Reimagining Our Relationship with the Earth
The Environmental Justice Cluster of the Harvard Climate Leaders Program explored the interwoven themes of history, equity, and possibility in the movement for climate justice.
In “Nesting,” Grace Gallagher reflects on the transition from wilderness backpacking to urban living, discovering how environmental intimacy and responsibility evolves when one settles into a local habitat. In “Planting Serviceberries in Public Policy,” Dani Schulman explores how Robin Wall Kimmerer’s teachings inspire a vision of policy rooted in reciprocity, abundance, and justice, especially in the face of political regression. Odessa Chitty’s “On Re-wilding Our Language” calls for a revival of ecological vocabulary, suggesting that naming and knowing the natural world generates deeper connection, responsibility, and advocacy for nonhuman kin. In “Legal Progressivism and Environmental Justice,” Gustavo Manicardi Schneider examines how environmental law often reinforces systemic inequality, advocating for legal reforms that prioritize equity, consent, and the redistribution of both burdens and benefits. Finally, in “The Historical Roots of the Climate Crisis,” Lila Rimalovski traces the roots of the climate crisis to colonialism, which positions reparative justice as a necessary feature of any ecological intervention.
With all of these explorations, we aim to ground climate-centered academic and professional fields with recognition that equity, both historical and present, is a central pillar of this field. With various professional experiences, as lawyers, farmers, NGO workers, business leaders, researchers, and more, we have seen numerous attempts to propose a technical ‘solution’ to the climate crisis without taking into account the social or political context of that specific place or time. We view all environmental work as both social and political, and we hope that our colleagues in the field join us in working towards the collective flourishing of lands and communities.
Source: Grace
PLANTING SERVICEBERRIES IN PUBLIC POLICY
By Dani Schulman
Robin Wall Kimmerer gave a talk through the Harvard Book Store a few months ago after releasing her new book, The Serviceberry. She spoke to the main themes of the book: how to learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world, cultivate a sense of abundance and reciprocity, and move away from our extractive economy toward a giving economy. The venue was packed with a multi-generational crowd of people who cared enough about healing their relationship to the Earth to show up right after a U.S. national election that seemed to validate the exact opposite worldview. Kimmerer’s talk felt like a dose of much-needed medicine. She explained how disasters can bring out the best in people, overruling market economies in favor of mutual aid.
In contrast, my first semester studying public policy at Harvard Kennedy School taught me how to recognize and maximize power. It left me feeling selfish, with a scarcity mindset, and far from the vision of mutual flourishing that Kimmerer evoked. Her talk reminded me of the heightened sense of interdependence that has long motivated my climate work. With that medicine in mind, I am trying to move through this semester in ways that enable more reciprocity and generosity toward each other and the Earth. I am asking myself: How can The Serviceberry, and other lessons from Indigenous elders, spiritual leaders, historians, and activists, expand and improve policies that deliver environmental justice?
Just a few weeks before, at lunch with a professor of mine who taught history, race, and public policy, I had shared that environmental justice felt like an area of meaningful recent progress in the United States (see photo below). I pointed to the Justice40 Initiative and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed during the Biden-Harris administration. Justice40 directed 40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean energy investments toward disadvantaged communities, and the IRA directed over $360 billion of government investment toward climate, all covered by Justice40. Those concrete programs felt like a meaningful win. My professor was quick to warn me I was celebrating too soon, that progress always gets pushback, and he was right.
Flash forward to late November, after the U.S. elected a Republican president and Republican- controlled House and Senate, and those wins felt terribly temporary. I wondered how many people in the room with me listening to Kimmerer felt like they were part of a living universe of subjects versus a collection of objects. I wondered how often every person in that room would need to read The Serviceberry to get jolted out of the racial capitalist paradigm into a deep sense of abundance. If people felt that way, if government and business leaders felt that way, perhaps their decisions would cease to perpetrate environmental injustices.
One day, I would like to work for a government that improves lives, opens opportunity, and enhances resilience for all, without coming at the expense of beings deemed less valuable or disposable. I will need to be grounded in the values Kimmerer writes on if I have any hope of advancing the policy change I feel is needed. Going forward, I will ask: Who has access to the economic, health, and environmental benefits of a policy? Where are resources coming from and how can they be shared to enhance justice and abundance? If a policy relates to land use change, who lives there now, who lived there before, and who gains or loses access to the land? ? What is the relationship between the potential winners and losers and their respective geographies, and who holds the most power to determine outcomes?
