Environmental scholarship for a new millennium.

• Author: Wood, Mary Christina

ENVIRONMENTAL SCHOLARSHIP FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM:

We are here tonight to celebrate the work accomplished by last year's law review staff and to inspire the new staff members for their work ahead. In the spirit of this occasion I would like to focus my remarks this evening on the role of environmental scholarship in meeting the tremendous ecological challenges that confront us. I hope to give you some thoughts regarding the significance of your work to carry with you into those late nights of cite-checking, reading manuscripts, and writing your own casenotes. I would like to suggest to you that environmental scholarship is not just interesting, or provocative, or perhaps even critical, but that it has epic and planetary importance. The focal point of environmental scholarship is, after all, the environment, and we have entered a time in human history when our fundamental system of survival may be imperiled.

The gamut of environmental issues appearing in the scholarship are alone indication of the pervasiveness of natural destruction. Flipping through past issues of your law review a reader will be immersed in fisheries loss, wetlands loss, deforestation, overpopulation, global warming, pesticide contamination, ozone depletion, water pollution, air pollution, nuclear waste disposal, and much more. Environmental destruction is occurring at an unprecedented rate virtually everywhere--in the oceans, in the atmosphere, in the rivers and in the soils, on every single continent and in ecosystems as far-flung as the Amazon and the Arctic.

On a global scale, the facts are staggering. The most recent State of the World Report from WorldWatch Institute warns of the abrupt decline of every type of natural system sustaining life.(1) One fifth of the world's freshwater fish are either endangered or extinct.(2) All of the seven major ocean fisheries are in decline or on the verge of collapse.(3) Between 10 and 100 species are lost each day on a worldwide basis due to human activity(4)--this is 25,000 times the natural rate.(5) It is estimated that, if trends continue, half of all of the species alive today will be gone by the year 2050.(6) And yet the human species will double in that same time frame, reaching 10 billion by 2050.(7)

Just six months ago a United Nations body of 1500 leading climate experts from 60 nations announced that global warming does exist, is measurable, and poses a significant threat to human systems, particularly to the more than half of humankind living within 60 miles of coastline.(8) In fewer than 50 years we have doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,(9) and in that time the ozone layer has been depleted by almost 10%,(10) resulting in a hole in the ozone extending over an area three times the size of the contiguous United States.(11) Government sponsored commercials in New Zealand appear daily on television warning parents not to let their children go outside without protective wear, because the risk of skin cancer is so great.(12) That basic feeling of warmth and comfort from sunshine pouring down on one's shoulders--something all of us in this room enjoyed and took for granted as children--is something those children in New Zealand will never have the privilege of feeling.

In this country too, industrial destruction has been massive and unsparing. Nearly half of the country's rivers, lakes and creeks are polluted.(13) Since white settlement the U.S. has lost half of its wetlands,(14) 90% of its old growth forests,(15) and 99% of its tall grass prairies.(16) According to the Council of Environmental Quality, an estimated 9,000 species of plants and animals in this country are at risk of extinction.(17)

And in our own region, ecosystems are imperiled. Just 200 miles to the east of us on the banks of the Columbia River sits one of the most contaminated sites in the world at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. There is a plume of radioactive groundwater 200 square miles in size,(18) with the leading edge already discharging into the Columbia River.(19) More than 54 tanks hold incompatible waste and appear on a "tank watch list" due to the threat of explosion;(20) more than 60 tanks holding radioactive waste are leaking into the groundwater.(21)

Our Pacific Northwest forests are unraveling. This region boasted some of the most magnificent old growth forest in the world just half a century ago. Last year we had only 5%-8% left of the ancient forest that was once here.(22) Now, due to the Salvage Logging Rider(23) slipped onto an appropriations bill by Congress last June, many of the last untouched areas are being clearcut, including groves of trees over 1,000 years old in the Umpqua area of Southern Oregon.(24) And the fisheries have met with a fate that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. The Columbia River system once produced the world's largest fishery.(25) The salmon species have evolved in this basin over the course of 5 million years(26) and have been vital to human existence in this region for at least 10,000 years. Now wild salmon are on the brink of extinction, and over 100 populations of Pacific Salmon have already been extirpated.(27)

These figures present a pattern of ecological crisis rapidly unfolding on a global, national, and regional level. What is the role of environmental law against this context? For better or for worse, the law is the overriding social mechanism in this society to control human behavior. It may not be the most desirable tool--some...