Environmental Justice in dark times: A Student Blog Symposium

By Dina Lupin

Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash

I teach a final year, elective module called “Environmental Justice and the Law” to law students at the University of Southampton. As I prepare to teach the module each year, I review and revise the curriculum, update the reading list, and reconsider the assessment. I do this, as all law teachers do, to reflect new legal developments, to include the latest scholarship, to adopt (or avoid) new technology, and to respond to the always changing needs of my students and institution.

But I also do this because environmental justice is contested, best understood (and critiqued) in a spatial and temporal context; conceptually evolving in its meanings and uses in a constantly changing world. To understand the demands of justice, after all, one must first reckon with injustice and injustice arrives, unbeckoned, every day, in entirely new and all too familiar forms.

This past year, my preparation for teaching began with capturing and archiving all the US government’s online resources on environmental justice, as the Trump administration began systematically erasing them. I opened up my teaching plan and tried to work out when to schedule the seminar on “Land, genocide and the ‘Middle East Riviera’”. I wondered whether discussing the authorisation of deep sea mining should be part of the extractive industries or ocean injustice seminars. I revised the readings on gender and the environment to reflect the latest oppressive laws limiting the rights of trans communities. I agonised over the perspective to adopt on Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s mother accepting an out of court settlement. I wondered whether the class should draft their own plastics treaty or ICJ climate change advisory opinion as we waited, hopeful, for both.

Students arrive in my classroom already burdened by climate anxiety, seeking something from an environmental law class that I’m not always certain I can provide – legal solutions to existential but disputed problems. The traditional methods I was taught—dissecting case law, analyzing statutory frameworks—feel hollow when we’re discussing ecocide in Gaza or the sixth mass extinction or environmental racism in Hull. I have written about the importance of despair for doing good, critical, environmental work, but when it comes to my students, I worry about adding to the weight they carry. My goal is to help them see that there is a huge amount of good work to be done, and to encourage them to be part of the community doing that work. My fear is that, faced with a world that often feels like it is sinking ever deeper into violence, fascism and irreversible environmental collapse, they will instead do nothing.

We bring the world into the classroom – we talk about the bombs that fell that week, the boats full of people who never made it to shore, the floods and droughts that are pushing communities into ever deeper poverty and insecurity as we sit in our classroom. The question of how to face crisis and feel capable, empowered, and able to act has pushed me towards non-traditional law teaching approaches. My students draw giant body maps (mapping their own bodies) and visually track air pollution and its regulation through their own blood streams. They use their phones as tools with which to witness the world, recording sounds and images of their environments. They draw over court decisions and cut up legislation – I have taken to carrying a big cardboard box of colourful pens and pencils across campus. We take a trip to the New Forest (a national park), walk through the muddy forest, and learn from the traditional land users (the commoners) how regulatory tools like national parks oppress and exclude local communities. Together we think about the visual, the aural, the olfactory as legal method.

These students will inherit not just environmental crises, but the responsibility to reimagine how law might respond to them. In thinking with them beyond conventional legal boundaries, to hear affected communities, to see the law as both a tool of justice and weapon of oppression, to understand environmental issues through art and sound and embodied experience, my hope is not so much that they are prepared to practice environmental law, but transform it.

In the course of the module, each student writes a blog post. They are asked to think about, interrogate and push the idea of environmental justice in new ways, and to examine the relationship between environmental justice and environmental law. Each student is asked to do this in the context of a real life case study of their choosing. In this symposium, I am excited to share five of those blog posts with you: