Millions of people are being forced to leave their homes due to the increasing effects of climate change. How is the international community responding to this growing crisis? Are there legal protections for those who are displaced?
Guests:
Barry Hill, Visiting Scholar at the Environmental Law Institute and Adjunct Faculty at Vermont Law School
Carmen Gonzalez, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law
Hosts:
Jeannie Oliver, Assistant Professor and Staff Attorney
Mason Overstreet, LLM Toxics Fellow with the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic
Recommended Resources:
Professor Carmen Gonzalez's Hot Topic Lecture: Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene
Their country is disappearing, a short documentary on the Marshall Islands
Natural Disasters: Developing Resilience and Addressing Climate Refugees, VJEL Top 10 Watch List 2019
For more Hothouse Earth, follow us on Twitter @HothouseEarth, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website, www.hothouseearthpodcast.com.
Intro: This podcast is a production of Vermont Law School's Environmental Law Center.
Mason: In September 2017, Hurricane Maria rampaged through the Caribbean devastating islands like Dominica, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Vermont Law School Professor Berry Hill was in Puerto Rico when Maria hit.
Professor Barry Hill: It was as if the hurricane was right above it. But never, ever heard with that loud.
Professor Barry Hill: It was as if I was living in the middle of a jet engine, and there were times that I thought that I was going to die. Everything was devastated. It didn't look like a Caribbean paradise, if you will.
Jeannie: Maria cause catastrophic destruction and a humanitarian crisis. It caused landslides and flooding, destroyed homes, agriculture, the power grid. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the island since 18. Hundreds more than 3000 people across the Caribbean are estimated to have lost their lives.
Mason: An estimated 130000 Puerto Ricans left Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Maria. That's almost 4 percent of the total population.
Professor Barry Hill: Now, what has happened is that there are climate justice refugees from Puerto Rico who've moved to Florida. They have moved to New York. They have moved to Chicago. They have moved to Texas. Those people are climate refugees.
Jeannie: Today on the show, we'll be talking about climate migration.
Jeannie: Hello and welcome to Hothouse Earth. I'm Jeanie Oliver.
Mason: And I'm Mason Overstreet.
Jeannie: Every month that hothouse earth, we talk to experts to help us and help you make sense of the law and policy behind the most pressing environmental challenges of our times. So, Mason, what's on the agenda today?
Mason: We're going to explore how people or even entire populations are being displaced by the increasingly severe effects of climate change like Hurricane Maria and fleeing within and across national borders. We're going to tackle questions like what exactly is climate migration? How are we responding to it or not? How should we respond to it? And what are the challenges and opportunities moving forward?
Jeannie: To help us do this, we'll be hearing from two experts today, Vermont Law School Professor Barry Hill, who you just heard from. And Professor Carmen Gonzalez from the Seattle University School of Law. And Professor Gonzalez was also the Distinguished International Environmental Law Summer Scholar at the VLS this summer.
Mason: They're both experts on environmental law, environmental justice, and they've both done extensive research on climate migration.
Jeannie: So, Mason, there's a few things our listeners need to know before we dive into climate migration specifically.
Mason: We can't talk about climate migration without first discussing climate change.
Jeannie: We actually asked Professor Gonzalez to explain what climate changes and what climate change does.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: Climate change is caused by greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Most of these gases are are generated through the burning of fossil fuels, petroleum, coal, natural gas. And when these gases are released into the atmosphere, some of them remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. And they trap heat near the surface of the earth, raising temperatures. So much carbon dioxide has been released since the industrial revolution that the atmosphere has warmed significantly and is disrupting the planet's climate in a variety of ways. So we see unprecedented heat waves. Every year we are told this is the hottest year on record. We see heavy precipitation. We see increasingly severe hurricanes such as Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico. We see sea level rise that is causing coastal erosion and inundation. And that will eventually submerge the small island states and will affect the world's major cities, including New York, Boston, Mumbai, Shanghai. And that's only the beginning.
Jeannie: So Mason going off what Professor Gonzalez just said. You can break the effects of climate change down into two categories, sudden onset events like natural disasters, including extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires, that sort of thing, and then slow onset events like sea level rise or drought conditions leading to severe food shortages.
