Christophe Courchesne, director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law and Graduate School, speaks with Alejandro Camacho, professor of law at UCLA School of Law. Camacho’s latest book with Brigham Daniels, Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law, traces the history of U.S. environmental law from colonization to the present, examining five distinct areas, highlighting the tension between idealists and pragmatists, and offering lessons for contemporary challenges like climate change.
Narrator
This podcast is 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 Christophe Courchesne, director of the Environmental Law Center at the Environmental Advocacy Clinic, associate professor of law, and associate dean for environmental and experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. For today's episode, I am delighted to welcome Alejandro Camacho, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. Professor Camacho Scholarship explores the goals, structures, and processes of regulation with a particular focus on environmental law. His work considers the role of participation and expertise in regulating the allocation of authority among regulatory institutions, and how the design and goals of legal institutions must and can be reshaped to account for emerging technologies and dynamic systems. Elected member of the American Law Institute on the Board of Directors of the Center for Progressive Reform and a frequent public speaker.
Previously taught at Yale University of California, Irvine. Notre Dame and Georgetown Law School. His latest book with Brigham Daniels, Lessons for a Warming Planet,traces the history of U.S. environmental law from colonization to the present, examining how law has both harmed and protected the environment. It analyzes five distinct areas, highlighting the tension between idealists and pragmatists. Explores how social movements, technology, and political coalitions have shaped environmental policy, offering lessons for contemporary challenges like climate change.
Welcome, Professor Camacho.
Alejandro Camacho
I'm delighted to be here.
Christophe Courchesne
I'm thrilled to have this conversation. I think that the book is a significant achievement in that it's extremely readable, but also covers really the whole waterfront of at least American environmental law in a short time. So I highly commend the audience to pick up a copy. And if you're in academia to use it, if you're a student, it's I can't think of really a better prepper nation for engaging in an environmental law course than picking this up and having this as a backdrop and a set of contextual cues.
So I hope in our discussion today, we can talk a little bit about the book, and in the course of doing that. Talk a little bit about environmental law and where you see it going. I guess we'll start why this book and why now?
Alejandro Camacho
That's a great question, and there's lots of answers to that question. But I think the best answer is, you know, it didn't start now. This is a collaboration that actually started seven years ago, where I reached out to my coauthor program and was thinking, I mean, I've always been interested in thinking about how lawyers, scholars, advocates can learn from prior legal approaches.
I mean, most people who write in this area think that way, but I have never written a history book, a legal history book. But one of the special areas of knowledge is environmental history. I thought the combination of my interest in governance more generally and that his his, his expertise in that would be a great combination.
So that's more on a very sort of practical level. But a lot of the reason for us ending up feeling compelled to write the book, at least internally, was that we were just surprised by the, you know, that there was nothing like it out there trying to do what we were trying to do, which was really trying to talk about a book that went trace the history, all the way back to Krieger in Colonial times till now, where most books obvious either many of them focused on one a major event or issue or something like that, which is a lot that can be quite rich.
This is obviously, as you mentioned, trying to be more panoramic, but we were looking to be both broad and deep, which is obviously quite a challenge. So there's a reason why it took seven years to try to figure out what we were going to do. But yeah, we definitely thought the story of environmental law did not start in the sixties and seventies, where most people think of it as doing so.
So we wanted both the combination of wanting to think about the history and how far back it really needed to go, but also how that was almost a necessary precondition to understanding what, you know, what the lessons might be for today's challenges. Because looking just to the seventies, there's lots to learn from that, but it certainly doesn't tell you the full picture.
Christophe Courchesne
And so as we sort of look at the first three eras that the book sketches out before that sort of conventional stories of American environmental start begin, tell me a little bit more about what really was motivating environmental law and what was environmental law before the major statutes were passed.
Alejandro Camacho
Right. So, I mean, it certainly depends on the era. And I think the overall premise of our of this story to elaborate a bit more is that environmental law is bigger than you think. It's not just pollution control law and natural resources law. It's civil rights law, it's property law, it's zoning law, it's corporate law, it's consumer protection law, administrative law.
