climate change

Bringing the Climate Crisis Close to Home

/ Ian Hurley / Leave a comment

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
— John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

When I started my career in journalism, I often heard this maxim about audience building: All news is local. The general idea underlying the concept (if you’re a journalism professor avert your eyes) was that no matter how national the story or the publication, it related to some localized community. The “locality” could be geographical, but equally, it could be about different identities, economic standings, experiences, etc. 

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Environmental Law and the Climate Apocalypse

/ Ian Hurley / Leave a comment

He rounded a bend to hear the roar of the conflagration and see a fire a half mile ahead like a black-and-red curtain dropped from a night sky. Even from that distance the heat stopped him. He collapsed to his knees, sat in the warm ashes through which he’d been wading, and wept.  – Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.

Fire has always been an inherent part of life in the American West. The mountains, plains, and forests that sprawl from the Mississippi to the Pacific see conflagrations that can reduce thousands of acres of landscape into smoldering ash in just a few days. Then, over time, the plants and wildlife return, and the ecology and lifestyles of the place return to normal over time. But nothing is normal anymore. And I fear we are long past the point where any legal efforts can save humanity from the bed it has made for itself.

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The COP Chronicles: Combating Climate Change on the Frontlines 

/ Sangeeta Kishore / Leave a comment

I’ve been following COP for as long as I can remember. As an International Relations major in undergrad, one of my student research positions was listing every sentence made by a world leader at COP into a monstrous Excel spreadsheet. And now, as a law student interested in human rights and environmental law, I read about COP nearly every day. 

But many of you must be thinking, what am I even talking about? 

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Why Hurricanes and Oranges Sent Me to Law School

/ Samantha Torre / Leave a comment

When I was ten years old, Hurricane Sandy hit my hometown on Long Island in October 2012.  My concerns at the time were centered on whether the neighborhood would cancel trick or treating and if the medium-sized pear tree on our front lawn would survive after the storm knocked it over. For me, Hurricane Sandy represented a vacation from school and a chance to finish Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Fortunately, circumstance shielded me from the extent of the damage — our utilities survived most of the storm and were replaced quickly. This was not the case for everyone. Friends who lived five minutes away lost water for days and power for longer. My aunt had to move after her home was flooded. A friend from high school still had nightmares when it rained — six years after the storm.

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What Do Conservatives Believe?

/ ianramseynorth / 1 Comment

In the early days of the pandemic, I read a tweet suggesting that public health authorities seeking to overcome conservative skepticism about the virus should heed the lessons of Cultural Cognition. Cultural cognition is a theory, coming out of Yale Law School, that perception of factual issues is shaped by normative commitments. In other words, our moral beliefs shape how we understand facts.

Around the same time I read that tweet, a conservative friend warned me about various Governors’ lock down orders and local officials’ enforcement of social distancing measures. He said that once government assumes a new power, it is unlikely to give it up. It seemed absurd to me to imagine governors and state health officials as crypto-fascists eager to control citizen’s lives. I have, however, ranted at and to my friends and family about federal government surveillance powers using the exact same argument.

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