As part of the VLGS's celebration of its 50th commencement year, the Environmental Law Center (ELC) gathered past and present VLGS environmental leaders to participate in a roundtable discussion reflecting on VLGS’s record of leadership in environmental law and policy, reckoning with unmet challenges, and looking ahead to the future of the field. The panel featured Gus Speth, Patrick Parenteau, Tamara Toles O’Laughlin JD/MELP’09, Lindi Mutius Widell JD’08, and Jennifer Rushlow. The panel was moderated by ELC Director Christophe Courchesne and David Mears JD'91.
Narrator
This podcast is the production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment, at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Christophe Courchesne
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast, I’m Professor Christophe Courchesne, faculty director of the Environmental Law Center and associate dean for environmental and experiential programs in the Vermont Law and Graduate School. For this special episode of the podcast, I'm delighted to share excerpts of a recent roundtable discussion from past and present faculty, environmental leaders, and alums. It took place during our alumni weekend celebration of our 50th anniversary of the agency's first commencement. That afternoon, we came together on campus in South Royalton to reflect, to unveil Jefferson's leadership role in environmental law and policy, and to look ahead at the need for new thinking and approaches.
As we face down the major environmental challenges on the horizon. Environmental law has been part of the school from its earliest days. The inaugural 1973 course catalog highlighted the opportunity to specialize in environmental law.
In 1977, Norman Williams Professor Norman Williams developed a proposal for an environmental law center. And in 1978, under the leadership of our departed Professor Richard Brooks, the ELC was founded. Professor Brooks started the Master of Studies in Laws program with two students in the first graduating class in 1979. Today, close to 3000 students have graduated from our environmental master's and LLM degrees, and countless J.D. students have specialized in various areas of environmental law.
By 1991, this foundation meant that VLS was ranked number one in environmental law by U.S. News and World Report for its inaugural rankings of those programs. Since then, other law schools with greater name recognition and vastly more resources have joined the fray. However, our own small but mighty Wielgus has stayed in the top five of that list for all 35 of those years.
We still have more environmental courses, over 60, and more environmental clinics, six, more than any other law school in the country. And affiliated with the ELC are four powerhouse centers focused on food and agriculture law, clean energy, animal, land policy, and environmental law around the world, but especially in partnership with Asia, where I was just in China for the last week.
And you will appreciate that I heard from one of the senior-most judges focused on environmental and natural resources law in China that she was pleased to meet me because Vermont Law School is the best environmental law school in the world. So that was that was a lovely vote of confidence. I'd like to introduce our panelists, but in a moment, I'll hand over the mic to none other than David Mears. But let's start with introducing David, my co-moderator of this discussion. JD Class of 1991.
David Mears
1991, which was the year. You may recall from his earlier remarks that Vermont Law School was named the number one environmental law school in the country. Is that a coincidence or…
Christophe Courchesne
Was it a coincidence? Was it a coincidence? I don't think so. He's spent his career as an environmental lawyer, an educator, and a rabble-rouser. He started in Texas in the attorney general's office there. He worked in the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the U.S. DOJ, and then the state of Washington's Attorney General's office before returning to VLS in 2005 to run the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic.
He served as commissioner of Vermont's Department of Environmental Information Conservation during the Shumlin administration, then came back to VLS, eventually landing his dream job running the Environmental Law Center. He then became the executive director of Audubon Vermont and is now an attorney at Tarrant, Gillies and Shims. All right. I will take the next person. To my left is Lindi Mutius Widell , J.D. Class of 2008. Her career has been focused on environmental justice and education. She has been an associate at Fox Rothschild LLP and at Flaster Greenberg, P.C., and worked at AHK USA Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and the Trust for Public Land. In 2022, she became the director of the Sustainability and Global Development Practice Graduate programs at the Harvard Extension School, then led Harvard's Climate Action Accelerator.
She is now the class of 1946 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Environmental Studies at Williams College, and she is a visiting professor here at the OGs in the Environmental Justice Clinic and the incoming director of said clinic. So to Lindi's left is none other than Pat Parenteau, who maybe needs no introduction. I'll just say that Pat's been on the faculty since 1993 here and has been involved in drafting, litigating, teaching, and writing about environmental law and policy for his entire career.
