Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice—the world’s largest nonprofit public interest environmental law organization—gives an inspiring address to Vermont Law and Graduate School graduates and audience members alike for VLGS’s 50th commencement.
Narrator
This podcast, the production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment, a Vermont law and graduate school.
Christophe Courchesne
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm Christoph Courchesne, associate professor of law, director of the Environmental Law Center, the Environmental Advocacy Clinic, and associate dean for environmental and experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. For this episode, I am delighted to share the remarks of our featured speaker for VLGS's 50th commencement honorary degree recipient Abigail Dillen, President of Earthjustice. We join the commencement ceremony with an introduction by Dean of the Graduate School, Dan Bromberg.
Dan Bromberg
It is my honor to introduce you to our commencement speaker, Abigail Dillen. Abigail Dillen is the president of Earthjustice, the world's largest nonprofit public interest environmental law organization, an Earthjustice Action, which is focused on securing fair courts and strong environmental laws. She leads over 650 staff in harnessing the power of law to protect the environment and people's health in the U.S. and internationally.
Dillen joined Earthjustice in 2000, initially focusing on public lands and ecosystem protection. She founded Earth Justice Coal Program and then served as its managing attorney, which played a core role in backing coal out of the U.S. power mix. She went on to serve as the organization's first vice president of litigation for climate and energy, leading the organization's litigation and advocacy to drive the essential shift to clean energy economy.
Her work is premised on a disciplined insistence that lawyers and policy makers have an essential role to play in creating a safer and more just world on a healing planet. And Abby takes time to truly enjoy the planet. She's a genuine outdoors person, binoculars always in hand, ready for whatever bird landscape or small wonder might cross her path.
Her creativity runs just as deep, especially in the way she brings scenes to life through her hand-drawn artwork. Abbie received her B.A. from Yale University and her law degree from the University of California. Please come to the stage.
Abigail Dillen
Abigail Thank you so much. Dean Bromberg. It is a tremendous honor to be here. This milestone anniversary of this great school and to be here on this very momentous day for all of you in these front rows. As I was thinking about what I could say today that might be of use, I realized I should know more about how you think.
You think about how to frame the mission of the VLGS. So I went to your website, and as you probably know, the very first thing you see on your landing page is a call to action says Become a catalyst for change. Well, that that in exactly those words, is my forever aspiration for myself and for Earthjustice, which is the organization where I have been lucky to work for the last 26 years.
So hear me when I say I am very moved to receive this honorary degree, even though I can't rock the hat, apparently. And and very, very, very proud to be here celebrating all of your hard earned degrees and the promise that all of you hold for community and the world. You made the right choice throwing in with the change agents, because even if you want to, just to be your best selves following a time honored path, I don't believe that's the thing anymore.
I don't have to tell you that we are hitting all kinds of tipping points for our planet and the consequences will continue to accelerate over our lifetimes. However, artificial intelligence develops, however it is governed or not, it will change human work and therefore society in profound ways that even its developers can't begin to predict. Our democracy is backsliding, perhaps landslide.
And that's not only in the U.S. it's the case in countries around the world and the world order. If that's really an appropriate phrase of the last 18 years is gone and the next geopolitical arrangements are TBD. So we know we're not the first people to live in tumultuous times. But in this new weather, I think our species is having a new collective experience.
I feel it in my bones, or perhaps more accurately, in my soft tissue. And I can imagine you do, too. It's a very human response to downplay this feeling and just hope that it will go away. And honestly, I relate to that some days. But there is another human response to rise to challenges and protect and nurture what we love.
We see how capacious and practical that love can be in the everyday facts of hospitals, of fire stations, of libraries, of schools, and choosing this mission driven school in doing all the work that your degrees reflect. You have delivered greatly prepared yourselves to work in service to see and understand the big problems and to act to solve them, not just to weather change, but to catalyze it.
Working in Earthjustice, these days, I get a lot of grave. How are you? As in No, really? Really. How are you? I think people want to know some basics. How hard is this administration coming at us? Whether the lawsuits are working or not, how much we and I mean all of us are losing. Whether the damage can ever be repaired.
The question is genuinely, are you okay? But it's also are we okay? And I think the subtitle is always, Are you afraid?
So my new standing answer to this intense How are you is? I'm not sure. That's sort of a melee kind of. Look at how much what time is it? How many will it be? The attacks on Earthjustice and even on our clients. Serious causing disruption. But they are manageable so far. But everyone in this room needs to know.
And I assume you do the weaponization of the Justice Department and the cooperation of the majority in Congress should alarm everyone to the maximum. The lawsuits are working. The lawsuits are working. The lawyers are filing them. We're filing them more than ever at Earthjustice and judges of all political stripes and ideologies are doing their jobs. But when it matters most, when the stakes are highest, this Supreme Court is reaching down faster than it ever has into the lower courts, and not only accepting but advancing the president's abuse of power.
And I meet many people who say on the basis perhaps of the tariff decisions, but it seems like things are shaping up. No, they're not. No, they are not. What we stand to lose in this time is incalculable. Already we are losing time, and that will cause irreparable damage. But we are winning cases and we are stopping so many bad things.
And that will continue. So are we okay? No, not yet. Am I afraid? Yes, very. But I am also activated like I have never been before. And my guess is you are too. Am I right? The Pulitzer Prize just went to Jill Lepore for her book We the People, which, if it weren't too big and heavy to fit in my suitcase, I would be marshaling in this way because it is a must read.