And what we mean by that is that environmental law is the law of both exploitation and protection in environmental law. Most historians history looks at only yet sort of the laws of protection. And we look at the laws that harm the environment, because those are also laws of the environment, or at least in our view, circumstances where humans, through the law, have shaped the environment.
So, property law, water law, and the like, all our laws, but also corporate law and the like, are all laws that clearly shaped what the environment was. So it's much broader than people think. And so when you do that, you look at the earlier eras, and then that becomes quite clear. The first era being what we call the allocation era.
In some ways, it's ridiculous to call it one single era, but which is the time, from pre-colonial time to basically the 1890s. That's a massive amount of time. But what coheres that area together is that law is an engine of exploitation, of displacement and destruction for primarily for European settlers and for their industry. So there was law there, and it was shaping the environment in fundamental ways.
Property law, now certainly, you know, the common law rule of capture is a dominant theme of ownership and therefore shaping of the environment. That rule being whoever extracts first or ever takes it possesses it, owns it. And so this led to all sorts of exploitation of wildlife, fisheries, minerals, and water. And it also involves, you know, many of us who are familiar with US history, that it involves land disposal policies.
So all the Homestead Act, the Railroad Land Grants Act, all the sorts of grant General Land Office, and its basic approach to subsidize private exploitation by giving people land and telling them go ahead and shape the environment by, quote unquote, cultivating it. And so obviously, those were done, you know, in favor of European settlers and industry.
In the meantime, Native Americans were the ones where the harms fell on them because they were considered outside the laws protection. So that's a clear example of in the first era of even though it's a long period of time, over a century, we see the, you know, laws involving Native American law, federal Indian law, property law that really and infrastructure law, law know basically giving railroad companies massive grants to to extend these are laws of that involved and certainly a shaping of the environment.
And each era has this sort of story. But the story is somewhat different because another theme of the book is that we really see the law as having ebbs and flows and oscillations between exploitation and protection.
Christophe Courchesne
Something that struck me in reading the book, how some of the more conventional story that omits these eras often takes it's kind of the results of them as kind of a neutral baseline on which protection was accomplished or achieved. Yeah, Yeah. So maybe you could say a little bit more about those earlier phases of those sort of crosscurrents of protection that predated the environmental movement.
Alejandro Camacho
Of course, that's great. So yeah, so starting with the allocation era in that pre-colonial time, the 1890 there, the dominant current we like to talk about, it was exploitation, but there was an undercurrent of protection. I mean, some of that you definitely had some modest wildlife protections, certainly following things like the bison slaughter, which many of us are familiar with, where, you know, the government endorsed hunting, where you decimated millions of bison and displacing the Native Americans that depended on them.
You ended up with laws that, you know, definitely did some things to try to curb those harms to massive, massive decimation. You also saw some sort of health regulations when you had some major sanitation crises. But the biggest sort of example beyond sort of this sort of environmental thought, you know, Henry David Thoreau and the transcendentalists thinking about nature and its relationship with humanity in sort of a cerebral or a theoretical sort of pushback on the industrial revolution.
And you definitely have probably the biggest example in that era of of protection is the creation of Yellowstone in 1872. I mean, the first national Park. Many of the national parks didn't come into place until many decades later, but Yellowstone was the first national park was. So the institutionalization of preservation, again, you know, accompanied by the displacement of Native Americans at the same time.But you did. So our story of protection always has always had a sort of interesting, you know, nuanced story. But you did see this undercurrent and you see and so what ends up happening is that in later eras, it sort of flips. You have a major oscillation where now what was an undercurrent becomes a major current, and that's what happened in the next era.
Christophe Courchesne
So as we look at some of those efforts, they seemed in your account of those cross-currents that sort of were precursors to more modern environmental protections. There were also some precursors of pushback and resistance. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the history of that resistance from, you know, industry, from moneyed interest, from pro-development forests.
