market, the management of forests in developing countries is becoming a matter of constant concern for ecologists, economists, and politicians.

Part I of this article provides an overview of the Participatory Forest Management (PFM) approach in the international context. Part II and III examine environmental governance in the forest sector of two rapidly emerging economies of the world, India and …

President Obama And The New Politics Of Inclusion In The Climate Change Debate, Leslie G. Fields, Royce G. Brooks

Florida A & M University Law Review

No abstract provided.

¡Peligro! Si Usted No Entiende La Etiqueta, Busque A Alguien Para Que Se La Explique A Usted En Detalle: The Need For International And Domestic Implementation Of Bilingual Pesticide Labeling To Enhance Protection Of Migrant Farmworkers In Florida, Vanessa Calcano Thomas

Florida A & M University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Responding To Environmental Injustice: The Civil Rights Act And American Federal Institutional And Systemic Barriers To Private Redress Of Disparate Environmental Harm, Michael B. Jones, Peter J. Jacques

Florida A & M University Law Review

This article discusses the use of private action in federal institutions for relief from disparate racial impacts. The courts have eliminated consideration of § 602 disparate impact regulations as the basis for a private right of action challenging environmental harms. Legislative action seems unlikely in this era of gridlock and partisan polarization. Agency action seems to offer the most avenues for consideration of environmental justice concerns. However, agencies are bureaucratic and subject to election results, Congressional oversight and budgetary limitations, and backlogs of determination of environmental justice complaints. Deeply rooted systemic institutional racism further constrains possible reforms to the federal …

Move, Or Wait For The Flood And Die: Protection Of Environmentally Displaced Populations Through A New Relocation Law, Jessica Scott

Florida A & M University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Room For A (Sacred) View? American Indian Tribes Confront Visual Desecration Caused By Wind Energy Projects, Allison M. Dussias

American Indian Law Review

No abstract provided.

Climate Change And Environmental Justice: Lessons From The California Lawsuits, Alice Kaswan

San Diego Journal of Climate & Energy Law

This essay does not debate the political wisdom of suing; instead, it takes the suits as a given and attempts to enhance understanding of the environmental justice community’s climate justice agenda. It describes the role of environmental justice in the development of California’s climate law, AB 32, describes the lawsuits, and suggests some of the larger lessons about climate policy, cap-and-trade, and environmental justice that these lawsuits reveal. Ultimately, the environmental justice lawsuits highlight two primary themes: (1) the importance of a holistic approach to climate change policy that recognizes and integrates its multiple dimensions, including co-pollutant implications; and (2) …

On The Waterfront: New York City's Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation Challenge (Part 1 Of 2), Sarah J. Adams-Schoen

Scholarly Works

New York City is a city on the waterfront. With 520 miles of coastline, New York City’s coastline is longer than the coastlines of Miami, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. Nearly nine million New Yorkers live in areas vulnerable to flooding, storm surges and other natural disaster-related risks that are increasing as a result of climate change.

New York City didn’t wait for a devastating storm to begin comprehensively addressing the effects of climate change. The City’s extensive climate change mitigation and resiliency efforts and communications strategy have put the City in a league of its own. But, …

On The Waterfront: New York City's Climate Change Adaptation And Mitigation Challenge (Part 2 Of 2), Sarah J. Adams-Schoen

Scholarly Works

New York City, like other major cities around the world, has acknowledged the problem of climate change and begun to implement proactive policies to decrease the city’s contribution to the problem (i.e., mitigation) and to make the city less vulnerable to the effects of climate change (i.e., adaptation). The City’s initiatives have been comprehensive and progressive, especially its climate change-related data analysis and communication initiatives including NPCC, and its comprehensive reform of building and other related codes. The City’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by 2030 and its progress toward that goal are also laudable, but the …

The Executive And The Environment: A Look At The Last Five Governors In New York, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

Gubernatorial leadership is the single most important indicator of how sustainable New York will be when it comes to issues of environmental protection and conservation. In preparing for the Kerlin Lecture, one of the things that struck (the author) is that New York governors for at least the last thirty years have consistently identified the critical economic, social, and environmental challenges facing this state. Is it simply political rhetoric to decry that the state is in terrible fiscal shape, that programs need to be funded to help those is need, and that we must pay attention to stewarding the environment …