It makes an irresistible, well constructed, popular case for the necessity of constitutional amendments, which for my entire lifetime have been presumed to be out of reach. Now we are talking about them as an imperative. We, the collective we and the we at our justice are giving new life to doctrines that were taught to me as side shows the public trust doctrine, state constitutional rights to a clean and healthy environment.
The last recognized international human right to a clean and healthy environment. We are bringing the historic opinion of the International Court of Justice to bear in actual judgments abroad. So many smart new policies are finding their way into law. I'll offer climate super funds as a shining example. I'm going to insert a little footnote here. If you all aren't paying great attention to preemption, please start.
We need all the help we can. This time is creating the imperative and therefore the space to re-imagine government. When have we had more conversations about how government can deliver? It's thrilling. We are looking at law reform no longer as a someday aspiration, but as an urgent today priority. And the smartest, most practical people are rolling up their sleeves and thinking about how we do this.
And you know what? Smart people in congressional offices and state houses are saying, can you hurry up? We're interested. Having lived with the limitations of all laws for many years now, I'm excited to draft new ones. Having spent so much time suing the government, I genuinely want it to work better. Having watched the erosion of support year over year for environmental regulation, I am beyond ready to catalyze the new politics that can produce a new and improved social contract so that we have justice in this country and we can survive and thrive for the next century and beyond.
At this very moment, under this very tent, I'm so excited to be at this school that is uniting law and policy with the correct practical emphasis on real world results. You are in the right place for what you have to do next. For people who want to make change in the world, this is the time for that. And you are those people.
So as you set out to do important purpose driven work of many kinds, I'm going to take this platform you have given me to offer three exhortations. And the first is, let's please be thoughtful about preserving what isn't broken. Even as people are feeling the pain of a lawless government, there is still an ascendant narrative that laws and regulations are our problem.
Your training gives you the skills to explain and demonstrate why deregulation is not a prescription for achieving abundance of social goods. People are better at everything, including innovation, when there are some effective and fair rules in place. Second, always remember it's our job to seek the truth really, genuinely seek the truth, and to tell the truth. The habits of legal Inquiry.
Whether you are getting a JD today or whether you are getting a masters, have never been more important. To be able to persuade. You actually have to understand and to understand, you have to doubt that you are right and you have to wonder what is right and what your opponents are saying to you. And the rigor of fact based evidentiary legal work is what we need in all things.
It's not enough to just have an opinion that is reached through intuition or bias. We need to speak in facts and we need to understand and what's wrong with our position. And the process of doing that does two things. It engages us in open inquiry. I have never actually been in a litigated proceeding where I did not come to deeply respect and like and even enjoy my opposing counsel.
Things are a little less civil that these days. So I don't I don't know that that's always true, but it is a model and it's one that we need now outside of litigation proceedings. And the other thing it does when you work so hard to reach your true, true assessment of what's going on and what the remedy is, you can stand in it no matter what wins come at you two years ago, we had a president who was committed to climate action and all of government approach and to environmental justice.
And now we are in a situation where a new president says those things are un-American and a lot of people are being very quiet about that, making the assessment that it will hurt them to say the things that they were saying just two years ago. And I will tell you at Earthjustice, we know what our truth is and we are saying it.
And we have never had more support and we have never been stronger. Trust your truth. I lifted up this passage that I happen to be reading in a George Saunders book about his short story class, and I had to share it with our team at Earthjustice, and I want to share it with you. George Saunders is being wrongly assailed as just a guru of kindness.
He's better than that. He's more than that. The world is full of people with agendas trying to persuade us to act on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf. But inside us is what Hemingway called a built in shock proof shit detector. How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it.
And that part of the mind is the one that reading and writing and I will add argument refined into sharpness. I will never do that for you. Don't begin to let it. Third, embrace this labor of love that you are choosing because the recompense comes for a labor of love is love. I love a rom com so much more than the next person.
But I will tell you that sitting in a folding chair 7:00 in the evening at a public hearing, windowless room, mad people with grievances and someone stands up at the podium and you think you're the one I've been waiting for. That's the kind of destiny that you never get over. One of my favorite Stevie Wonder song adds to the lyrics.
When I fall in love with you, I think it will be forever. And that articulation always confuses my husband's. The when and the if. But I know it's about public interest work, and I think Julia's remarks show that you have already found one of the greatest loves of all. And there's something bigger, of course, in the idea of a beloved community that you are serving.
And so never forget, that's what this is all about. Wherever you find yourself, whether it's at a firm or a NGO like mine, don't forget that you are making your own lifelong love story and look back and be proud about your choices. And all along the way you will doubt yourself. This work is hard. It is hard now and it will be hard for you over the foreseeable future.
And you will wonder whether you can make a difference. So find those touchstones for yourself that you come back to over and over again. I'm going to give one to you that was given to me by my friends Ayana, Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine Wilkinson in their anthology All We Can Save. This is Adrian Rich. My heart is moved by all I cannot save.
So much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who age after age. Perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. Congratulations, Class of 2026. Good luck.
Narrator
If you want to hear more about hot topics on environmental law and policy issues, check us out. Subscribe to the Hothouse Earth podcast wherever you get your podcasts.