Law 798:  Environmental Policy Seminar

We are not living within our environmental means.  We are depleting groundwater supplies, degrading agricultural soils, overfishing the oceans, cutting forests faster than they can re-grow, and filling in coastal and wetland areas in ways that exacerbate the devastating effects of floods and hurricanes. Our continued dependence on fossil fuels has caused an accumulation of greenhouse gases that threatens catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate patterns.  And our conversion of forests, grasslands, and wetlands to agriculture and urban development has resulted in a precipitous decline in biodiversity. 

In this seminar we will pursue two distinct goals: first, to develop a better appreciation of the problems that beset our planet and the practices in which we each engage on a daily basis that cause those problems; and second, to ask deeper, more theoretical questions about why we continue, as individuals and as a society, to engage in those practices when evidence suggests that their short-term gains will not be worth their long-term costs.   These two goals will cause us to pan back and forth between the empirics of environmental degradation and the theoretical and legal presuppositions that support and encourage our unsustainable practices. 

This seminar is explicitly designed to complement the study of environmental law.  Without understanding, for example, the value of biodiversity, the importance of preserving wilderness, the impact on animals of industrialized meat production, and the ways in which our consumptive practices continue to destabilize the climate, we will fail to craft and apply environmental law so as to serve its highest and best purposes.  Only by understanding the sources of environmental degradation and by engaging in debate about the ethics of environmental management, can students (and ultimately law and policy makers) understand the role that law can best play in inducing sustainable practices and protecting valuable natural capital.

Sequence and Prerequisites: None

Evaluation:  Students will be asked to do several in-class activities (cumulatively worth one-third of their grade) and two short papers (each worth one-third of their grade).