Volume 46 (2019)

Indigenous stewardship contributes to ecological biodiversity and ecosystem resiliency. Restoring reciprocal relationships between American Indians and traditional lands can improve ecosystem health and cure social ills through the restoration of traditional foods, medicines, and culturally utilized plants. Federal regulations and failure to recognize tribes near Yosemite National Park threaten endangered ...

Residential solar and utility scale solar are low-hanging fruit in the renewables transition, but targeting low-hanging fruit can only go so far. Can states innovate, reach further, and ignite near-universal consumer demand for clean energy and achieve social justice goals through equitable community solar?

Community choice aggregation energy programs have proliferated throughout California as a tool for public municipalities to aggregate their communities’ electricity demand and procure electricity for themselves. Through their community choice aggregation programs, communities have reduced their electricity-related greenhouse gas emissions in order to combat climate change. In this Article, we ...

What can you, as students, do to get involved in the environmental justice or social justice movements? My name is Roger Lin. I am one of the attorneys in Berkeley Law’s Environmental Law Clinic. We do environmental health and environmental justice cases. We have fantastic panelists who are going to ...

The goal of the panel is to make sure that you all, as students, have the opportunity, first and foremost, to understand how lawyers are using their degrees on environmental justice issues. So the panelists are going to focus on their roles within their organizations and the efforts they are ...

Our panel is called What We’re Up Against. We do not want to leave folks with the impression that what we have before us is a long list of challenges that we all face. Although that is the case in many instances, and today it is very obvious what the ...

In many instances, we have some extremely intelligent scientists, attorneys, engineers—a whole bunch of folks. I have been really blessed to be surrounded by and work with those individuals. Sometimes we forget about the intelligence, the innovation, the ability for communities to not only engage in a process, but to ...

My name is Candice Youngblood, and I am a third-year student here at Berkeley Law. More importantly, I am a member of Students for Economic and Environmental Justice, also known as SEEJ. On behalf of SEEJ, it is my pleasure to welcome you all to our 2019 Symposium, “Ground-Truthing Injustice.” ...

A cornerstone of the environmental justice movement is to allow residents of communities to speak for themselves. To understand the themes explored in the transcripts and articles in this special issue, it is important to first understand the history of this movement. . .

Courts in key climate change cases have abdicated their constitutional responsibility to protect a prejudiced and disenfranchised group (nonvoting minors and future generations) and remedy an insidious pathology in public discourse and the political process: the industry-funded climate disinformation campaign. This Article posits that this abdication results from courts’ uneasiness ...

Parties to the Paris Agreement can engage in voluntary cooperation and use internationally transferred mitigation outcomes towards their national climate pledges. Doing so promises to lower the cost of achieving agreed climate objectives, which allows countries to increase their mitigation efforts with given resources.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is the centerpiece of federal environmental law. This “broadest and perhaps most important” of environmental laws requires federal agencies to publicly weigh environmental impacts before proceeding with federal actions. NEPA has been criticized because it can delay development. Other critics describe NEPA as “bureaucratic ...

Just four years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, there are serious warning signs that the Agreement could unravel in the 2020s. Not only did President Trump’s 2017 withdrawal announcement damage the universality and reciprocity of the Agreement, but many parties are not on track to reach their own ...

In the nearly fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, hurricane victims’ efforts to recover for the Army Corps of Engineers’ construction and maintenance of New Orleans’s faulty levee systems have slowly wended their way through the courts. After the Federal Circuit held in St. Bernard Parish Government v. United States that ...

Increasingly complex environmental challenges reveal the necessity of creative, decisive regulatory solutions. Effective public policy responses to the distributional effects of a changing climate require nuanced analysis and collaborative effort by each branch of government. The analysis supporting the D.C. Circuit’s recent endorsement of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new policy ...

What can be done about the recent phenomenon of intense wildfire air pollution in the American West? Wildfire science emphasizes the importance of using fire as a natural, regenerative process to maintain forest health and reduce large wildfire air pollution events. But forestry management policy has long emphasized suppressing wildfires, ...

In 2017 and 2018 the California Legislature passed two packages of bills aiming to address the state’s massive housing shortage. The bills focus on the state’s housing element law and Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) system. These two mechanisms were created to require cities to plan for their long-term housing ...

A well-functioning United States electricity system, also known as “the grid,” is fundamentally important to the American way of life. Nearly everyone involved—from users, to electricity generators, to transmitters, to regulators— recognizes this and agrees broadly that the system should be “resilient” to threats such as extreme weather, attack, and ...

This Note seeks to paint a picture of what working toward environmental justice should look like. Focusing on the demands that environmental justice communities voiced through the Principles of Environmental Justice, it posits that three key components are necessary to comprehensively achieve environmental justice: distributive justice, recognitional justice, and procedural ...

In the past two decades, the Supreme Court has significantly reduced the deference given to the “Jurisdictional Determinations” made by the Army Corps of Engineers under section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Previous to the Court’s holding in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army ...