Before coming to Vermont, he served as vice President for conservation with the National Wildlife Federation Regional Council at EPA Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, and as senior counsel with Perkins Currie at VLS. He landed his dream job running the Environmental Law Center. Among his many accomplishments in the ELC he founded and then directed the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic in 2016.
He received the Carey Redbird Award for Excellence in Public Interest Law. He's received many awards, including one just today. He's now professor of law at Meredith and senior fellow for climate policy with us here at Yes and to Pat's left gospel, Gus Speth, Gus’s impressive legal career started as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in 1969.
He went on to co-found the Natural Resources Defense Council and then led the President's Council on Environmental Quality during the Carter administration. He was the president and founder of the World Resources Institute and served as administrator of the United Nations Development Program. In 1999, he became the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now called the Yale School of the Environment.
In 2010. He joined the VLGS faculty. Well, thank you so much for coming, Gus. And to Gus’s left is Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, J.D., Class of 2009, with a Master of Environmental Law and Policy. So, one of our wonderful joint-degree legacy of joint degree students here. She worked at the Maryland Energy Administration and the District of Columbia Department of Energy and Environment before becoming the North American director at 350.org.
She started Toles O’Laughlin Ventures in 2016 with a focus on global and national climate issues and founded Climate Critical in 2021, where she is a booster coach and community support for people fighting for the planet. She has been president and chief executive officer of Environmental Grant Makers Association since 2021, and we are thrilled to have her as a member of our Board of Trustees.
To Tamara’s Left is none other than Jenny Rushlow, my immediate predecessor in this role, and a long, long-time friend going back decades now, Jenny started her career in environmental litigation at Anderson and Krieger in Boston, working on, among other things, cleaning up urban wilds in Boston in connection with the Boston Bar Association's pro bono committee. She then moved to the conservation law of Anderson, where she was my colleague, and she was a senior attorney working on climate change and environmental justice.
She directed the Farm and Food Program. She began then teaching here in the summer, and then in 2018, she landed her dream job running the Environmental Law Center. She brought a strong focus on environmental justice and animal protection to the program. She stepped in as the interim dean of the graduate school and then served as the inaugural dean of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment.
She is now back at Conservation Law Foundation as a senior attorney in the arena working on climate and energy. Welcome back, Jenny.
Pat Parenteau
Thanks a lot for coming. That's all the time we have.
Christophe Courchesne
That's all the time we have. I'm going to hand the mic now to David, who will provide other framing remarks for our discussion.
David Mears
Thanks, Christophe. And by the way, my main job here, Christophe said, wasn't to really do much. Just to launch a couple of questions, but I want to turn first to Gus and to Pat. You are two of the true icons of the environmental movement. Gus, you you're made a face, Gus, but really for people like me, you know, like, you know, when I picked up case books in the 1980s and started reading about the movement, the environmental movement, you're there, like you're part of this, this change in the worldview and the way that government approach the law.
Pat, you have been there in every single important case, whether it's Clean Water Act, endangered species, People across the world right now call up, have try to find a major publication, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and read an article about climate and see if you can't find Pat’s name in it. Right? You are playing a huge role.
And I happen to know from behind the scenes that you're advising environmental groups and that in the region and then nationally about major opportunities to change the world. We'll start with you, Gus, and then go to you, Pat, if you would, reflect for us a little bit on what you achieved and what's been broken.
Gus Speth
Well, it's great to be back. It's great to see so many old friends here, and it's great to be part of this fantastic panel. Well, I had a hand in creating a NRDC way back and starting in the late sixties and we had a role in creating and breathing more life into the current generation of environmental law and environmental activity in the U.S. environmentalism more broadly.
And I'm very proud of that and very positive about what we were able to do. And I see that as a kind of a prelude to saying that I now have come to the conclusion that the corpus of environmental law and the what we think of as US environmental ism today with all the things, has failed in the larger sense of reversing the environmental decline.