Alejandro Camacho
Yeah. I mean, there's a there's a lot to say about that, so I'll try to keep it brief. But yeah, I think what you end up happening is in that next era after the allocation era, we refer to the I mean, the Progressive Era has being basically 1890 to 1920, so about 30 years there where the primary wave is of of protection of a progressive sort of backlash against the excesses of the allocation era.
So this is where the real first instantiation of government as the bulwark against excess. And it's not just excess in terms of exploitation, but in all sorts of ways involving not in what necessarily is not environmental law, but certainly impact environmental law, because we see a lot of laws involving securities laws and others that are really about, you know, tempering the markets and therefore exploitation.
But so you have this oscillation where serious environmental movement of public health regulation and legislation and again, more natural resource protections in public land preservations. But you end up with also at the same time, a backlash primarily driven by industry pushback about this place, you know, the place of regulation of interestingly in that era, of course, the Progressive era, and it's sort of the major oscillation, this sort of major movement of of of of government intervention for protection purposes was built with a coalition of industry.
So it wasn't like all industry was against it. You did see sort of an understanding that perhaps markets did not work well all the time and that you need government sometimes to help step in and help deal with that. On the flipside of that, an interesting part of that is another one of these sort of themes of the book we see is just within the conservation movement, you see some tensions.
You definitely saw environmentalists and conservation preservationists, you know, in favor of regulation. But the purposes of the regulation, how far it should go. There was debate. And so you ended up with this theme is really of one of environmental idealism and environmental pragmatism. And that was certainly just like industry was tempered in its moves. There were definitely pragmatists in the conservation movement who saw a primary role of it, where conservation was just meant to, you know, temper the market.
That's sort of the Gifford picture of sort of conservation use resources efficiently for the greatest good versus the John Muir's of this world were much more idealistic a believing of preservation to protect nature from human intrusion. It really a belief in sort of the spiritual value of of of nature and natural places. And so these saw even tension in environmentalist as well.
So it's a much more textured story.
Christophe Courchesne
And so that textured story sort of continues to what modernization era that you talk about, where, you know, we really see the explosion of industrialization, massive sort of public commitments to major environmental change. And I wonder how some of these forces were playing out during that part of the story. It's a really, really important you know, it's not a neutral baseline as a as I was suggesting, it's sort of, yeah, what's going on during that era.
Alejandro Camacho
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the story doesn't begin in the sixties and seventies. A lot is going on in the background. And I think your point about the baselines is actually incredibly important. One we can talk about more later if you like, because I think there's a limited aperture that many of us engage in now, where a narrowness of our understanding of history, we are prisoners of our own mind, and our imagination becomes limited because of our thinking of what, what, what existed before, and therefore what's possible in the future.
So even those of us who are environmentalists who think of environmental law starting in the 1960s and seventies, if you start started that point in time, you sometimes forget that it wasn't always that way. The modernization era was an era of again, parallels that of the allocation era in the sense that even though it is also a long period of time, we're talking about 40 years, 19, 22, 1960, you know, so much is going on that we starting with the Roaring 20 to the Great Depression, to the New Deal, to World War Two and the postwar boom.
Each of those are micro-histories. But I think that what sort of coheres them together from an environmental perspective is that the legal system in all of these is again, is underwrites what many would call it at the time. And certainly even today, the American dream, where as opposed to in the progressive era, where environmental reform and conservation were the primary dominant theme with some sort of backlash pushing for, you know, sort of paralleling the United States, becoming a global superpower, and that as it became a global superpower and as the primary engine for that super that that that sort of foreign and domestic hegemony was, you know, a ascendancy of fossil fuels.
And so we end up with dependency through massive investments and not just obviously in the fossil fuel infrastructure directly like oil and gas and and coal, but in things that obviously depended heavily on that that fall on those fossil fuels. So federal interstate highway systems, dams, obviously the automobile, coal and oil extraction, but also the, you know, the sort of the push to create suburbs through federal law and state law.