As is probably appropriate for graduate school, I have no clear solutions to all of these questions. But I am determined to learn more and lean into difficult questions and subversive ideas with the time I have left in school. This spring, I am taking courses in politics and ethics, interdisciplinary climate leadership, and Indigenous economic development to build on Kimmerer’s ideas. In my personal life, I am cultivating awe and articulating gratitude for my human and nonhuman relationships. I have written a list of my core values and pinned it to my fridge to remind me to be a Serviceberry every day. Hopefully these big questions and small actions can help me inform equitable, practical economic policies that nurture a thriving, decarbonized future.
Photos of me getting up close and personal with said Hebridean peaty Moorland!
Getting to know each other, and the trees, in the Harvard Forest!
LEGAL PROGRESSIVISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
By Gustavo Manicardi Schneider
As the preceding sections illustrate, environmental justice is a multifaceted and complex concept. It encompasses our personal relationship with nature and habitats, the limitations of legal standing and rights, and the challenges associated with preserving and protecting knowledge in the face of the climate crisis. These challenges expose significant gaps in prevailing legal thought.
More visibly, environmental law often allocates the costs of inadequate waste management practices to racialized and marginalized communities. [6] As Sarah Krakoff has pointed out, environmental protections are often enforced to preserve scenic areas like Marble Canyon in the Grand Canyon, but rarely to prevent the air and water pollution or land scarring caused by strip mining in Indigenous Lands. These legal frameworks enabled massive infrastructure projects—like the Navajo Generating Station and the Central Arizona Project—that exported energy and water to cities like Phoenix, while leaving many Navajo households without electricity or running water. [7] The uneven distribution of harm has long been a focal point of critique from legal scholars and impacted communities alike. [8]
Less visibly, however, environmental law also plays a crucial role in shaping the distribution of surplus between different actors. [9] By permitting harmful contamination of rivers and the destruction of ecosystems, it effectively “legalizes” the profits derived from such activities. This not only imposes costs on vulnerable communities, but also bestows significant economic benefits upon polluters. Similarly, disputes over the allocation of benefits from climate mitigation and adaptation processes further exemplify how environmental law influences the distribution of both costs and rewards. For example, forest conservation programs like REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) have been contested by Indigenous groups in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, who argue that these programs commodify their lands and restrict their autonomy without providing meaningful benefits or consultation.
Even though the cost-benefit analytical approach advocates for an economic evaluation of surplus distribution, critical legal studies scholars have long rejected the idea that the benefits allocated by law must conform to purely economic rationales. This rejection is a cornerstone of the environmental justice movement, which integrates a range of radical ethical reform proposals aimed at fostering equity and accountability. [10]
In doing so, the movement highlights pathways for expanding current legal frameworks to align with contemporary ethical standards. For example, it advocates for granting stewardship rights over land to traditional communities and establishing enforceable principles-based rights. One such right is the provision of free, prior, and informed consent, empowering communities to resist harmful interventions by both private and public entities.
The environmental justice movement, therefore, serves as both a beneficiary of critical legal thought, such as distributional analyses, and a contributor to contemporary legal progressivism by introducing advanced ethical standards and challenging foundational assumptions within environmental law. As lawyers, we stand to benefit from the interaction of these two strands in literature, and must engage in translating these research agendas into institutional reforms. Furthermore, strategic litigation efforts are key in trying to translate political projects into material benefits for marginalized communities - that is, after all, what the legal left must do.
[6] Sarah Krakoff, Environmental Justice and the Possibilities for Environmental Law, 49 Envtl. L. 229 (2019), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1228.
[7] Idem.
[8] See, e.g. Lauren Cormany, Standing in the Way of Environmental Justice, 2024 Utah L. Rev.
167 (2024); Robert D. Bullard, Introduction: Environmental Justice—Once a Footnote, Now a Headline, 45 Harv. Env’t L. Rev.229 (2021).
[9] The language here is drawn from the conceptual framework developed by critical legal studies scholars. For two articulations of this conceptual framework, see, David Kennedy, A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton Univ. Press 2016). Janet Halley, Conclusion: Distribution and Decision: Assessing Governance Feminism, in Governance Feminism: An Introduction 243 (Janet Halley et al. eds., Univ. of Minnesota Press 2018).