And we're now on the cusp of a ruined planet. I don't think that's news to anybody here. And so I had taught international environmental law at Yale for a couple of years. And when Jeff Shields allowed me to join this faculty, I decided I didn't want to go there again. What I wanted to teach was the need for a new U.S. environmentalism, one that broke out of the cocoon of the early seventies, and the laws that were written in is powerful and as good as they were; we needed something else.
And I began a search starting at Yale and continuing here, looking at what really were the roots of our overall problem and with the hope that a new environmentalism could arise that would go at those deeper causes. And I had a chance to work on that while I was here. And I had a chance to teach for five years here.
To some of you, the course on New Directions for America, environmentalism, basically, you know, we want I think it's a fair statement that our environmentalism was really born and has worked within the system, is dependent on the system for its success. And what we need to do now is not only to continue that fighting for every victory, but also to step outside and to challenge the system itself.
The other quote that I like a lot is system change, not climate change. And I've seen this in almost all of the climate rallies that I've been to. Somebody has that sign often more than one and I'll carry it to now. I've made my own. But the system that we're trying to operate in will not let us accomplish the things that we really need to do to sustain and restore the natural world, our own health and our people, not only for from their environmental fates that are coming, but also for the tremendous insults that our people, most people in our country live with every day.
David Mears
Pat, can you top that?
Pat Parenteau
No, I won't even try. The first official publication in the Carter administration with us as head of the C. Q, the annual sort of State of the Environment report due the President of the United States identified climate change, climate disruption, climate breakdown as a emerging major threat to not just the environment, but to global security, to life as we've known it on Earth.
And that clarion call, which was ignored, came from Gus Speth. Now, as for my little part of history in the seventies, you know, heavily focused on the federal government, that was our, that was our blind spot. We saw, you know, all we had to do was great. EPA and Fish and Wildlife Service, etc., and all would be good.
Now, we know that's not true, but we had a hell of a run. I mean, NRDC led the charge on implementing all these laws that Congress was spitting out left and right, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the RCRA, the FIFRA, the TSCA, it was true. I mean, we put the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation out of the dam building business. We did highways. Well, you know, there was a proposal to run a recreation highway across the ridge of the Green Mountains, four or five of these recreational highways desecrating Alpine ridgelines across the United States.
David Mears
What is their challenge? You look back. I mean, you both inspired generations of environmental leaders. For my long graduate school, graduates are out across the world, changing the world and working inspired by both of you. What is this next generation of leaders? What should they do? How do they achieve that same level of impact?
Gus Speth
Thank you for that question. If I had a hope for the next generation, it would be the to set out to build a political movement in our country that was strong and determined and committed on climate and environment. A really tough-nosed political force which as you see every day now, we did not create in all of these years.
We have no no political strength. So I think if there's you know, to me, if there's a big challenge, you know, is to continue the great things that we're doing. But also outside of the of the normal system that we work in to to build a mighty political force and to reach out to other communities, we need a movement of movements, a fusion of forces across many national concerns.
We're all in the same boat. We're going to sink or swim together, and we need to come together and build this mighty force. And I think that to me is the big challenge for the next generation of concerned people.
Christophe Courchesne
Pat Parenteau
Pat Parenteau
Well, it's still true. Environmental problems don't respect political boundaries. That's that's an immutable fact. State-focused capabilities have got to be addressed. Their politics. Their priorities. Their reliance on science. We have much stronger arguments today than we had in the seventies. At least we didn't. If we had them, we didn't know it. We have the arguments on affordability.
If you want to make the abundance argument, okay. I mean, but we do have the facts on that. Environmental advocates coming out of this school are going to be incredibly well-prepared on the past. But they're not taught in law schools.
Christophe Courchesne
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin
The thing I think is important is even the way that we're framing this discussion, this work is not linear, nor has it ever been. Last time Gus and I were on a panel together, it was during Environmental Joy at Yale and we talked because you said something that I found joyfully triggering, which is that everything that we care about and loving this work is inside of environmental justice, what we call environmental justice.
