Environmental Justice: Agency and Environmental Joy with Gerald Torres

Friday, December 6, 2024, 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM ET  //  8:30 - 9:45 AM PT

Joy is a transformative force with diverse meanings. Joy can be innate, born of grace when one feels in harmony with nature, community, faith, culture, laws, policy, or even the economy. It is what injustice takes from us and what we regain when healing and repair occur. Joy is a core piece of what we seek when working for justice. It expresses the goal that sustains the work for a better world. The primary objective of most environmental and climate initiatives is to alleviate suffering and enhance well-being. Torres wants to explore and celebrate how environmental justice achieves these goals. The aim is to assist the field of environmental and climate justice in discovering and enhancing practices that reduce harm, promote well-being, and enable our legal and political systems to be healthy places of engagement.

Gerald Torres (Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment) is the former President of the Association of American Law Schools and has taught at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. Professor Torres served as Counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Torres served on the Board of the Environmental Law Institute and the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and was the founding chairman of the Advancement Project. He is board chair of Earth Day and a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was a consultant to the United Nations on environmental matters. Torres is a life member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Torres has done groundbreaking work in agricultural law and policy, especially on the environmental regulation of food and fiber production. He has written about water resource management. While continuing to focus on the role of social movements in producing durable legal change, he is finishing a book on environmental justice. An internationally known scholar of Indian law, Torres has recently focused on cooperative resource management and the changing legal landscape within American colonies.

This Antioch Works for Democracy webinar is in partnership with and celebration of 50 years of Environmental Studies at Antioch University as part of its Fall 2024 Environmental Justice and Democracy Colloquium Series.