[10] See, the discussions on the Rights of Nature as a mobilizing political goal in Sam Bookman, The Puzzling Persistence of Nature’s Rights, 2025 Utah L. Rev. 165 (2025).
Photo of me igniting dried grassed during a cultural burn on a hillside in the Siskiyou Mountains. Latgawa, Shasta, and Dakubetede Land, February 2024.
The amazing bark of a Madrone tree. Latgawa, Shasta, and Dakubetede Land, February 2024.
CLP Cluster logo generated by Fotor AI.
NESTING
By Grace Gallagher
It’s June and I have just moved to Boston. I carry my reusable bags to the farmers market. People bike through the city to drop kids off at school and commute to work. The local compost collector gathers bins of food scraps. I bend down to pick up a piece of garbage resting on the roots of a nearby tree. I snap back up and peek to and fro. Do Leave No Trace principles apply on this street corner? Where is the nearest trash can? How much trash is all around me?
I am not accustomed to living in the city. I catch myself momentarily reaching for trash bits often on the street. I jerk and jump with the loud sounds of ambulances, construction, and dogs barking. The robins keep me up at night tweeting their contempt at the light pollution. I too take night walks in the coolest hours this summer offers. Without the people everywhere, I can get to know this city. The best streets for gazing at the moon. The parks with real grass instead of turf.
I have not been in one space like this in quite a while. I have known the cycles of the sun above my head and the shifts of environment beneath my feet as I have moved through the vastness of the West. For the past three years, Leave No Trace principles truly have situated my life as a backpacker. Putting twenty or thirty miles between where I had slept the night before, I had forgotten how much a place changes when you sit and watch it. I had learned instead of flowers who have never known a plastic wrapper and rivers that do not know the taste of industrial run off.
In my years of continuous hiking, the forest fires and drying rivers had impassioned me to slow the shifting global climates. I worried tirelessly about land and water rights under pressure to farm cattle and grow non-native plants. I viewed whole states as endangered for their positionally with resources and heat preparation.
But now, in my stillness, the tiniest details become jarring and the large environmental dilemmas unavoidable. My community in the city—the oak outside my house, the garden on campus, the robins who have mostly left— does not exist independently from me but in spite of me. My habitat has shifted the living community that pre-existed me but has not entirely erased it.
What has shifted my considerations? Two factors, quite basic, focus the scale of my musings: time and space. The days, weeks, months, and eventually years I will spend in this city will expose me to a plethora of shifts and changes. I too have cycles of seasons and must learn to integrate into the interconnectedness of the nature around me. The city with its human systems and highly concentrated people still exists as a natural environment around me. The sidewalk is mineral and rocks altered by human hands but still metamorphosing beneath me. The trees will grow and bear fruit, and now I know where a particular crab apple tree will bloom, fruit, and drop splatters on the impervious sidewalk.
And yet, the specificity of this place, the measurable space the city occupies, is striking, too. The toxicity of the Charles River, although similar to other waterways, has its own particular set of obstacles. Ever since the damming of the river in 1910, the Charles has been filled with industrial sludge through most of the 20th century until the Clean Charles River Initiative of 1995 attempted to make the river fishable and swimmable again. [1] The high levels of lead in the soil affects marginalized communities at a higher rate. [2] The pollution–whether it be light, air, sound, water or any other source–is all concentrated in a spatially limited zone. There can be no escaping particles and gasses that travel faster and further than any human. Hemmed in by the ocean, Boston sprawls Westward with the population density dwindling just a day or two’s walking distance in my previous travels.
As time lengthens and space shrinks, my care for the environment becomes more and more intimate to my own life. I am not separate from my surroundings in Boston. I am an animal in an elaborate habitat. I am not as migratory as I once was, but have traded my flight pattern for a nest. My nest is the environmental hazards concentrated into this city of human habitation. The gap between the climate crisis, affecting each of us, and the environmental crises, an effect of each of us, closes tighter and tighter, but I am taking note of my interconnectedness to both tragedies. To care for the global scale, we must care for the local hazards too. By starting with the bit of land and trash around you, everyone plays a necessary role in the grand scale of a livable land in the not-so-distant future. I am settling into this nest of Boston and might just collect scraps of garbage to cushion it. How will you make a nest in your neighborhood?
