Environmental Law Prof Blog

Interdisciplinary Research and Environmental Law

In my second year as an academic, I became involved in a major NSF-funded interdisciplinary research project.  Initially, this did not go well.  I learned, the hard way, that it is not easy to conduct interdisciplinary research with people you’ve barely met, who work in other fields, and who live two hours’ drive away from you.  Yet I would count the project—in which I am still involved, now more productively—as one of the best learning experiences of my academic career.

That experience convinced me that it would be useful to write an article addressing the challenges of interdisciplinary environmental law research.  It also led me to think that the standard debates about interdisciplinary legal research might not apply particularly well to environmental law, and that perhaps some empirical research might help inform those debates.  So I distributed a survey to my peers, conducted some interviews, and, working with UMaine economist Caroline Noblet, wrote up an article, which now is available (in draft form) here. 

Our hope is that the article will be useful to environmental law faculty—particularly at the junior level—who are interested in getting into interdisciplinary work; to non-legal environmental researchers who want some information about what environmental law professors do and how they think; and to anyone who wants to pontificate in an informed way about the role of interdisciplinary research in the legal academy.

For those who prefer the Cliff Notes version, here are a few key conclusions from the study (most of which are intuitive but some of which are potentially surprising or controversial):

- Environmental law professors are generally very interested in conducting interdisciplinary research, yet it forms a relatively small part of their research portfolios;

- Conducting interdisciplinary research successfully requires a large up-front time investment—you need to take time to get to know your collaborators and learn about their fields, and they have to get to know you—and the need for that time investment is one of the primary barriers to successful collaborations;

- Publication systems and institutional divisions do create pressure toward traditional disciplinary work (in other words, the legal academy generally doesn't push professors to become interdisciplinarians);

- Compared to tenured faculty, junior faculty tend to perceive more pressure to do traditional disciplinary work, though that pressure is by no means universally felt; and

- Law professors may be more interested in, and prepared for, collaborations with non-lawyers than the non-lawyers are for collaborations with lawyers.

And a few recommendations:

- Law schools and universities should work hard to create opportunities for informal contact between law professors and other faculty—in research settings, social settings, and in the classroom;

- Law schools ought to abandon any tenure or promotion policies that favor law review or single-author publications over peer-reviewed or team publications, and they ought to put their new policies in writing, so that junior faculty know about them;

- Visiting assistant professor and fellowship programs should consider adding an instructional component focused on research methodologies (and, perhaps, allowing full-time faculty to participate in the program);

- Law professors interested in working beyond the boundaries of their field should be aware that they will need to spend some time educating their potential partners about how legal research works, what kinds of questions it typically focuses upon, and how it could contribute to a larger project.

Again, the full article is here, and comments are welcome.

-Dave Owen

Technological Optimists, Climate Change, and the Lack of Historical Reference

I love history, and have always been torn between my interests in both the function of the physical world (biology and the environment) and the function of reviewing historical events as a means of bettering the social world (history and other social studies). Historians interpret the past for many reasons, including to gain understanding of how both desirable and undesirable circumstances can be replicated or avoided (respectively) in the future. Consider the "technological optimist" view of history. I suppose the purest form of technological optimist would look back and note that society has always been improving - advances in medicine, food systems, transportation systems, the internet - to name only a handful of technological advances - have helped society increase wealth, human lifespan, and overall well-being. And increased access to information regarding calamities and human violence arguably mask the fact that, as some commentators have argued, society is overall becoming less violent. In other words, society is continually improving. Even though we can look back at some of the empires that have existed in the past, and arguably trace their fall to environmental calamities (see Easter Island, the Mayan civilization, the Roman Empire, etc.), modern society has no doubt moved to a place where it can avoid some of those pitfalls through technology. Thus, a technological optimist would at his or her most optimistic view society as fully capable of engineering its way out of the seemingly dire environmental challenges faced today.

In my International Environmental Law class we discuss the IPAT formula: Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of P= Population, A= Affluence (consumption), T= Technology. Thus if technology increases sufficiently, then it can offset population growth and increased consumption to reduce environmental impact. Of course, some commentators highlight the virtually impossible impact technology would need to have in order to offset the current rate of population growth and increased consumption (see Paul Ekins, The Sustainable Consumer Society: A Contradiction in Terms?, International Environmental Affairs, Volume 3, Number 4, at 242-257 (Fall 1991)). It seems clear then that reductions in both consumption and control of population growth will be necessary ingredients to any future that is sustainable.

I am somewhat 1/3 technological optimist and 2/3 pessimist. My family's Christmas dinner conversations involve my brother and I arguing over whether the future will be like Star Trek (his view) or The Road/The Postman/The Book of Eli (which I tend toward). Now, nothing I am about to say is groundbreaking, but it is helpful to ask: what does history tell us about the role of technology in achieving sustainability? How likely is it that we will be able to innovate fast enough to forestall calamity and continue to improve society the way we have done in the past? There are two important factors we see today for which there is no historical reference: population growth and the rate at which we have released greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 4.5 billion years this earth has never seen as dramatic of an increase in a species with such profound impacts on the environment as it has in the last few centuries with humans (as strikingly depicted in the chart at the beginning of this post). Thus, making projections about our future based upon the past is of far less value with this new variable thrown in. Also, while carbon levels and other GHGs have fluctuated in the atmosphere for millennia, never before has such a sudden release of fossil-fuel gases taken place over a two century period. These two variables should cause even the most optimistic technological optimist to proceed with caution when harnessing the value of history in projecting future outcomes.

On the flip side, all too often I hear discussions of the I=PAT formula framed as if each variable were completely independent. Of course, I tell my class that the "Affluence" (or consumption) variable is in large part only a problem because of what we are consuming. That is, we are consuming non-renewable substances in large part - products, goods, and services that are themselves made of non-renewables and that are produced using non-renewable energy sources. In fact, technology plays a key role in increasing the impact of both the "T" part of the equation AND reducing the "A" variable. If technology can change what we are consuming, to make the product/service as well as the energy inputs providing it renewable, then we are left with only the "P" variable as a primary challenge. As I've discussed before, perhaps one day our vehicles made entirely out of recyclable metals and renewable plastics (from lignin in pine tree bark), will be plugged into (via renewably created extension cords) power sockets in homes built out of renewable materials and powered by solar panels (an obviously renewable energy source), while the solar panels themselves are made out of the same recyclable metals and renewable plastics from biological sources. In other words, the 1/3 technological optimist in me sees a world with a closed loop system of consumption (affluence), and technology plays a key role in that future.

Ultimately, the most recent history of advanced civilization includes an almost complete reliance on the consumption of non-renewable, fossil fuels. If we are unable to project our future based upon history given new variables of population growth and GHG emissions, then we will need to change the game and foster a new variable of our own - that is, technology that we have never before used to make modern society a completely renewable society. Otherwise, I will win my bet with my brother, which I really would prefer not to do.

- Blake Hudson