Environmental Policy & Law

The Endangered Species Act (ESA), which quietly passed its 42nd birthday last week, has shielded hundreds of species in the United States from extinction and dramatically achieved full recovery for a celebrated few. Flexibility of implementation is one of the ESA’s great strengths, allowing for adaptation in response to new knowledge and changing social and environmental conditions.

“It’s fascinating to me to look at the partisan evolution of this issue over the past decade,” Joseph Aldy, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who previously worked on carbon pricing for the Obama Administration, told me. “In 2003, the leader in the Senate on climate change was John McCain.

Clinton’s plan calls for $30 billion towards infrastructure improvements, mine land remediation, training and education programs, and incentives for business investment in Appalachia, the Illinois Basin, and the Western coal areas. “What I like about this plan is that it’s multi-faceted,” Evan Hansen, president of Downstream Strategies, a West Virginia-based environmental consulting firm, told ThinkProgress. “There is no one solution.”

On Monday, December 7, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME-1) introduced the Food Recovery Act (H.R. 4184) to curb food waste across the entire food system. She publicly announced the bill earlier the same day at the Portland Food Co-op in Portland, Maine.

The Environmental Data Summit, convened under the auspices of the Delta Stewardship Council’s Delta Science Program in June 2014, witnessed remarkable participation from experts across California, the nation, and even the world.

There’s a lot on the line at the climate negotiations in Paris. Fellow Heather Coleman, among others, is there, working to make sure that whatever deal is made, that it’s a fair one for us all.

Jia-Ching Chen is now at Pennsylavania State University as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Governance and Urban Systems.

Countries are loosely interpreting the legal meaning of “rational use” of natural resources to escalate fishing efforts in Antarctic waters and hinder efforts to establish marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean, scientists and legal scholars say.

As the management adage goes, "you can't manage what you can't measure." At Yale's Environmental Performance Index they are all about integrating data and indicators into environmental policy and decision-making. This summer, Ariana Spawn was fortunate to receive an on-the-ground lesson in how the United States government is putting this concept into practice for ocean and coastal management.