William H. Rodgers Jr. – A Founder of Environmental Law
Climate change: A Reader (William H. Rodgers Jr., Michael Robinson-Dorn, Jennifer K. Barcelos & Anna T. Moritz eds., Carolina Academic Press 2011). 1206 pages & CD-ROM.
"Science changes very rapidly. What hasn’t changed is the law,” says Professor William Rodgers, recognized as a founder of environmental law. “This book details what we know and what we can do. It also showcases the bright young intellects in the climate justice world. I’ve been up and down these roads before. I meant this book to be about them and for them."
William Rodgers, the UW Law Stimson Bullitt Professor of Environmental Law, along with Michael Robinson-Dorn, former UW Law professor and currently the Clinical Professor of Law at UC Irvine;
Jeni K. Barcelos
'10, Co-Founder and Co-Director of
Three Degrees, a multidisciplinary climate justice initiative based at the UW School of Law; and Anna T. Moritz, J.D. Class of 2009, University of Washington School of Law (and a brain scientist before coming to UW Law); joined forces to provide a definitive
introduction to the emerging issues of global climate change.
It was inspired by multiple campaigns of teachings, seminars, and conferences; in particular The Law of Climate Change and Human Rights Conference led by Three Degrees founders Jeni K. Barcelos and
Jen
Marlow '10. Barcelos and Marlow invited people from all over the world to speak and to attend the 2009 conference, a first of its kind. Those people included Steve Berman, a lawyer representing the rights of consumers -- most notably on behalf of several plaintiff states in the tobacco litigation -- and David Battisti, UW Professor of Atmospheric Sciences. Other people involved with the Three Degrees conference encouraged them to carry on. Out of this encouragement came the publication project.
For the project Rodgers, Barcelos, Robinson-Dorn and Moritz brought together 60 leading thinkers and scholars in the areas of global warming, environmental science, and environmental, energy, international and human rights law. The book of excerpts, essays and original articles is organized around the topics of science, justice, impacts, energy, the U.S. response, international law, state and local law, and innovative litigation. It includes articles written by other UW School of Law professors including
Joel Ngugi and
Dongsheng
Zang.
The first article in the 1215 page book is by Peter Ward, known as a modern Carl Sagan. Ward is a professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Earth and Space Science at the University of Washington. He is also with the NASA Astrobiology Institute. In his article,
Mass Extinctions in Deep Time as Clues to Potential Future Catastrophes: The Most Dangerous Threat from Global Warming, he writes:
What We Should Worry About
Based on a reading of the past, we humans should care very much about both asteroid impacts,
as well as global warming. These seem to be the two main causes of past catastrophes. A
rapid change in sea level that will occur if the Greenland, or even parts of the Antarctic ice sheets melt, would be particularly devastating to agriculture and human habitation. Loss of the Greenland Ice
Cap would cause sea level rise between 3 and 6m, whereas the loss of all continental ice sheets would cause an 80m rise.
Professor Joel Ngugi, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Washington whose interests include the role of law in economic development, the role of governments in market regulation and wealth allocation, and legal reforms in transition and developing economies. He writes in his essay
The Curse of Ecological Interdependence: Africa, Climate Change and Social Justice:
While the world’s poor walk the Earth with a light carbon footprint they are bearing the brunt of unsustainable management of our ecological interdependence. In rich countries, coping with
climate change to date has largely been a matter of adjusting thermostats, dealing with longer, hotter summers, and observing seasonal shifts. Cities like London and Los Angeles may face
flooding risks as sea levels rise, but their inhabitants are protected by elaborate flood defense systems.
By contrast, when global warming changes weather patterns in the Horn of Africa, it
means that crops fail and people go hungry, or that women and young girls spend more hours
collecting water.
Dongsheng Zang, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law, penned
Poisoned Air: The Negotiating State and the Changing Climate in China:
These two elements — the proportion of coal and the dispersion of its use — are formidable
obstacles for the environmentalists in China. One is a material condition dictated by mother-nature, the other — though admittedly man-made — is a product of state policy set by the paramount leaders on the top. Environmentalists have neither the financial resources nor the political muscle to challenge either. They can only negotiate — sometimes through seeking temporary alliance with the State, sometimes with the international environmental movement, sometimes through self-help. And the State will negotiate back. Both sides engage in this process through the vocabulary of “rule of law,” or, the departure from it. Environmental crisis, in China as elsewhere, is a result of failure in political representation. But the failure, as a whole, is not static; it is rather a dynamic one — the result of ongoing contentions and suppressions. The point is not to be fatalist, but to understand the dirty secret of the structure, and to see that cracks are already visible.
Others published in the book include Holly Doremus, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, who wrote the essay
Lots of Science, Not Much Law; Why Knowledge Has Not (Yet) Been Power over Greenhouse Gas Emissions:
For nearly forty years, environmental lawyers and environmentalists more generally in the
United States have had a love-hate relationship with science. On the one hand, they have seen
science as a powerful political force, providing the justification for legislation that significantly
constrains individual choices, which in the absence of scientific justification might seem inconsistent with the foundations of liberal democracy.
“The present state of energy and global warming policy is a product of a series of decisions,” reports Denis Hayes in his article
Renewable Energy and the Reagan Revolution: An Unstoppable Force Derailed by an Immovable Object. Hayes was the National Coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970 and is chair of the International Earth Day Network. During the Carter administration, Hayes was Director of the federal Solar Energy Research Institute (now the Renewable Energy Laboratory). He is now President and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, a Seattle-based philanthropy dedicated to supporting the development of an ecologically sustainable economy in the Pacific Northwest:
Without exception, the political appointees I encountered knew nothing about energy, not
even the most basic facts, figures, or vocabulary. As a candidate, Reagan had vowed to abolish
the Department of Energy, so DOE was viewed as the booby prize among political appointees.
The very last appointee to the Reagan Cabinet was Jim Edwards, a South Carolina politician and
former dentist, who received the energy portfolio when Reagan was forcefully reminded that he had appointed no southerners at all.
The book also highlights the work of Steve Berman. In Legal Retaliation Against a Strategy of “Fictionalization” of Global Warming Science Native Village of Kivalina and City of Kivalina v. Exxon Mobil Corp. et al., Complaint Filed Feb. 26, 2008 (N.D. Cal), the lawsuit seeks $400 million to facilitate relocation of the Village of Kivalina:
This lawsuit raises common law claims against U.S. coal and oil companies for releases of
greenhouse gases that have led to the flooding— and anticipated abandonment— of a Native
Alaska village.
And it includes a letter written to Professor Rodgers (An Iñupiaq Reflection on “Ice”) by Victoria Hykes Steere, an Inupiaq from the village of Unalakleet. Steere holds a J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law and an LL.M. from the University of Washington School of Law:
September 2008
Professor Rodgers,
I began putting together a legal argument on the right to sea ice based on international public
law and human rights law and stopped after reading the first few chapters of Paul W. Kahn’s
book, The Cultural Study of Law.
Kahn’s words hit hard and true for they reflected my grandmother’s question that led me to
law school: “What happened to us? I was born free, why am I not going to die that way?”