Speakers from around the country and beyond emphasized the global nature of environmental law issues this past weekend at the University’s 23rd annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. The conference, which ran from Thursday, March 3 to Sunday, March 6, was organized by the student environmental law organization Land Air Water.
This year’s conference theme was “Living as if nature mattered,” and was taken from the title of the book “Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered” by Bill Devall.
“It’s what’s missing in decision-making in government and society these days,” conference Co-director Zack Mazer said. “We don’t really regard nature when we’re trying to decide what to do as a culture, and we’re trying to change that.”
Devall, a professor emeritus at Humboldt State University in California, spoke at the conference Thursday night.
University law professor John Bonine helped initiate the conference 22 years ago.
“We decided, students and I and professor Mike Axline … that we wanted to bring together lawyers, law students and activists,” Bonine said. “The idea was that the law students could maybe find a job, the lawyers could maybe find a client, and the activists could help the lawyers and remind them why they went to law school.”
Bonine said the conference this year included 200 speakers and several thousand participants.
Speakers shared different messages of
environmental challenges and their local and global impact.
“All over the world, we find that minorities and the poor bear the burdens of our highly technical society,” said Beverly Wright, founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in Louisiana. To illustrate how similar situations occur in different countries, Wright displayed nearly identical photographs of chemical plants located next to playgrounds in a black neighborhood in Louisiana and a black neighborhood in South Africa.
“A fight for environmental justice is really a fight for the protection of all of us,” Wright said. “Pollution doesn’t stop at a particular street. The air blows everywhere.”
In another speech, cancer researcher Dr. Samuel Epstein described industries’ reckless practices with toxic chemicals as “a violation of human rights and white-collar crime.”
Epstein blamed these practices for rising
cancer rates, and said incidence of all cancers in the United States has increased 23 percent from 1973 to 1999. Currently, one in two men and one in three women will get cancer at some point in their lifetimes, he said.
“If that isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to touch 100 percent of Americans, I could step out and start selling newspapers,” Epstein said.
Former FOX Television news reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson spoke after Epstein. Akre and Wilson were fired for refusing to distort information in a news story on rBGH, a growth hormone-
injected into cows at many American dairies.
“Sam (Epstein) said the truth shall set you free,” Wilson said. “It set us free of our home and most of our life savings. It set us free, all right.”
Other speakers also showed how environmental changes have impacted them personally.
Dune Lankard was a commercial fisherman in Alaska until the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 devastated his industry.
“The oil spill happened, and for me that was the day the ocean died,” Lankard said. “But it was also the day my spirit came to life.” Since then, Lankard said he has worked to protect the environment and the rights of
native people in Alaska.
“It’s really important that we
remember we’re all the same tribe,” Lankard said. “We’re all indigenous of planet Earth.”
At the conference, activists who had made significant contributions were also recognized.
Fernando Dougnac, founder of Chile’s premier public interest environmental organization Fiscalía del Medio Ambiente, received the Kerry Rydberg Award for Environmental Activism, given annually at the conference.
“I have to say that there is
nothing more important than
defending the environment,” Dougnac said in Spanish through an interpreter. “Another struggle is not only to recognize the environmental right as human rights, but to
recognize there are other beings more important than human beings, or at least as important. To this struggle I have given my life.”
The conference is a student-run event. Conference Co-director Rachel Kastenberg said she and three other student co-directors started compiling a list of possible speakers last summer.
Kastenberg, a second year law
student, said she chose to attend
the University because of the environmental law program and conference.
“It puts the law school right on the map,” Kastenberg said.
“It’s neat,” conference Co-director Kat Moore said. “It reaches out
to other law schools and they bring their students here.” Moore said
in past years, she met students
from other schools such as Harvard at the conference.
This year’s conference did draw both local students and students from other campuses.
University junior Ben Nussbaum said he attended the conference
for a Clark Honors College class he
is taking, Human Rights and the
Environment. He said he enjoyed
the panel about forestry in Ecuador and Bolivia.
“It was really helpful for me because I’m doing a paper on Ecuador,”
Nussbaum said.
Chris Coelho, an environmental
science graduate student at California State University, Chico, said he also
attended the conference for a class.
His favorite part was a panel
discussion Epstein led about cosmetics and cancer.
To earn class credit, Coelho and his classmates had to attend at least four panel discussions and write papers about the event. They will also speak about their experiences at their
university’s Earth Day celebration.
“We’re going to present the
information we got here to
campus,” Coelho said.
Dan Clarkson first attended the
conference in 1988, when he was
a Harvard University law student,
at the insistence of his professor
Zygmunt Plater. Plater, now a
professor of law at the Boston College Law School, spoke at this year’s
conference and received a lifetime achievement award.
“He dragged me out here on a plane,” Clarkson said. “He said, ‘You have to come out here. It’ll change your life.’ It changed my life.”
Clarkson, now director of legal and governmental affairs for an alternative energy company in Seattle, said he has attended the conference every year since then. He also makes periodic visits to Harvard to encourage more students to come to the conference.
“It’s more than a conference,” he said. “It’s a life-changing event.”
Weekend conference explores law, environment
Daily Emerald
March 7, 2005
Bill Devall, co-author of “Deep Ecology
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