Health Law As Social Justice, Lindsay Wiley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Health law is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. From a relatively narrow discipline focused on regulating relationships among individual patients, health care providers, and third-party payers, it is expanding into a far broader field with a burgeoning commitment to access to health care and assurance of healthy living conditions as matters of social justice. Through a series of incremental reform efforts stretching back decades before the Affordable Care Act and encompassing public health law as well as the law of health care financing and delivery, reducing health disparities has become a central focus of American health law and …

Narratives In Conflicts: Alaska Natives And Offshore Drilling In The Arctic, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This Symposium Essay examines and elucidates the ways in which the narrative constructions that constitute the “imaginary Arctic” factor into litigation surrounding Shell Oil’s highly controversial attempts to drill for oil and gas in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska’s North Slope. Judges, lawyers and litigants involved in the Shell litigation have deployed a number of well-established storylines against each other: the Arctic as Classical Frontier, the Arctic as Spiritualized Frontier, the Arctic as Ancestral Homeland, the Arctic as Developing World, and the Arctic as Neutral Space. The litigation literature produced by this “battle for the Arctic” offers an …

Voluntary Commitments As Emerging Instruments In International Environmental Law, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Today we confront a critical environmental challenge: how to protect the human environment for ourselves and future generations in the face of our unprecedented capacity to alter fundamental physical cycles with global and longrange implications for the robustness of our planet.

Scientists observe that we are leaving the stable Holocene Epoch, embarking on a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the major force for change to the planet. There is evidence that the fundamental carbon and nitrogen cycles are accelerating significantly, and that the hydrological cycle is speeding up. The latter can lead to devastating impacts from …

Protecting Your Environment, Exacerbating Justice: Avoiding "Mandate Havens", David Takacs

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Principles Of International Law For Multilateral Development Banks: The Obligation To Respect Human Rights, Robert T. Coulter, Leonardo A. Crippa, Emily Wann

Free, Prior and Informed Consent: Pathways for a New Millennium (November 1)

41 pages.

"January, 2009"

www.indianlaw.org

Adaptive Planning For Flooding And Coastal Change In Virginia: Legal And Policy Issues For Local Government, Chris Olcott, Erica Penn

Virginia Coastal Policy Center

No abstract provided.

Environmental Law At Maryland, No. 35, Fall 2013

Environmental Law at Maryland

No abstract provided.

Insuring Island States: The Role Of Insurance For Small Island States In Responding To The Adverse Effects Of Sea Level Rise, Maria Antonia Tigre

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Student Publications

Small island states are likely to suffer the greatest impact of sea level rise. They are also generally low emitters of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), meaning they have contributed little to the problem of human-induced climate change. For an array of reasons, including their reduced economic and political power relative to the international power of other states, these smaller islands and states have come together, forming the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Jointly, they have been battling to gain the attention of the international community in their search for solutions. However, they are still left with many unanswered questions …

From Consultation To Consent: Community Approval As A Prerequisite To Environmentally Significant Projects, Nicholas A. Fromhertz

West Virginia Law Review

Since the United States enacted the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969, nations all around the world have adopted similar statutes. What started as a unique response to the American environmental movement grew to become a nearly global standard. Although the details of the regimes vary from country to country, there are two constants: (1) the regimes force the government to consider environmental impacts before conducting or authoriz- ing projects, and (2) they allow some degree of public participation. This Arti- cle focuses on the latter of these two features. Public participation in NEPA-style regimes generally means public consultation: …

The Meaning Of Green Growth, Michael A. Livermore

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Although the term is still rarely used in the United States, in recent years “green growth” has become part of the lexicon of global environmental policy. Unfortunately, although it is frequently cited as a public policy goal, green growth has remained vague and ill-defined, leading to conflicting interpretations and confusion over the distinction between green growth and related concepts like sustainable development. This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of green growth as a distinct concept, defining a “green growth frontier” of policies that dominate along both environmental and economic dimensions. The green growth agenda can be understood as moving …