And I respectfully said, as someone who respects you very much, that's a very interesting way to frame what happened, because the asterisks that I referred to earlier was not that there was a set of mistakes that were made or miscalculations, but people moving in comfort instead of on facts and so what we have to do to deal with the future is not repeat.
Those mistakes often remind people that the EPA was not like if you added up all the parts of the federal government that these men have helped to make work for us, what we forget is that they didn't show up with pearly white teeth and a big ass on their chest and their ability to solve the problems of people They were beaten into doing that by folks who made demands.
The stories we tell about the last five years will 50 years will dictate what we say about the next 50. And the thing that we have to talk about is that these weren't mistakes like I am the president and CEO of the Environmental Makers Association, which turns 40 next year. That means 40 years ago, deals were made by 12 people who shook hands in a room with 12 other people to decide how this work was going to be built.
All of them wanted good things to happen for the next 50 years, but if they moved at the level of things beyond their comfort, the people that became the movement for environmental justice and women's rights and education and disability rights would not have operated separately running towards the same goals. So what we cannot do is pretend that this work happens in silos or that it could have ever been successful in those silos, despite all the brilliance there in. And that's not a personal argument about any of the people involved, is that we cannot pretend that this stuff happened by accident. Those were design choices. Those were decisions made about relationships that built institutions that bury the DNA, that hide the the product of what a successful global thinking can do to solve a group project. The environment is not a US problem.
It's a global problem. And it has always been a global problem. The EPA became a place where poor people could go to fight because the rules were written to provide resources for lawyers to be in that space because people fought for it. Otherwise, it just would have looked like something nice and shiny. The Department of Energy has always operated so in my mind, we always think of the EPA as like Superman, bright, shiny, in-your-face cape.
Everybody sees it coming, saves the day. Mind you, D.O.D. has always been Batman. Really cool. Lots of toys, no friends. You got to repel into a basement to get access to some of that stuff. And everybody needs it, right? So like, the difference is when you just look at the things we've built, the problems that we are seeing were in the seeds of the ways we made those decisions then.
And I think the gift of what we could do now is have conversations with each other about what was learned, where the gaps were without the hubris that the earlier parts of the conversations took on about saving the world. Right. So I do think the future of the work involves us being in much more conversation than we have ever been about what the problems are and what the mistakes are, because waiting our turn and being polite, we're the only people playing that way.
We have always only been the people playing that way. We, until every two years cross every I was dotted and everybody got consensus, which has never solved any of our problems. We need to be in more conversations about what's not working and I fully agree with the idea that a political praxis that is not matched by a politic is foolish.
An environmental design that is not match with an economic design is also foolhardy. And we told people for 50 years that other people would worry about money.
Christophe Courchesne
David.
David Mears
Take the prerogative just to share one other editorial thought about this system change in the United States and across the globe. The revolution of human rights that has happened and is in progress and is not yet complete was built on the concepts of democracy that when people who are affected by the harms that are inflicted on them have a voice, that we can change the world.
And at the core of that concept has been the idea of democracy and the rule of law. And if Vermont Law School can stand for nothing else, nothing else it can stand for building and training that next generation of people who know how to use the law to change the world. So Christophe.
Christophe Courchesne
I would say the folks who will speak next are among my favorite people in that they are thinking about the future and figuring out how to make it work in all kinds of settings. I think that's the part of the discussion that I'm super interested to carry forward, but I, I think whoever would like to go first, who has the most generative thought to bring the conversation into the present in the future of what we should do.
Do you want to start with Lindi?
Lindi Mutius Widell
Well, I want to build on what Tamara said, and I just want to recognize, for those of you who are in the environmental movement, the powerhouse leader that Tamara is, I think my lucky stars. I like, you know, one of the one of the things that Tamara and I talk a lot about having been in executive leadership positions in the movement is that we don't really have a cohesive movement as I think about teaching.
And I teach undergrads as well as law students, and they ask me a lot of the time, All right, well, what do we do because we're losing or are we even going to be successful? And but those kinds of sentiments of hopelessness I'm hearing so much of and I fight it every time I hear it, because that's just not an acceptable answer to me.