[1] 13 years behind schedule, the river received an A- as a grade, but rarely does anyone swim or fish in the river, 30 years after the origin of this initiative.
[2] Harvard Chan-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health. “Environmental Racism at the Neighborhood Level.” ArcGIS StoryMaps, Esri, 15 July 2022,
Source: Dani
ON RE-WILDING OUR LANGUAGE
By Odessa Chitty
A study conducted at the dawn of the millennium in the UK, of children between four and eleven, found that they were better at identifying Pokémon characters than common native organisms like badgers or oak trees. [3] The study found that young people have an incredible capacity for learning about and building attachment to creatures, but in contemporary society they seem more inspired by synthetic subjects than by living organisms.
As someone who considers themselves a #nature #gurl, these results disturb me. I have always found peace in the dense pine forests and wild bracken moors of the west coast of Scotland, where I was fortunate enough to spend most of my childhood. I had privileged access to nature, with formative memories of charging into icy waters, paddling in rock pools, camping on beaches, and dragging my dad up misty mountains. A friend recently described me as “earthy,” which satisfied an image of myself I take pride in, perhaps even consciously an image I try to cultivate — of someone who truly loves the natural world. And yet, on a recent wander through the Harvard Forest with our climate justice group, as my friends confidently identified the trees around us like old friends, I felt a disorienting sense of inadequacy. When it comes to recognizing the world’s natural inhabitants, I realized, I’m not much better than an 11 year old Pokémon patron.
The erosion of nature knowledge is real. Generation by generation, we are losing the words that once brought the natural world to life. Anne Campbell’s ‘Rathad an Isein/The Bird’s Road: A Lewis Moorland glossary’, [4] catalogues a wealth of Gaelic vocabulary to describe the damp, boggy landscapes of my childhood. It captures the nuance of specific features in ways that resonate with deep familiarity. Terms like caochan, “a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation, virtually hidden from sight,” or fèith, “a fine vein-like watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer,” convey a profound relationship with the land.
I marvel at these poetic terms. Yet, the relationship between naming, knowing, and nature is complex. There is perhaps a danger in the belief that we could ever fully “know” the natural world. Driven by an anthropocentric instinct to name and to know, the development of taxonomy has fought many battles, from theory blind to theory laden. A reliance on specific terminology or expert knowledge can be alienating rather than empowering. Yet, as Carol Kaesuk Yoon argues, there is an instinctual facet to ordering and naming life, that goes beyond a distancing scientific impulse, and is instead a vibrant and dynamic art that manifests across varied human cultures. The restriction of taxonomy to a science rather than a natural result of ‘living-with’, is what has enabled our distance and apathy towards mass extinction and a breakdown of our vocabulary. [5]
We must rediscover the words for the living world, reawakening a shared language of recognition and reciprocity between ourselves and the other beings with whom we share this planet. Words rooted in the entangled lives of people and the land can inspire a renewed connection to the natural world, awakening a sense of shared history and responsibility. We protect what we know, and while modern life no longer demands that we identify every local plant, track animal signs, or read weather patterns as our ancestors once did, the decline of these skills creates a divide between us and the living world. It dulls our imaginations and erodes our capacity to live in harmony with the earth.
One personal goal in my advocacy for the Earth and its rights is to learn the names and habits of the trees I share my environment with, especially as I ground myself in a new home this year in New England. It’s a modest practice, but one I hope will deepen my connection to the land and its nuances and needs, in more than a superficial embrace of an ‘earthy’ aesthetic. I believe that our primary responsibility as ‘climate leaders’ is in advocating for the earth, not just in our various professional disciplines, but in our personal relations. Championing the needs and wants of the natural world starts with a closer attention to its reality. In our first climate leaders meeting, we went around the room and introduced ourselves. We started with our names and pronouns, and then explained briefly our backgrounds in relation to climate issues, and finally shared a fun fact. We’ve shared months of bi-weekly dinners and discussions, a weekend in the Harvard forest, and hang outs squeezed between busy student schedules. With this diligence and nurturing, friendships are flourishing. Just as we can’t hope to understand or build empathy towards our fellow human beings without learning their names, engaging in their stories, and building meaningful connections—if we want to represent the natural world and advocate for it, the first step has to be a rewilding of the words we know and use for our fellow planetary inhabitants.
[3] Balmford, A., Clegg, L., Coulson, T. and Taylor, J., 2002. Why conservationists should heed Pokémon. Science, 295(5564), pp. 2367-2367.