Mason: Yes. So basically climate change is causing conditions that make it untenable to stay on the land. Right?
Jeannie: That's right.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: There are two ways in which climate change is affecting populations. One is the disasters such as the hurricanes and the typhoons. There is major hurricane, massive loss of life, flooding. People are displaced from their homes. And we see that happening over and over and over again. Then we have what are called slow onset events, such as rising sea levels that are affecting the small island states. They're not going under immediately. But as the sea levels rise, their water supplies are contaminated with salt water, their agriculture is flooded, their food security and their access to water is undermined. So it's not all of a sudden it's happening gradually.
Jeannie: Both sudden onset and slow onset climate impacts will ultimately lead to climate displacement. So in the first category, your displaced immediately and in the second you might be displaced over time or the slow onset event might suddenly become something like a natural disaster and suddenly displace people. So can you explain for our listeners what climate migration is?
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: It's it's the temporary or permanent displacement by people as a consequence of both these sudden disasters and slow onset events. Most of the people who migrate migrate elsewhere in their own country where they remain as internally displaced persons. Another group will migrate across national borders into the neighboring country and then a smaller group. Usually the most ambitious and with some resources will try to cross into the United States, the European Union, Australia.
Jeannie: Mason We know that the majority of people who are displaced by climate change will originate in poorer developing regions of the world. Something you might hear referred to as the global south. And they'll move within the borders of their own country. And this is what Professor Gonzalez was referring to as internally displaced people.
Mason: So, for example, Jeannie, you and I just listen to this NPR two part series about migration occurring in Mongolia that was fascinating, where increasingly severe cold weather events are forcing nomadic farmers to move from rural areas to the city.
Jeannie: And during research for this episode, I was also reading about the situation. And in Bangladesh and apparently and in Bangladesh, a lot of the coastal flooding causes people to move to the capital. And something like 70 percent of people living in Dhaka slums were displaced from their original home by environmental disasters.
Mason: And the same thing is happening in Syria, too.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: If you have a situation where water is scarce for food is scarce, and then climate change exacerbates the situation. At that point, you have climate change induced conflict. So what it does is it makes the pre-existing conditions so much worse and tips people over the edge.
Jeannie: So, for example, could we consider the sort of terrible events that are going on in Syria? Could we link those to climate change or is that too tenuous?
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: Climate change is one of the causes. So there was a drought, an unprecedented drought, a drought so severe in 2006 that there was nothing like it for the prior 900 years. And as a result, about one point five million farmers migrated from rural areas to urban areas. Suddenly, you didn't have their agricultural production and suddenly they were a displaced population that had no place to live, no jobs, et cetera. Putting more pressure on the cities. What was the government's response? Nothing. And so that then fueled anger against the government and was one of many precipitating causes of the conflict in Syria.
Jeannie: So that's internal displacement. And then there's people who migrate across borders. So those who are most likely to migrate across borders are island nations because they and a lot of options for domestic relocation. So some of the Caribbean islands or the Pacific islands like Kiribati, for example, those that do migrate across national borders are most likely to settle in neighboring developing countries. So, again, that's the global south. We were talking about.
Mason: Right. Developing nations currently host about 85 percent of the world's refugees, with Turkey hosting the most, followed by Pakistan, Uganda, Lebanon, Iran, Bangladesh and Sudan.
Jeannie: A smaller number moved to wealthier, more developed nations, something you'll hear referred to as the global north.
Mason: Sometimes those that move to the global north have more resources than those who are displaced internally or than those who moved to neighboring nations in the global south.
Jeannie: But it might also be those who are more desperate, like the case in Syria or Central America that Professor Gonzalez referenced.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: They're more desperate or they're more ambitious to have a better life for themselves and their families than they think is going to happen in a country that doesn't have the resources to deal with all of the internally displaced people.
Jeannie: In terms of numbers. I read that about 24 million people displaced by catastrophic weather disasters each year. And these numbers are expected to rise as climate change intensifies. The World Bank thinks that about one hundred and million people could be displaced by desertification and sea level rise in the most vulnerable regions, like the sub-Saharan South Asia and Latin America.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: How many people will be displaced by 2050? There are varying estimates. The most common number you hear is 200 million. But this is really uncertain. It will be between 25 million and 1 billion if it's on the 1 billion end. Think about what that means. That's going to be the greatest migration in human history.
