The fossil fuel industry is an overwhelming force that funnels the climate crisis and threatens our collective present and future. Through this student-led initiative, we aim to engage in one avenue for tackling the crisis and cleaning up our shared space, environmental law. Through our class research, we promote a progressive implementation of solutions at both macro and micro levels; no idea is too big, and no solution is too small. Each student selects an issue of focus (i.e. flooding) and a legal statute associated with that focus (i.e. The Water Pollution Control Act) to explore and speak on the relevancy of the issue within the climate crisis. We then add to this interactive database of environmental law topics and imagine their solutions through ease of access and transparency with primary and secondary sources, as well as ways to hold accountable the entities whose public or private funding is conditional to remedying poor environmental conditions. Local projects that monitor how resources are spent is one vital approach to environmental sustainability. By mapping cases of environmental injustice, this digital project also aims to connect individuals suffering from poor environmental conditions with entities whose public or private funding offers assistance. 

The project started with a group of seven Barnard College students in 2021. Then, in the following year, the project initiated a pilot, which was limited to flooding zones in West Virginia and the organizations designated to address and redress these issues, whether governmental, academic, non-governmental, or voluntary associations. We presented our pilot project to academic conferences and unsuccessfully submitted grant requests [1]. The first edition of our project relied on the work of a Barnard student leader, Havah Bernstein, one Dusquene Univserity School Law student, and a student from Nottingham School of Law. In 2023, the project continued with Barnard students enrolled in Environmental Law EESC BC3040, where Havah Bernstein continued her leadership role as the TA. The second edition of our project focused on identifying the ways in which legal cases of environmental injustice have interpreted and defined statutory law in order to develop our project’s functionality as a database for researchers and students. In 2024, the TA role was given to Skylar Nieman and another round of research was added to the project by the class. Beginning in 2025, Ashley Ahn will continue the project as the class TA. By the end of the semester, we hope to start a new phase in our project where our legal research is paired with visual aids in order to more comprehensively offer a narrative of the locations of environmental injustices, the communities and ecosystems they affect, and how case law has impacted the situation.

The ultimate goal of the project is to provide transparency and informational support to those who are interested in researching the link between environmental issues and social injustice, but also to those who need help locating entities offering assistance in order to hold them accountable if they fail to provide help as promised. Please feel welcome to contact us if you’re interested in adding content to our page.

[1] https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/e1a5-ye76.