Native American tribes have been shaping the North American landscape far before colonial powers arrived. Through the centuries, Native tribes have faced countless environmental conflicts, like disease and displacement.

There are many laws that have kept these colonial conflicts in place. Promising changes to the system emerged around 30 years ago and developed especially well under President Obama. Under the conservative Trump administration, however, years of environmental legal progress in Midwestern tribes is at risk.

Through colonialism and the growth of the United States, indigenous people of this country were forced off their land by a foreign, unforgiving government. The Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 was an act that forced Native people in the U.S. to assimilate to farm lifestyles. While tribes struggled to adapt to an unknown way of living, Congress transferred their former land to non-native owners and limited Native access to that land. The Act took nearly two-thirds of Native land in a matter of years, and with it many sacred traditions and sites.

While the Dawes Act is outdated, and Indian law has evolved greatly since 1887, Native people still struggle for proper nation autonomy. The federal government treats tribes as sovereign, but only if they are federally recognized—a qualification granted by Congress.  Despite being sovereign, tribes are expected in many facets, such as environmental policy and criminal justice, to submit to state and federal law.

Not only does the federal government extend laws onto tribal nations, but they also control tribal land. Protected land, according to the Department of the Interior (DOI), is only granted to federally recognized tribes. The DOI admits that not every tribe has protected land, and lands allotted are not always the original tribal land. The DOI also holds title to the land, and Congress has the option to take jurisdiction in any matters on the land that they see fit.

While tribes are technically sovereign nations on their land, is the government to be trusted with this executive power? Native people need the right to sacred lands, the right to benefit off their land and natural resources without a looming federal government that has the final say.

The Red Lake nation in Minnesota was planning a deal with a corporation, giving up a small parcel of land for an oil pipeline and in turn receiving payment and a piece of land over 300 times larger. If successful, the Red Lake nation would have gained $18.5 million and 164 acres of land. The Red Lake nation pulled out— Trump-appointed Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke pushed the tribe to seek approval from Congress rather than the DOI. Native land cases are routinely delayed and denied by Congress more than other federal reviewers.

Unfortunately, is likely that these delays and denials by dominantly Republican and Trump-appointed officials will only increase in number. Without legal approval and claim to their land, the Red Lake nation lost the ability to benefit and profit off their natural resources. Native communities are kept socially and financially immobile by misplaced environmental protections and denied land claims. With poverty rates twice that of the rest of the country, Native nations are in need of financial growth free from biased federal legal systems.

Even the government agencies that aid Native nations in many ways are threatened by the Trump administration. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created wide-ranging water clean-up projects that successfully protected crucial water systems for tribes like the Fond du Lac tribe in northern Minnesota. However, the EPA has already lost stability, funding, and staff under Trump and several under-qualified directors. Beneficial government agencies that help Native people are at risk.

I would like to focus on the way that Native people in the United States grapple with the federal government to have autonomy and environmental justice—specifically in the Upper Midwest—and how these processes might change under President Trump.

Photo by Indianz.Com (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

https://www.indianz.com/News/2018/08/31/prominent-indian-country-attorney-reassi.asp

Guess what the most common organizational crimes prosecuted by the federal government in the United States are? Smuggling? Gang violence? No, it is violating environmental laws, according to a 2015 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Environmental crimes can include offenses ranging from illegal animal trafficking to egregious chemical spills. Governments and regulators are already struggling to keep up with the impacts of environmental disasters that occur naturally. Ecological crimes purposefully caused by humans that are damaging the environment and human health need to be a priority for the government. Indeed, environmental laws not only protect the environment, but they protect human health and welfare. That makes enforcement of environmental regulations essential.

Identifying and punishing the parties responsible for environmental crimes is complicated because it can be hard to place blame on a sole party. Many federal environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, include provisions that make violating stipulated legal regulations a crime. To prosecute an environmental crime, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has to prove that an organization or individual knows it committed an act that harmed the environment.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a Criminal Investigation Division that investigates violations of federal environmental law. The EPA will recommend cases to the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. The Division prosecutes on behalf of the United States under 150 civil and criminal environmental statutes. Many of the cases prosecuted by the Environmental Crimes Section (ECS) of the DOJ are settled out of court. For those that are not, ECS can, in some cases, prosecute violators and issue them criminal fines, among other penalty options.

The Obama administration was focused on improving the Clean Water Act nationwide, therefore the DOJ worked to prosecute violations of the Clean Water Act. In the past, 70% of prosecuted environmental crimes involved water. With the Trump administration’s appointment of Scott Pruitt, many environmentalists worried about how the EPA Director’s past contempt for federal environmental regulations would affect the agency’s investigative arm. There was concern that Pruitt would shift a large part of investigative and enforcement responsibilities to the states, many of which do not have the resources to effectively carry out such tasks to the ability that the federal government does. After Pruitt’s resignation, Andrew Wheeler has become the Acting Director of the EPA, bringing even more uncertainty to how the EPA and the Trump administration will view the importance of prosecuting environmental crimes.

