I joined the faculty at Humboldt most recently from Alaska, where environmental law as it applies to the natural environment is being tested to the extreme. Major pieces of landmark wilderness are poised for oil and gas development. Shorelines and the structures they support are eroding. The world’s most productive fisheries are threatened by major mining operations. My approach to teaching environmental coursework at Humboldt is informed by years of footwork dancing around these challenges and also by the joys, disappointments, and connections that link Alaska’s environmental issues to global-scale social, economic, political, and cultural challenges.

Fundamentally, I take a practical approach to deep questions tugging at the social consequences of a degraded global environment. As an advocate, I’ve applied multiple tools—litigation, community lawyering, non-profit community organizing, design, scenario planning, social art, entrepreneurship, and conflict resolution. These diverse approaches share one thing in common—a curious and careful questioning of assumed and official outcomes. My overall approach to environmental problem solving invites a willingness to be surprised and cultivate an open mind. It is these nimble skills that I hope to hone with my students, along with the technical and detailed grind of learning the letter of the law. 

Before arriving on campus, I provided legal counsel to nonprofits, community groups, and other clients on regulatory compliance, environmental, climate, administrative, and constitutional matters, and my teaching is an extension of my practice of law. My law practice was shaped and influenced by the interdisciplinary complexities of environmental conflicts and the expertise of my colleagues in law, the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, and by affected communities facing the realities of unprecedented environmental change. I bring a unique expertise in climate law and climate adaptation, particularly in pre-disaster contexts, to the classroom—subjects about which I have presented and published in a wide variety of venues, in the U.S. and internationally. 

I teach to further my ongoing commitment to developing a climate justice practice. Example past projects include: co-founding and running the climate justice nonprofit Three Degrees Warmer for a decade and co-chairing the Three Degrees Conference on the Law of Climate Change and Human Rights at UW Law School; serving as a probono attorney for Our Children’s Trust’s atmospheric trust legal campaign; and curating Re-Locate, an arts and research collective in support of a community-led relocation planning process in Kivalina, Alaska. I also co-owned Re-Locate LLC, a small business that developed relocatable infrastructure and sanitation services for rural Alaska.