And we see not just suburbanization but also chemicalization. This is where, you know, many of our major chemicals that are so prevalent and people think of as being, again, going back to your baseline point, just always they're like cars, but like plastics or maybe nuclear power, which is now seeing a resurgence in synthetic chemicals, limited legal oversight.
But so massive proliferation, it really not only did the United States become now the global major superpower, it also became the major global polluter.
Christophe Courchesne
Another sort of striking, you know, precursor element of that era was the, you know, advent and explosion of administrative lot and how that was all happening sort of in the background, almost in a non-environmental way in many cases to manage those resources. And I want if you can talk about how administrative law sort of maybe set the stage in some ways for, you know, some of the values of administrative law ascendant during that period.
Alejandro Camacho
You're 100% right that, you know, at the time, they were the administrative law wasn't sort of focused on conservation at all. In this era, and particularly in the New Deal, there was this creation of the modern administrative state. But the sort of bureaucratic superstructure that was built was built to drive development rather than relying on sort of retrospective courts in the common law, focusing much more on that sort of public law and the administrative state of agencies with their expertise and some public involvement in the decision making.
But the overall focus overall drive was to was development. But that same sort of infrastructure of administrative law, administrative procedure of federal agencies, state agencies, drawing on their particular disciplinary expertise with some public involvement, eventually became the scaffolding for public environmental law. Later on, where many of us who know environmental law certainly think of it as strongly as a common law sort of courts element to it.
But it is certainly that public environmental law that took on that administrative law that was focused on development and then in later eras, the environment area in particular took that massive infrastructure and turned it to protection rather than exploitation.
Christophe Courchesne
The discussion sort of heading into what we conventionally think of as environmental law with the major alphabet soup of statutes. Yes, the move to protect a lot of these resources that had been exploited and curb the excesses of the postwar period was something that struck me in reading this account was just how short it was, really this period of innovation and regulatory ambition and I wonder, you know, the final period of your book, the contested Era, is is five decades or we're in the fifth decade of it.
So it struck me that that was a very short period, but it was very, very formative for all of us environmental law professors and those who were in school to study it and in practice to practice it. So I'm wondering if you can speak to that short, the shortness of that period.
Alejandro Camacho
Yeah. And we actually in some sense had a challenge because the way that it cohered best by looking at the history was five different eras that it's possible that the era could have been defined even more of a short a short period of time because we decided to include the sixties in the two decade era as what we call the environmental era, where it's arguable that the sixties could be incorporate at least part of it, that certain elements of it into the into modernization era ultimately we thought it belonged in that era because that what you saw in the sixties was a sort of a slow sort of roll.
And there's clearly got to be a wave metaphor there, a sort of a slow wave coming in. But then it eventually became a tsunami, if you will, of transformative legislation. I think what Cahiers It is that the sixties involved a sort of if even in the fifties, of course, these eras, there are undercurrents. So in the fifties, you saw some environmental laws, very modest federal legislation, early state and local efforts.
But then you see a much more strong in the sixties, particularly a public lands movement, particularly the Wilderness Act, which saw John Muir as a vision of of sort of helping protect nature for its own sake or in a more pristine state, you know, after, you know, 75 years finally getting an aggressive progressive sort of preservation law. But in the sixties, you didn't have a lot of pollution laws, and then you hit the seventies.
And you're right. Then you've get this alphabet soup of many statutes. That period of time is, you know, a ten-year period. And it is, you're right, it is a you know, an avalanche. It's a huge period, an incredibly formative period of time. I think, you know, while there's no doubt that it is a short period of time and we could talk more about why that happened at that time, if you like.
But I think it's also it helps tell the story that many of us are sort of have a narrow aperture because of what we've been taught and what we think about environmental law that, you know, Yes, it's true that that period of point in time, you know, particularly the seventies, was an incredibly important period of time where things came together.