Environmental laws are written and implemented to safeguard and improve not only the natural environment, but also to protect human health and wellbeing. When these laws are not enforced, it can lead to industries committing environmental crimes that have adverse effects on human health. Successful ongoing investigation and prosecution of environmental crimes by the EPA and the DOJ not only protects our environment, but also has the potential to save lives. As the Trump administration continues to roll back environmental regulations, how will this affect the rate of prosecution of environmental crimes? What effect will this change have on ecological and human health?

Climate change is becoming an increasingly serious and complicated problem. The three hottest years on record happen to be the last three calendar years: 2015, 2016, and 2017. Even worse, 2018 is projected to be the fourth hottest year on record. Nations of the world have already come together at the Paris Climate Accord back in 2015. The Paris agreement has 195 signatories, sending a strong message that climate change is an international issue worthy of our attention. Three years after meeting in Paris, we still have yet to take strong action on the issue. The longer we wait to take action, the harder it will be to avert crisis.

The general consensus is that in order to combat climate change, we must develop and consume more renewable energy. Those concerned about climate change seem to mostly agree that solar and wind are desirable forms of renewable energy that help to significantly cut carbon emissions, are competitively priced with fossil-fuel derived energy, and are relatively safe for people and for the environment.

Nuclear energy, although not technically classified as a renewable energy, is another form of low-carbon energy that has total carbon emissions comparable to solar energy and wind energy. It has the potential to be competitively priced with fossil fuels and with renewable energies. Plus, nuclear energy isn’t intermittent like wind and solar power are. Given all of these benefits, should implementing nuclear energy be one of the strong actions we take against climate change?

To understand the roots of the anti-nuclear energy movement, we need to first look at history. The movement arises partly from fear of nuclear weaponry and war during the Cold War era, and partly from the worst nuclear disasters in history, such as those in Fukushima and Chernobyl. Besides this, opponents often criticize nuclear power’s high costs. And, there are unanswered questions about how we can safely dispose nuclear waste. Many prominent environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, Environment America, and Greenpeace have been known to be anti-nuclear energy. In fact, Greenpeace was first established to oppose U.S. nuclear weapon tests of the late 1960s.

But recently, a growing number of environmentalists and technical experts have begun to come around to the idea of using nuclear energy to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative released a groundbreaking study called “The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World”. According to the report, nuclear energy could become less expensive and safer with newer and more cost-effective reactors. It also argues that fighting climate change will be slower, more difficult, and more expensive if we do not include nuclear power as one climate change solution of many.

So, should we give nuclear energy a chance? Do we even have a choice? To answer these questions, I will explore the promising qualities of nuclear energy and the recent growing support for developing it as an important part of climate action plans.

As the waters inch up around their homes, fields, and ancestral lands, the villagers from a small province in Guatemala watch. Children stare with their mouths open, some men cry. Animals that are too slow and hundreds of species of plants are washed away. Plodding back to their new makeshift homes, women steel themselves for the upward battle of making a new life from scratch. Miles upstream, engineers breathe a sigh of relief. A new dam has been successfully put in place with the promise to provide electricity for thousands.

It’s expensive to build a dam, so many countries need outside money to do it, so multilateral development banks, foreign governments, and private firms step up to help meet these needs. But what is the most socially and environmentally sustainable way to undertake large development projects, and who should fund and implement them? These questions have drawn intense scrutiny and debate in recent years because of high-profile cases in which projects have gone very wrong, like massive flooding at the Hidroituango dam in Colombia.

Although not every internationally funded development project involves displacement or environmental destruction, far too often they do. Dam projects bring electricity but resettlement of communities; transmission lines threaten indigenous farming communities; roads destroy biodiverse hotspots. The CEOs and bank directors that make decisions about projects are often shadowy figures that never see the harm projects cause and have little incentive to improve their practices. What makes structural change even more difficult is that American voters, citizens of the country that holds the most voting power in almost all development banks and provides funding to private companies, are unaware of their tacit participation in these projects.

The multilateral development banks—the World Bank being the best known—that provide public funding for a range of development projects have begun to emphasize the importance of private funding to reach development goals. Another source of international funding that is increasingly important and even less transparent than that from multilateral development banks comes from specific governments and the private sector, with China rising rapidly in their share of the global lending portfolio. All multilateral development banks have policies in order to isolate themselves from risk and to protect the environment and communities, but when the private sector is involved, standards are more relaxed. The effects of these shifts in funding are drawing attention in the development sphere, but not many people from outside of it are even aware that any change occurred in the first place.

