Rolling Stone Editor Jeff Goodell to speak at Environmental Law Conference

Rolling Stone editor and environmental writer Jeff Goodell will speak at Yale Law School on Saturday, March 2, 2013. His talk, the keynote address of the New Directions in Environmental Law Conference: The Power of Voice, will begin at 1:45 p.m. in Yale Law School’s Room 127.

Goodell has written for a number of publications including The New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and Wired. His most recent book How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate, discusses the development of new technologies that could someday be used to manipulate the earth's climate to reduce the risks associated with global warming. It won the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting’s 2011 Grantham Prize Award of Special Merit, which is one of the highest awards in the field of environmental journalism.

He headlines the Yale Environmental Law Association’s (YELA) third annual New Directions in Environmental Law conference, which brings together students, practitioners, and academics to examine who and what motivates changes in environmental law and policy and how different actors pursue and achieve that change. The conference is co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and Yale Law School. Attendees will consider important problems in environmental law and policy, such as whose voices are missing from today’s environmental law and policy dialogue, what the relationship between science, law and policymaking should be, and what environmental decision making should look like when groups with competing environmental values are in conflict.

“This year’s conference has given me yet another opportunity to marvel at the insight and energy of our environmental students,” said YELA adviser and Yale Law School Deputy Dean and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law Doug Kysar.

The program features two panels as well as a series of roundtable workshops on a variety of topics from hydraulic fracturing and sustainable international investment to invasive species and factory farming. The first panel will focus on the island nation of Palau’s use of legal mechanisms to fight the effects of anthropogenic climate in the International Court of Justice. The second panel will look at tensions between different environmental actors and campaigns, probing the decision making processes employed by administrative bodies, legislatures, and courts in the face of conflicting environmental values and initiatives.

The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy is a joint undertaking between the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Yale Law School and seeks to incorporate fresh thinking, ethical awareness, and analytically rigorous decision-making tools into environmental law and policy.

To register for the event, and for more information on this year’s schedule, speakers, and logistics, please visit http://www.law.yale.edu/news/2013envirolawconference.htm