And from a statutory level, there's nothing that was more explosive in terms of a development of environmental law legislatively. But in the overall scheme of things in our US history, very, very short and so very important, that doesn't diminish it. But it's also important to keep in mind that that it is only a relatively short moment of time and that if you take a much wider lens, not just in terms of the areas of law, but also just temporally, you end up a really hopefully, hopefully be able to break out of our sort of more narrow prism to think about, you know, emerging problems, you know, where a lot of environmental law is in,
I would say stuck in but it legal imagination about environmental law, it's the gravitational pull of that of that decade is so strong that people have a hard time thinking outside of it in terms of what what might be done to deal with new problems.
Christophe Courchesne
So, as we move closer to the present here, we have a long period of push-pull. You describe it as turbulence, where administrations change and priorities change, industry strikes back. But then you see resurgence and policy efforts on various fronts. Even though we're, you know, in environmental law, there's this very much contingent quality to it. Wondering how you think about talking about it, teaching in an era where it's just a lot of push-pull.
Alejandro Camacho
Mm hmm. Yeah. So this is definitely something that I learned as I was going through it. And one of the great things in writing this project is to be shaped in my thinking about environmental law. Again, this era is to me, like many others probably, who had read the book, shockingly, you know, long in terms of like, you know, it's a huge part of where, you know, since 1980, which we consider to be the same era.
That's obviously a long period of time. We're talking about over 40 years. So, but what coheres it is, as you described it, it's like all the other areas where there was a major dominant theme or major dominant wave, and there was an undercurrent. This is one where that isn't the case. It's much more what we would call turbulence and not a current and an undercurrent.
It's sort of turbulent water where you get incremental ebbs and flows. You get, you know, backlash, polarization, gridlock, even. I mean, even the era, as it started with the Reagan revolution, if you will, quickly got pushed back on. And it's not just pushed back in terms of, again, time-wise, you have one administration at the federal level coming in and changing or contrasting what the other did.
But you have, you know, the whole idea of the red state blue state phenomenon means that we now sort of take for granted, you know, this is where you start seeing it happen, where you get the red states, swing blue administrations, blue states are in red ones. So you don't have a lot of federal legislation. I mean, you have some of starting with, you know, the superfund law circa.
But there is the creativity, it tends to be from a pragmatic lens, how do we manage this sort of conflict? And of course, out many, many of us live in this era know that, you know, that that that turbulence has only accelerated the you know, you could you talk about the turbulence of the eighties and nineties and the aughts, but what seems to be now is obviously you know the last few ministrations is as extreme a partizan divide and where environmental law is hardened from having a spectrum of of of divide to more of a sort of pretty defined wall where it now feels like it's not just environmental environmentalism, it's also anti-regulation, anti-science and anti-environmental justice which frankly has been part of the story for decades. Yeah. Even you know that that is not a new part. But the other sort of anti-regulation, anti-science have become incredibly vocal and in the current political environment. So you end up with an era where even though it's a long period of time, really it coheres.
And it's one where many of us think of it. This is what environmental law is. And for the environmentalists, the legal advocates, the legal scholars, the legal, the teachers, the students that were taught this, the aperture is one of conflict on I don't wanna say minutia, but sort of on these sort of narrow questions and even things that we think of as being including myself, as massive things, like many of us know that over this current administration, one of the biggest sort of ground shaking things they've done is sort of decide they're going to try to reverse the endangerment finding in the Clean Air Act, which is the the the finding that basically lead is
a precursor for regulation of all greenhouse gases under the Clean federal Clean Air Act. You know, that is a change. That is a massive change because it was something that every administration, including the first Trump administration, thought was pretty foundational. But it still is taking a narrow aperture and thinking about how to address environmental law.
And if you could reverse that in not reversing, then fine. And keeping as it is, is that really going to solve the major problems we have in front of us? My answer would probably be no, We need more legal imagination than just that.
Christophe Courchesne
So thinking about our current challenges, where we find ourselves today, where I think you're right, over the last several decades, we've been arguing about important but modest differences on and on, sort of legal regimes and regulatory choices with something of a backdrop of that environmental era. Now, we have maybe the playing field is a little bit more open in all kinds of directions.