I plan to investigate the environmental and human rights effects of international lending to projects in Latin America. While environmental and human rights defenders lose their lives for their work in Latin America, the faces and voices of the communities feeling the impacts of a development project rarely reach the public in the United States. As the United States reconsiders its lending policies through the BUILD Act, and private sector financing increases at exponential rates, now is the time for people who care about communities and the environment to find their voice. The damage caused by poorly designed projects is easy to spot; what is harder to understand is the opaque world of development finance that led to the project being funded in the first place. At this time of rapid change in the development sphere, I will shed light on these issues so that readers are educated and empowered to take action on this complicated topic.

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It’s easy to think of climate change as a far-off danger. Most people know that rising tides and temperatures will change our planet dramatically, but the distance between predictions for 2100 and the comparatively small changes we’re seeing now lets us imagine this as a future problem. Our great-grandkids, riding around on hoverboards in holographic spacesuits, might live in a dystopian world, but surely they’ll have the technology to fix everything by then. Unfortunately, objects in the mirror are closer than they appear: there are already climate refugees within the United States’ own borders.

Off the coast of Louisiana, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe is watching the Gulf of Mexico cover its ancestral home on Isle de Jean Charles. Across the country, the Quinault Indian Nation of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula faces a similar fate. While this is an immeasurable and wholly unfair loss, these two communities are fortunate in that they’re small enough to be resettled inland as distinct entities. The same cannot be said for Miami (population: 417,650) or New York City (8,550,405).

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 39% of the U.S. population lived in counties bordering an ocean in 2013. The advantage that led people to settle near the water – proximity to the ocean which made international trade possible – has become a major weakness. Yet, despite broad awareness that urban infrastructure in most U.S. cities cannot handle several feet of sea level rise, adaptation is proving to be a mega-challenge. Even the most proactive cities are still in the early stages of their adaptation efforts.

In response to the double threats of land erosion and increased flooding, Virginia Beach residents built a strong adaptation network including nearby townships, businesses, and universities. Even the federal government has been a partner in their efforts since a local Naval base is also threatened. They’re ahead of the game on holistic vulnerability assessments and intergovernmental cooperation. They’ve considered innovative adaptation options, even calling in the Dutch for strategies on living with water. Even here, it’s been hard to make it from the planning stage to implementation.

So what’s making it so difficult for U.S. cities to move forward? In most places, the problem is no longer a lack of political will or a technological deficit: it’s that our legislative bodies aren’t equipped to deal with uncertainty.
There aren’t definitive numbers for temperature change and sea level rise because of the sheer number of variables that could change our climate future. Even authoritative models, like those published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have to divide their predictions into “scenarios” based on different levels of future greenhouse gas emissions. How, then, can a city government figure out how to adjust its regulations? What level of sea level rise will buildings built today have to withstand in 50 years? Just how dangerous will urban heat islands become? Overestimating the problem would likely result in political backlash, and underestimating it would leave citizens unprotected from the impending storm. Uncertainty demands more flexibility and faster reactions than most city governments can handle.

This semester, I will explore policy solutions to the challenges of urban climate change adaptation. U.S. cities have to transform if they are to withstand inevitable change over the next century, and that transformation likely needs to be more than a physical one. We can no longer wait to build Tomorrowland: the ocean is already lapping at our front doors.

Historically perceived as a place apart from nature, the concrete and iron jungles of cities are now being remodeled with nature in mind. On America’s West coast, architects are transforming bustling Seattle into a lush forest environment by designing buildings that retain moisture like lichen and moss. On the East coast, the Omega Institute in upstate New York filters and naturally reclaims its wastewater through a series of artificial wetlands and lagoons. Across the globe, Tokyo uses slime mold growth patterns to design efficient transportation networks.

These projects signify the growing popularity and use of biomimicry, whereby architects, scientists, and engineers draw inspiration from natural processes to rethink the way the urban landscape can function and interact with all aspects of human life and the surrounding environment. Having had billions of years to evolve into an efficient, integrated, and holistic ‘machine’, the natural world can shed wisdom on how to approach the design of sustainable and resilient solutions for the built environment.

As urban population growth and a changing climate threaten human existence, this boom in biomimetic design comes at a vital time. Over half of the global population currently lives in urban areas, and this figure is expected to increase to 66% by 2050. Not only will officials and planners have to work quickly and efficiently to accommodate larger and denser populations, but they also have the added challenge of doing so during an era of unprecedented environmental variability due to climate change. The good news is that much of the land that will accommodate rising urban population levels has yet to be developed. Therefore, cities are places with potential for sustainable planning and increased efficiencies.

This semester, I aim to investigate how to breathe new life into the artificial structure of urban areas to create cities that function like living organisms. Is nature-inspired design the most effective way to do this? Can it foster holistic, lasting solutions to urban environmental problems, or will it result in quick fixes that lack long-term cultural and environmental impacts? How can we raise public and political awareness to implement biomimetic technology into our urban infrastructure? Hopefully, the biomimetic approach will help humanity transition into an era where dominance over nature is replaced with one of cooperation and symbiotic support.