And part of the reason why is because I grew up in the 1900s. I grew up in West Germany, and I say West Germany because, yes, there was still a wall. And all the people in my neighborhood where people who had lived through World War Two and had dodgy, questionable roles in that conflict and didn't want to talk about it.
And so my generation was the first generation of Germans who was like, okay, well, we didn't live through this or were born immediately after it, but now we're dealing with the consequences of this nonsense. We're having these raids, we're having tanks down the street, you know, because we're still occupied as a nation. And then when I was ten years old, the wall came down and there are lots of reasons why that happened.
But the takeaway for me was that you can actually change big problems. You can you know, there's there's a time; there's a clock that's ticking here in our environmental crisis, but you can fix things. It's possible. And so I don't give up and I teach the students not to give up. And I think the way that I teach students about the power of the law that David is referencing is that it is no longer this mythology of the shiny lawyer going into court and winning the day.
That is not how we're winning battles now. We are winning battles now by working with activists, we're working with moms, we're working with school boards, and we're working with teachers unions. Rhode Island has some of the best environmental tool union workforce laws in the country, small, tiny state, but mighty because they got over themselves and the unions actually led that in the state house.
Right. That's how we're winning. And so in the AJC, the Environmental Justice Clinic, we teach movement lawyering. We don't teach environmental lawyering, we teach movement lawyering, and we teach students how to get out of the silos that Tamara was referencing and how to learn about the advocacy in the work and the success in many different parts of the movement.
So they can incorporate that into the litigation, into the community-level lawyering that we're trying to teach them how to do. You need to think about success looking like something different than what we are reading in our case books. And if you look at the environmental justice movement, you can see examples of success that don't look like the shiny lawyer in the Superman cape.
They look like working with communities with different kinds of kids to be successful.
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin
And I just want to support a continuation of the discussion around the binary that we need to get out of the binary that is either-or thinking that's going to fix this stuff. I'm also not of the opinion at the current moment is a sign that we have failed at anything. If you're not expecting to be attacked, you don't have a fully fleshed-out campaign.
You have not prepared for how this fight is actually going to go. Like as a person who has trained people and movements to be prepared, that is about recognizing that everybody's going for their 3 minutes. What's the story that we are telling? What are the political stories that we are telling about this moment? What do we talk about as a long arc of winning, and what does that actually look like?
I got to live in a world of duality at the same time, and we just got to got to get out of it. It's this or it's that thinking. I also think the thing that's least funded and environmental funding of every type is narrative and storytelling. So the fact that we don't like the fact that this law school has a fellowship for people who are reporters, the largest spike in incredibly good coverage for what we do that didn't come from Pat’s different comments to the New York Times.
The Gray Lady is out selling herself to anyone who will buy an ad because if you only rely on one or two really great people to have 5 seconds of great things to say, we have already failed because we're not doing enough messaging in this work about what it takes to win. And I think this school is actually in one of the best positions it has ever been.
We have 50 years of graduates thanks to the folks in this room and others, because when we step into any room, Vermont Law and Graduate School is a place where people trust what we say. They trust what we do. Last month, the graduation that happened on the quad last month, I talked to 50 different students who had masters degrees and law degrees, and every one of them had a story about a place they were going back to, to fight a very specific problem.
So we don't do the work in this building to make sure we stay in relationship with those folks. It doesn't matter what we do outside or in a court or in a policy room or in a spaces where we could be because the answer to our problems are people who have been to these doors and hundreds of other people they connect to every day, because Vermont sends out people who are really incredibly talented, have a small amount of self esteem and do really big things.
When no one's paying attention to them. So I just wanted to point out that, like, we don't need to look outside to what we have to do. There are kids doing policy work and restorative justice and agriculture and getting online degrees, and that's happening here just like all the other things we've talked about. So that is waiting for us to get a small amount of hubris around what we're doing so that we can step up in a moment that requires us.