Yes. And I wonder what you know, your conclusions were very striking in terms of, you know, thinking about different themes that we could maybe encourage students to think about practitioners and policymakers to think about, as you look towards the future with this backdrop of this long history, you know, what are these lessons that you're taking from the stories?
Alejandro Camacho
Right. So I do think if you look at our history is obviously the long arc. US history is relatively short in the broader scheme of human history and history more broadly. But yes, in our US history, you see, you know, clearly humans' capacity to really exploit and in some ways devastate the environment. But you also see moments where the legal system achieved remarkable environmental gains, and certainly, the progressive era and the environmental era are where we see that.
And, you know, in the book, we talk about at the end the remarkable benefits in clean air and clean water in terms of protection of species, at least to prevent them from going extinct in the preservation of lands. There's more work to be done by any stretch, by any measure. But we see that that there that the legal system has imperfectly addressed problems and that one of the things that may be encouraging, but it certainly is a lesson of our that we see is that in every prior era before the major evolution in environmental law, there was a moment when progress seemed impossible or it certainly to meet the challenge.
And certainly for many today, that seems to be the case. But the reason for cautious hope is that with a combination of a variety of different factors, when you look at those areas where there was massive environmental change, you see a combination of a reliance on science and information and sort of information technology, which today, of course, is beyond measure compared to any moment in human history.
It was also involved in social movements, which, of course, have been well documented. Of course, you see all those things playing a role, and those that those ingredients exist today as well. Of the ones that we point out in the book that we think of as incredibly important one, and particularly for lawyers, law students, teachers of the law, is also legal imagination.
That is that even in the era of prior eras where, you know, not a lot was being done to engage in protection, there was a percolation of ideas about how to address problems and in a wider aperture than just the existing laws that were there. And so for us, we see whether we're talking about climate change or any emerging technologies or environmental justice, which we see as the primary challenges in front of us today, it's also might require us to look at other areas of law, transportation, energy, land use, finance, corporate law, and administrative law, and more.
That that is what the history of U.S. environmental law tells us is that the legal imagination needs that legal sort of infrastructure of ideas needs to be there so that when that window opens for for change, which isn't always going to be long, the Progressive Era and the environment over both the shortest eras as we see them, that it's a relative success of the change that can happen of social change will be heavily affected by legal change and that legal change will be heavily affected by what sort of ideas are on the shelf to then be to be drawn from to address the problems.
Christophe Courchesne
So what's on your shelf? What are the key things that you are thinking about as real opportunities that that those of us concerned about the environment should be devoting more time and energy to, as we do see this appropriate attention on this pattern of rollbacks and the need to fight some of these proposals against something like the endangerment finding, withdrawal or rollbacks of wetland protections or threats to, you know, sort of species protections or wilderness protections.
We see a lot of emphasis on those, you know, trying to protect the building blocks of conventional environmental law as we've understood it. What's on your shelf in terms of the places where we need more imagination?
Alejandro Camacho
That's great. And I got to. Great question. I appreciate it. I mean, I think well, I will just start by saying in some ways this is a story to tell, what others might want to think to put on their shelf. And it to me, this is something that is sort of in the background, but it's not even something that I said yet.
So I think it is in some ways the central theme of the book, and it's a more vanilla claim, but it's that law is always at the center of our environmental destruction and protection. And so for the lawyers, for the non-lawyers, etc., the first story I would say is that because law has been the core engine of its destruction and protection, we need to be looking at what legal change, what sort of laws can be, can be protected and defended, and what sort of laws can be advanced and created.
And so certainly you mentioned a lot of the things that people might be thinking about needing to do is sort of what I would say are taking more of a defensive posture. And I think that those are critical, of course, defending the existing infrastructure that's there today that is clearly in this particular administration, most under attack. And so defending against those is critical.
So my intellectual investment is less on those, although I definitely have been involved in those as well. My sort of the legal imagination piece of that is less on that and more on thinking about climate change, emerging technology and environmental justice. What sorts of laws might we think about in addressing those changes, in those laws that are wider than just the existing system?