[4] Anne Campbell, Rathad an Isein/The Bird’s Road: A Lewis Moorland glossary, (FARAM: Glasgow, 2013)
[5] Yoon, C.K., 2016. Naming nature: the clash between instinct and science. The Chautauqua Journal, 1(1), p.19.
Navajo girl waters family’s corn crop. Source.
THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS
By Lila Rimalovski
In 2022, the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change released it’s bi-decade report, this time including an unprecedented clause: “Officials and scientists from around the globe now recognize the significant role colonialism has played in heating our planet and destroying its many gifts.” [11] Though this recognition is at least as old as 1492, the fact that a transnational coalition of government leaders, largely comprised of politicians from colonial nations, issued this statement marks 2022 as a pin point on the map of pivotal history. [12]
While plenty of governments disregard the IPCC report, the present-day American White House included, I would argue that the issuance of this statement posed an opportunity to generate a radical precedent for the major institutional bodies of the western industrial world (whether corporate or political or somewhere in between) to take a restorative justice approach to history. [13]
2022 could have marked the beginning of major accountability process for colonial nations. That IPCC report could have initiated cross-continental truth and reconciliation councils, mass reparations networks, coordinated global efforts for landback, public grief rituals at sites of colonial genocide. Maybe, most importantly, the report could have ignited a critical examination of legacies of coloniality that define western industrial cultures today, with an urgent yet well-paced process guided by elders to uproot the ongoing manifestations of harmful practices and revive, honor, and sanctify the living and lost cultures that offer antidotes to every act of violence that colonialism introduced. What if?
Last winter, I journeyed to the Little Applegate Valley of the Siskiyou Mountains– a watershed that has been home to the Latgawa, Shasta, and Dakubetede Native American tribes for 11,000 years and counting. I was there for a weeklong forestry training program specifically aimed to teach forest management practices that center social equity and indigenous ecological wisdom. The crux of the training revolved around a “cultural burn,” i.e. a daylong ritual of intentionally lighting fire in the forest understory. This practice of intentional burning is one of the strongest antidotes to preventing damaging wildfire. It’s no coincidence that the intentional and violent removal of indigenous peoples from those ecosystems means more catastrophic fire and less healthy, slow burns.
I share this story in the context of the 2022 IPCC report to suggest that honoring the relationship between colonialism and the present-day impacts of the climate crisis is an essential step towards actualizing ecological and social interventions that generate a more regenerative path forward. I don’t aim to indicate that the extraordinary ecological wisdom held by Native populations around the globe should or will pose the “solutions” to the catastrophes that the West has generated. Rather, here I see an opportunity for colonial nations to reevaluate the stories that have generated the systems of power that reign large today. What are the healing and collaborative possibilities for global climate interventions that await true repair from colonial nations towards the Indigenous peoples of the world?
On a local level, one of the ways I commit to decolonial action in the face of climate injustice is by learning and honoring indigenous practices of ecosystem management upon invitation. Cultural burning is just one example of what this could look like. A coordinated effort among national and corporate actors is undoubtedly necessary to ignite lasting change– and that necessity does not negate the responsibility I believe we all carry (specifically for non-native folks) to proactively care for local ecosystems in the methodologies these ecosystems have known for millennia.
I dream of all peoples, urban and rural, learning Indigenous land management practices that generate sovereignty for native nations while regenerating local ecosystems. While for many this might seem like a far off reality, I see actionable steps for everyone to begin a process of repairing relationships with land and their original peoples. The first steps might look like learning the non-English names for native species, participating in actions or ecosystem clean-up days with local non-profits, and committing to moving money to nearby Native nations or organizations on a rhythmic or seasonal basis. For me, an integral part of my journey has been learning the stories of my own ancestors– Ashkenazi Jews– to understand how my lineage is implicated in the history of Turtle Island.
I weave together these stories to paint a picture of possibility: one of true justice and reparations for Indigenous nations, and one of healing and climate resiliency for everyone involved.
[11] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by Hans-Otto Pörtner, Debra C. Roberts, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/.
[12] Simon Pokagon, The Red Man's Rebuke (Hartford, MI: C.H. Engle, 1893).
[13] "Michelle Obama Says She’ll ‘Never Forgive’ Trump," BBC News, November 13, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46351940.