Mason: Before we go any further, we need to pause and incorporate a key puzzle piece into this conversation environmental justice and climate justice.
Jeannie: Yeah, this relates back to something we were just talking about when we said that most climate migration occurs in the global south.
Mason: And it goes to the heart of climate change, climate, migration, and arguably should also inform how we respond to these issues.
Jeannie: But first, we need to know what do we mean by environmental justice and climate justice?
Mason: So in simplified terms, it's about how environmental issues, including climate change, disproportionately affect marginalized communities, which include low income areas, communities of color or developing nations.
Jeannie: So what we're really talking about when we talk about environmental justice and climate justice is environmental and climate injustice.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: It's an environmental justice issue for several different reasons. The main one is that it's caused primarily by the greenhouse gas emissions of the world's most affluent people. So the United States, if you look at our carbon footprint, how much energy we waste essentially per person is mind boggling. But the consequences are being borne by the people who contributed the least to the problem and have the fewest resources to protect themselves from harm. So we see right now that the small island states are being affected. The least developed countries are being affected because they don't have the resources to prepare for these major hurricanes and respond to the disaster after the fact. Indigenous peoples are being forced to migrate from their territories. So it has a disproportionate impact on the poor and it is caused primarily by the affluent. It is one of the most pressing social justice issues of our time.
Jeannie: So Mason, the international community and in particular those we have classed as the global north, have a really big responsibility to deal with climate migration. Do we know what they are doing?
Mason: Not enough with climate migration. We're facing a truly global problem. But as it stands, there's no global tool to deal with her.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: Currently, persons who are displaced by climate change don't have any legal status under international law. So if they come to the European Union, for example, or cross into the United States, they are essentially treated as unauthorized immigrants, meaning that they're subject to criminalization, detention and deportation. That is a serious problem.
Jeannie: The international law that's in place for refugees doesn't cover climate refugees.
Mason: So there's this treaty called the 1951 Refugee Convention that defines a refugee as a person who is outside of his or her country of origin, an unwilling or unable to return due to, quote, a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or a political opinion and refugees.
Jeannie: Under this definition, start off as something called asylum seekers. And then once they prove that they meet the definition of refugee, they became a refugee with the rights and protections of refugees.
Mason: But that doesn't cover people displaced by climate change.
Jeannie: No, it doesn't. It's really a treaty aimed at persecution. A bit of a side note here. But when I was researching for this show, I learnt that there have been 11 unsuccessful cases of people seeking refugee status on climate grounds in New Zealand since 2011 because they don't fall within the refugee convention.
Mason: This leads me to the question of whether the international community isn't thinking about this.
Jeannie: No, I don't think that's the case. There are conversations happening at the international level as well as at the national level around the globe. It seems that there are four main responses or approaches. First is the international law options. So building off the refugee convention we talked about just now. Second, there is a national security or maybe more accurately, a nationalist response. Third, there's a managed migration response. And finally, there's a self-determination approach. Let's start by talking about the international law options. As I understand it, there's three main conversations going on at the international level at the moment.
Mason: They're planning to expand the definition of refugee under the 1951 Climate Convention to include climate refugees.
Jeannie: So this would give those people the protections of refugees under the refugee convention. Exactly. Mason This sounds like it could be a really positive change.
Mason: Yeah, I think so. But the real issue is whether the international community will be able to reach consensus on this given this white nationalist anti immigration sentiment that's uprising right now.
Jeannie: Yeah, along those lines, Mason, even asylum seekers who do fit within the current definition of refugee, they're having a really hard time at borders at the moment, aren't they?
Mason: They are. So there's militarized borders. There's detention centers. There's lack of legal representation. There's even a lack of understanding of the systems they would need to work with to get their refugee status recognized.
Jeannie: And so we're probably going to see this situation happen even if we had climate refugees fall within the definition.
Mason: I Think so.