According to current predictions by the World Economic Forum, plastic debris in the ocean will outweigh the ocean’s fish by the year 2050. If you’re like me, this statistic is startling. More plastic than fish in our vast oceans? That seems so unnatural, so absurd, that it was hard to wrap my head around that projection when I first heard it at my internship this summer at a coastal conservation organization. But at the same time, I look around myself and all I see is plastic— we wear plastic; our food is packaged in plastic; we drive cars made increasingly out of plastic to stores to buy more things made of plastic. The World Economic Forum study found that about one third of our plastic waste is not disposed of properly. Not surprisingly, quite a bit of plastic ends up drifting in the great blue ocean forming huge patches of garbage and messing with our lives and the lives of the ocean’s creatures.

The effects of marine plastic pollution on wildlife are life threatening. Photographs of creatures caught up and trapped in plastic debris are numerous. Current studies find that at least half of the world’s sea turtles and ninety percent of seabirds have consumed plastic, which can kill them by blocking digestive tracts or piercing intestinal walls. And, animals that eat too much plastic can starve because their stomachs are too full of plastic to feel hungry.

Marine plastic pollution is not only a threat to the health of marine wildlife, but also to the livelihoods of fishermen, ways of life for coastal communities, and human health. Plastic pollution threatens already overfished fish stocks, causes damage to fishing vessels, and is aesthetically unattractive, all of which result in income losses for many coastal communities. A plastic threat that is getting more and more recognition is microplastics. Plastic never really disappears, but decomposes into tiny pieces of plastic that fish and shellfish eat. These microplastics attract and attach to chemical pollutants. When we eat these animals, we ingest these microplastics and the chemicals that attach to them. Studies have found that health effects, like infertility and genetic disruption, occur in fish due to these microplastics. There is fear among scientists that if humans ingest enough, similar effects might occur to us.

Marine plastic pollution poses a global, interconnected threat to our livelihoods, ways of life, health, and the health of marine wildlife. But at the same time, we are producing and dumping more and more plastic into the oceans every year. How can we begin to move towards realizing a future where plastic does not saturate our oceans? Is it possible to have plastic-free oceans when plastics are constantly breaking down into microplastics? How much of a threat are these microplastics to our health? Will this problem be solved through political means, changes in our behavior as consumers, or changes in the behavior of corporations? Through a series of case studies highlighting the importance of change on all three levels- consumer, corporate, and political- I will explore how, as a world connected by our ocean’s currents, we can begin to tackle the issue of marine plastic pollution.

Brownish lumps of chicken nuggets, a pile of white mush that calls itself mashed potatoes, a plastic cup of fruit swimming in syrupy water, a small square of peas that either came from a can or the freezer, and a chocolate chip cookie that is definitely not freshly baked. Is this really what we want to feed our children?

While many other countries serve their children nutrient-dense fresh fruits and vegetables, school lunches in the U.S. are often criticized for consisting of mainly processed, unhealthy foods. The U.S. School Lunch Program, which was initially designed to improve the nutrition of American children, is now putting them at a higher risk for being overweight, particularly children from lower-income families, who depend on these government-funded meals.

Although several initiatives have been created across the country with the goal of improving lower-income communities’ access to fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables, the Farm-to-Table movement is still most popular among the elite, some of whom can’t imagine someone not being able to afford organic kale from the local farmer’s market. Lower-income communities are still plagued with higher levels of obesity than the general public due to the affordability of calorie-dense processed foods and a lack of access to healthier options.

It begs the question, how can a movement be considered sustainable when it exacerbates inequality and leaves behind those who need it most? For a truly sustainable food system we must foster food sovereignty: the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

The Farm-to-School movement just might be the solution. By providing American children with locally grown fruits and vegetables and educating them about where their food actually comes from, Farm-to-School programs are certainly a step towards food sovereignty. While such initiatives have existed for decades in some parts of the country, the USDA formally established the Farm-to-School Program with the passage of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

As a part of the National School Lunch Program, which receives federal funding to provide free or reduced cost meals for students in public schools, Farm-to-School provides a way for lower-income students and communities to get involved in the Farm-to-Table movement.

However, funding for these Farm-to-School programs is limited and distributed on the basis of a competitive grant application process and lower-income communities might not be receiving the funding they so desperately need. Is Farm-to-School a step towards reducing childhood obesity rates and creating more equality within the sustainable food movement? What types of schools have Farm-to-School programs and how are they incorporated into the curriculum? How are farmers, the local economy, and the students themselves affected by these programs? Over the course of the semester, I will explore these questions and many more as I consider whether the Farm-to-School Program is truly sustainable: if it serves to increase food sovereignty for all, or only for some.