And so, I mean, I could talk forever on each of those different ones, but on a very quick moment, it's particularly given that my area of particular environmental expertise is in species and natural resource conservation. I would say on the climate change front, I mean, there's lots that can be done on energy and in transportation and on sort of greenhouse gas emission reduction. But I will focus more on the adaptation side and say that one of the challenges that we see is environmental law, and particularly the 1970s law, but certainly the progressive Arrow natural resource public lands laws tend to be based on a very static view of what nature is. It can be focused on the goal of keeping things natural, meaning humans should not intervene.
So you've got this goal of historical preservation or nonintervention, and how those goals are really, you know, incongruent with dealing with climate change, because climate change is going to make it impossible to, or if you care about ecological health and biodiversity, keeping things the way they used to be is either going to be impossible or not necessarily. The best goal of keeping humans out of it is potentially going to be worse, and things might get degraded.
And so some need to recognize the of intervention, but also figuring out how, you know, working through making the law more dynamic, more flexible, the goals more focused on positive in ecosystem health rather than sort of historical fidelity or nonintervention on the emerging technology front is a relationship. And instead, we're talking about here, we're talking about A.I., which I'm not an expert in, but things like geoengineering or synthetic biology.
There are some major potential benefits from some of these that many of us can imagine. But there are also obviously risks. And basically, I will say the existing legal framework is just not designed to address these very well. And unfortunately, history shows us that the law has been slow to recognize and even slower humans have been slower, and AI scientists have been slower to recognize the potential risks and even slower to regulate them.
And so this is where, you know, I spend my time trying to convince policymakers both for climate change and emerging technologies and for environmental justice, where I think civil rights law is where we need to draw on and make it more robust in the environmental context. But for each of these, for us to be thinking about pushing the boundaries of legal imagination, this is in many ways a call to all of us to sort of draw and build this legal imagination.
And when I say us, I don't mean just the environmental movement. I mean universities. I mean the government. You know, to the extent that we get when we do get legal change, and we sort of invest in this infrastructure, this legal imagination, infrastructure, and that that will pay dividends down the road.
Christophe Courchesne
And so on Hothouse Earth, obviously, our audience has a lot of students in it and a lot of folks involved in legal education. Wondering if you have some thoughts for our students as they embark on maybe this project of trying to break out of the existing limitations of what is an inadequate framework. Also thinking about a very difficult career landscape and how to design and plan a career.
Curious to know what you're telling students these.
Alejandro Camacho
Days, I will say that there's so much to tell students. This book has made me more of an optimist, or I should say optimism isn't the right word. I've got cautious hope. I do think you know the story I tell people, and I would want that people who listen to this to take from this, particularly law students, is that the law matters, that it's worth fighting for, that it's a career that is is very noble and can be very noble in protecting the rule of law on a very fundamental level, whether you're in whatever area of law you're going to work in, particularly and even in environmental law, that you can't do everything that this
is a this is a massive world and is it many different components to it. But you can do something, and there are different your area of law that you end up going into can you can help shape it in ways that are more publicly regarding or you can not do that and that whatever practice you have private practice, government or nonprofit, there are going to be opportunities to help shape the law in small ways and sometimes in big ways.
And doing so is always possible and that all you can do is you contribute your piece to the puzzle, to not freak out that you're not taking care of everything, but to not, you know, to not hide, to not shrink from your opportunity and maybe even your responsibility as an emerging lawyer to and as a citizen of this world and of this country, to to help to learn from the lessons from the past and know that that those challenges that are ahead of us are not necessarily insurmountable.
If you are willing to be a part of the solution.
Christophe Courchesne
Thank you very much for your time today. Professor Camacho, thank you for being on Hothouse Earth.
Alejandro Camacho
Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been wonderful.
Christophe Courchesne
And thank you, listeners, for joining us today. Please tune in 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. Subscribe to the Hothouse Earth podcast wherever you get your podcasts.