Jeannie: Here's Professor Gonzalez's take on this option.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: There is a proposal on the table that has been raised by some to say, why don't we amend the refugee convention since we already have something in place to cover climate displaced persons? One, I don't think that's going to happen. There's tremendous resistance. Two even if it did. What's happening to people who are actually asylum seekers and refugees when they cross the border, they're being held. Some of them indefinitely in detention. They are not offered legal assistance. And yet they have the burden of proving that they fit the criteria of the refugee convention. Imagine asking the average person on the street who has no background in law. Now you have to go before a judge and prove that you fit the definition of the 1951 Refugee Convention. So if we did the same for people who are displaced by climate change, we would likely have the same problem. The indefinite detention, the no legal help. And then because climate change exacerbates other factors that lead people to leave, the burden of proof would be so high as to be nearly insurmountable. So I don't think that's a good option, but it's one that has been raised.
Mason: The second conversation at the international level is to classify climate change as a disaster. And there's this thing called the Nansen Initiative that was adopted in Geneva in 2015. And it's basically a set of non-binding principles for how countries should respond to those displaced by natural disasters.
Jeannie: But Mason, this isn't about climate change specifically, is it? It's more about natural disasters generally. And so the thought is that you could use this to cover people who displaced by climate related disasters.
Mason: Exactly. So basically, it's a humanitarian response to climate migration.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: And that's a step forward because it's recognizing that due needs to be a humanitarian response, not a security response. This is well and good for something like an earthquake. But the reason it's problematic when it comes to climate change is that climate change is not a natural disaster or a misfortune. It's a human caused one. There is responsibility on the part of those who caused it toward those who then suffer the consequences. It's not charity. It should be viewed as a form of reparation. And so the Nansen Initiative, when you try to map it onto climate change, is problematic because it's based on charity, it's based on goodwill, rather than you have an obligation to undo the harm that you've done.
Jeannie: Going back to the climate justice principles we talked about earlier. Professor Gonzalez explains that the Nansen Initiative doesn't adequately encompass the climate regimes principles of common but differentiated responsibility.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: And so it treats those who are displaced as as victims, as passive, as helpless, when in fact they have been targets of lack of action on climate change.
Jeannie: Sticking with what's going on in international law, the third conversation happening is under the Paris agreement. And just really briefly. Basically, what's happening is the Paris agreement created this task force that's going to develop recommendations for addressing climate displacement.
Mason: So where are we with that?
Jeannie: Right now, we're in the very beginning of those conversations. So it's very much in its infancy and it's really hard to know what's going to come out of that. So, Mason, those of the international law conversations that are happening right now and all of this is to say that we can't really rely on international law to address this growing problem of climate migration, at least not yet.
Mason: Right. And Jeannie, an international option wouldn't necessarily help us address the vast numbers of internally displaced people. So what we're left with is individual countries responding in their own way.
Jeannie: Exactly. So this is probably a good time to transition to talking about the national security response. Here's a clip that's probably familiar to everyone.
Audio Clip of President Trump: We're in the middle of a crisis on our southern border. The unprecedented surge of illegal migrants from Central America is harming both Mexico and the United States. And I believe the steps we will take starting right now will improve the safety in both of our countries. Going to be very, very good for Mexico. A nation without borders is not a nation. Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders, gets back its borders.
Mason: So what we mean by the national security response is that we're seeing reactions across the world based on fear, xenophobia and a sense of other another way of looking at this, which some people might term fortress world, is that countries are responding in a sense of protectionism.
Jeannie: And Mason sometimes these sentiments are stirred up by people with really good intentions.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: Sometimes environmentalists take positions with the best of intentions that can really boomerang in negative ways. So, for instance, often environmental groups will urge states to take aggressive action on climate change by saying, look, if you don't do this, we're going to have millions of people displaced and they're just going to be running across the border, flooding our, you know, our country. And we don't have the ability to handle that. And therefore, you should take action. Well, the consequence of that is to provoke what I call the national security response. This this construction, this depiction of migrants as essentially threats to national well-being, barbarians, invaders. And what you see is the construction of walls and the militarization of the borders, which only produces greater injustice and abuse, as we're seeing right now in the U.S. Mexican border. So that's a very dangerous, dangerous approach.
Jeannie: Mason One of the reasons why this is a dangerous approach. Sort of from a legal perspective is when something is labeled as a quote unquote national security threat, then it makes it really difficult for the courts to review that government action, for example, with the recent Muslim ban cases that the courts are really reluctant to look behind that label of national security.
