Vibrant Environment

Each year, the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR)—a collaboration between Vanderbilt University Law School (VULS) and ELI— identifies some of the year’s best academic articles that present legal and policy solutions to pressing environmental problems.

What we grow and consume in America has a profound impact on our lives. It is also directly influenced by federal policy, and most importantly the Farm Bill, a collection of government programs that requires renewal every five years. This sprawling legislation governs initiatives from farm subsidies to low-income nutrition support. In our first blog in this three-part series, we explain the severe environmental and climate impacts of modern industrial agriculture.

By formally recognizing the Right to a Clean, Healthy, and Sustainable Environment through two separate resolutions in 2022, the United Nations has set the stage for a more just and inclusive world. Big headlines like this often overlook all the background work necessary to make it happen. That’s what makes the 2023 UN Human Rights Prize incredibly exciting.

Fresh fish in Lincoln, Nebraska. Atlantic Salmon born and raised in America for an American market. Thriving aquatic ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea, currently the world’s most overfished sea. Realizing these visions are trademark promises made by the land-based aquaculture (LBA) industry.

Water is life. All living things depend on water; human society depends on water. We need water for drinking, sanitation, food security, biodiversity, sustainable development—truly everything. Even though water is necessary for life, so many of us lack access to water. Water scarcity and water pollution are worsening, all while water demand is increasing.

The conference at Airlie House in September 1969 produced the Environmental Law Institute and Law and the Environment, a book of the papers presented at the meeting. Though published by one of ELI’s fiscal sponsors, it demonstrates that from its very beginning, ELI was at the forefront of environmental law. ELI and the American Law Institute began their collaboration educating attorneys about environmental law in 1970.

My youngest child adores the superhero Flash. He slips a felt mask over his eyes and has me run around after him, feigning exhaustion and the inability to keep pace with his three-year-old legs. He is enamored with the idea of superspeed.

After reading the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in late March, it seems we all must be. The IPCC found as a baseline that we are on track to exceed 2 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century. How far we exceed it depends on what we do over the next two decades.

A new Model Executive Order on Municipal Leadership on Food Waste Reduction developed by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) can help municipalities reduce the amount of food wasted throughout municipal operations, highlight the importance of reducing food waste, and demonstrate food waste reduction measures that businesses and o

On May 25 the Supreme Court, ruling in Sackett v. EPA, sharply limited the scope of the federal Clean Water Act’s protection for the nation’s waters. The Court redefined the Act’s coverage of “waters of the United States” (WOTUS), which has been hotly contested since the Court’s previous 2006 decision in Rapanos v. United States.

In 1970, Pres. Richard Nixon issued Reorganization Plan No. 4, creating the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and Reorganization Plan No. 3, establishing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).