Christophe Courchesne
Jenny Rushlow
Jenny Rushlow
I will keep it relatively brief, but the question that was posed to us is what role is the school playing and should it play in the future in this space? And what are the most promising opportunities? And, you know, it's a difficult moment. We've had many difficult moments, but are environmentalists right now are lacking influence. So we have to find other ways to make change, to effectuate actual solutions in this very difficult situation where people in power don't want to be persuaded, there's really nothing we could say that would persuade them.
Right now it's a brick wall. And so what do you do in that kind of situation? And, you know, I have I have five thoughts on that that I'll share. But one thing I just want to say at the outset is this school is scrappy. You know, $0.05 in the bank when has not been the case. This school is still here.
And it is it is getting stuff done and it is putting it is putting graduates out into the world who are doing all the things you just heard. They they get respect when they go to do this work because they're trained here to do real things. So how do we try and thrive in this space? Right now? We have to be smarter than the people who are making law and policy right now.
We have to be more strategic. Broad tactics and hand-waving do not work right now. We're just yelling into a void. So we have to be more technical. We have to not be afraid of the details. We have to be the ones that actually get into the weeds and do the hard stuff. Because as you've probably noticed, a lot of decision makers right now don't have that skill.
If you're smarter, if you're willing to do the harder work, that's the way you can undermine folks that may not have put in the time and effort to learn all the things that you have to succeed in this work. You have to be more prepared to use every tool in the toolbox, the Jedi, and the in the master's degrees.
You're learning every tool in that toolbox. You know, that's one of the things I really like about my job now as an advocate is I can go into the courtroom, I can go into the state house. I'm equally well prepared to use any of those tools. I can talk to a reporter, you know, whatever tool is going to solve the problem, you have to be equally skilled in all of those things.
And that is something that the school can deliver and I think has only over time has only grown even more strong at doing for its students. You have to be prepared to do work that's not only in the federal space because banging your head against a wall right? So I'll shout out the Institute for Energy and the Environment, an example of how this school is doing work that, you know, people in the statehouse know about that institute because they see students doing the work.
These are students that talk about being able to do the technical stuff that's hard. They can do that, and that's why they get awesome jobs in the energy space going out there. So more of that that you're you're working on state policies, you're working with towns on their, you know, clean energy options for all kinds of different specific communities.
You know, really getting in there. Students that learn to do that in law school are just ready to go the second they're out of here to do the work. That actually makes change. Field studies -learning how to se strategic. I mentioned you cannot be successful. You cannot achieve change if you don't understand the context that you're operating in.
That is something that you could say some of our opponents do better than we do, You know, connecting to their base, understanding what the people around them care about. And then finally, another thing that I think is really important about this school is that you're not turning a blind eye to environmental justice. Too many schools that have environmental programs cannot offer anything meaningful in that space.
You know, I want to shout out Jameson Davis, one of the students that led a really powerful grassroots effort to get the school to get serious about environmental justice. We created the Environmental Justice Clinic shortly after and couldn't be more excited with the leadership that's coming in. I mean, you know, showing to our students that this is not optional work.
This is part of all of your work. And even if they don't all do the Environmental Justice Clinic, they see it, they hear about it. There are other ways in which we were able to infuse E.J. into the core curriculum. That's something that not every school can say, and it's a step in the right direction. It's not enough, but it's more than everybody else is doing, frankly.
And that's a feather in the cap. So don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You got to get messy. You know, Tamara was talking about the need to not always wait until that. The I's are perfectly dotted and the T's are perfectly crossed. So that is a challenge for lawyers. But I think if there's one thing we can take away and it's not my job to sum up, but if there's one thing we can take away here, it's that it's this is not clean work.
We're going to have to play dirty and we're going to have to be willing not just to be, you know, transactional lawyers. There's a space for that, but it's a little more like you got to use every every weapon in your arsenal if you don't like to own the toolbox that.
Christophe Courchesne
Thank you all for your participation today.
Thank you to our panel from law and thank you listeners. Please join it again for the next edition of Hothouse Earth.
Narrator
If you want to hear more about hot topics on environmental law and policy issues, check us out through the Hothouse Earth podcast wherever you get your podcasts.