Mason: And if it's left unchecked, it could lead to a tremendous amount of conflict and violence, basically because of that fear response and that sense of evenness.
Jeannie: Mason Another concern I have and this is from talking with Professor Dycus at Vermont Law School. He is really helpful as part of the research for this show is with this national security response, it could take really important military resources away from responding to issues of climate change and also climate migration. So, for example, military bases are being damaged by rising sea water and the military needs to be able to put resources into responding to that. The military has been at the forefront of thinking about climate change and adaptation and mitigation measures. And the military also puts a lot of time and funds into humanitarian aid internationally, which is going to be a growing need as climate change intensifies. But with the national security response, we'll be drawing resources back to sort of that the borders, the walls, the fortress world, as you described it before, and that could harm our ability to respond. And for the military to respond in those other ways,.
Mason: The national security response has some serious downsides. As Professor Gonzalez explained,.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: Our own survival really is at stake. And unfortunately, though, what we see is this some view the opposite of the response we should be having this movement of what we're going to live behind fortified walls and we're going to keep people out and we're going to divide the population. That's not going to produce a positive outcome. That is a recipe for disaster. Conflict. So climate change is an opportunity to actually rethink so many of our received ideas and think very carefully about who we should be in solidarity with because we really are in the same boat.
Jeannie: If international law isn't there yet and our current trend towards a fortress world is sort of fraught with danger, really, we're left with this managed migration approach. Essentially, it seems to be adapting a country's existing immigration policies or expanding on them to allow for some climate displaced persons to migrate to another country. So sort of a person by person immigration decision. What's an example of that? Well, taking New Zealand as an example, at some point they were talking about a targeted climate change visa to give people from the Pacific Island nations the ability to move to New Zealand on humanitarian grounds. And there was also talk about expanding seasonal employer schemes and other Pacific Pacific worker policies to accommodate some Pacific peoples displaced by climate change. So these would all be examples of working within the existing immigration system, but expanding it to climate change. So Mason, these were just ideas that have been around on the immigration front. At the moment, though, New Zealand is putting more resources into helping Pacific nations with adaptation rather than manage migration. This managed migration of which has a lot of benefits over the national security response it sees climate. Migrants as productive members of society entrepreneurs. It welcomes climate displaced peoples into other countries. But we spoke with Professor Gonzalez about some of the challenges or downsides of this approach.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: In a sense, it's saying you can migrate only if it is carefully coordinated by states who have the right, not the obligation to let people in, but the right to cherry pick which migrants they want. So you know, which migrants they're going to want. They're going to be younger, able bodied, better educated, lighter skinned, and everyone else gets left behind. But then the migration management approach doesn't contemplate ensuring that those who migrate actually have rights. So what you're going to see is a replication of the problems that that we see with people who are on temporary visas working or who are undocumented. And that is they don't have the labor protections, necessarily the social safety nets and the ability to complain about working conditions without being deported. And those left behind are likely to be women, children, the disabled, the elderly, the poor.
Mason: There's this U.N. publication that specified that this approach treats climate displaced persons as, quote, commodities to be exploited in the national labor market.
Jeannie: One of the biggest shortfalls with this approach is that it doesn't recognize that sometimes entire populations are going to have to migrate. And so by treating climate migration as an individual issue rather than a community or a population issue, it's really allowing coaches and national identities to disappear. It doesn't allow for moving the cultural identity and the national identity to another land.
Mason: Right. So there's no mechanism to preserve the culture of the population as they migrate.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: You lose your community cohesion. You use you lose your ability to be self-governing. It's one thing if you're if you were choosing to migrate to another country where you're choosing to assimilate, it's very different if you're displaced. And it becomes essentially a form of used the term ethnocide. But it's a form of genocide. You are losing your existence as a people.
Mason: So, Jeannie, what approaches have recovered thus far?
Jeannie: So we looked at what's happening in international law and we learnt that there's conversations happening, but they're not ready to address climate migration right now. We looked at what's happening on the national level, meaning national security response and sort of the fortress world response. And we found out that that's kind of a scary approach to managing climate migration. And then we looked at managed migration. That's the one we just talked about. So that leaves us with the self determination approach, a fourth approach, assuming that we can't prevent all climate change and that climate migration is a reality to some extent. We need to start talking about ways in which we can do that, where we're not fragmenting populations and we're not losing entire cultures.
Mason: The self-determination approach is really a holistic approach. It's a paradigm shift where you have entire cultures and communities moving from their place of origin to a new place, and the whole idea is preserving and not fragmenting their culture and identity.
Jeannie: And this will allow them to preserve their language, their culture, their customs, self governance, political community, that sort of thing.
Mason: So this is really a true paradigm shift. Oh, yeah.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: So the small island states are currently in negotiations with neighboring states because they think of this issue of migration through a very different lens. And that is the lens of self-determination. How can we continue to exist as a distinct, self-governing people? How can we preserve our language? How can we preserve our culture? Well, it's not through everyone individually migrating to a different country of the world. It's through collective migration. How can we migrate as a group? And so there are proposals on the table, they're nowhere near being accepted, but will countries cede land? Can we buy land? Can we exist as an extraterritorial state, as a state on the territory of a different state? Alternatively, can we exist as a province, like a state, or if that doesn't work, a category similar to that of indigenous peoples, a self-governing minority community within another state? So this is changing the way that we think about the nation state.
Jeannie: So this could be a particularly provocative approach and one that's likely to be met with some degree of discomfort and resistance, I think.
Mason: And to do this successfully, we're really going to have to draw on history, learn lessons from our colossal historic failures. And it's going to require a tremendous amount of empathy and understanding.
Jeannie: And the global north is going to have to truly embrace that sense of responsibility that's inherent in the climate regime.
Mason: Okay, so we've walked through all the different approaches, where does this leave us now?
Jeannie: I think first and foremost, we have to continue to put efforts into preventing climate change.
Mason: We need to do everything in our power to make sure that the worst effects of climate change, including climate migration, don't occur.
Jeannie: And just to reiterate the numbers that Professor Gonzalez shared with US, climate migration could be in the realm of 25 million to 1 billion people displaced.
Mason: This means that we need to focus on things like mitigation, adaptation, resilience.
Jeannie: We don't want people to be forced to leave their homes and to leave their country. So really, climate migration should be a measure of last resort because these strategies really take time to implement. We need to make sure that we're providing the knowledge and the resources to help people deal with severe weather events and climate change related impacts, because it's not a question of if, but when. In the short term, going back to Barry Hill, who we heard from at the beginning of the episode and his experiences in Puerto Rico,.
Professor Barry Hill: We just don't know what that's going to hit. But you know that it's coming. And climate change, these severe weather events are going to continue.
Jeannie: But right now, when not really properly prepared for climate migration, either at the international level or at the national level. For me personally, what I took away from speaking with Professor Gonzalez about this topic is we need to be having these conversations at the local level and on the personal level in the hopes that that will create a cultural shift that filters out through policymaking so that we come out of this experience with the best possible climate migration policy.
Professor Carmen Gonzalez: I think the most important thing that needs to happen right now is for those who care about this and other issues to become politically active. To not despair, but to, in fact, use this as an opportunity to engage, really engage in a way they've never engaged before, because this is a crisis.
Jeannie: And it involves acknowledging responsibility. So we talked a lot about the global north and the global south. In this episode, and it's the idea that the more affluent nations are responsible for causing the majority of climate change and therefore they have to take a big responsibility in addressing climate change.
Mason: And this requires change both politically at the leadership level, but also change within ourselves individually. So, Jenny, that wraps up our show today.
Jeannie: If you want to learn more about climate migration, you can find resources at our resource page on hothouseearthpodcast.com.
Mason: This episode of Hothouse Earth was produced by the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School.
Jeannie: Thanks to director of the Environmental Law Center, Jenny Rushlow, the Associate Director Anne Linehan, and our patient editor, Emily Potts.
Mason: And a special thanks to our guests on today's show, Professor Berry Hill and Professor Carmen Gonzalez.
Jeannie: Thanks also to Vermont Law School Professor Steven Dycus and Emily Spiegel for helping us research this topic.
Mason: Finally, if you'd like what you heard and you want to hear more, check us out hothouseearthpodcast.com and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and wherever you get your podcasts.
Jeannie: Thanks for listening. Be on the lookout for our next show.