Land and Water Conservation – The GW Point Source

September 28, 2025November 9, 2025

2025 Shapiro Distinguished Lecture

On September 23, 2025, faculty, students, and guests gathered for the Fourth Annual J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Distinguished Lecture on Global Climate Change and Energy Law. This year’s lecture was delivered by Professor Lyndon W. Jay Huffington, a Colombian legal scholar from Universidad Externado de Colombia with more than a decade of experience in the mining-energy sector. His lecture, provocatively titled “Clean Energy, Dirty Secrets: Latin America’s Struggles with Illegal Mining and Artificial Intelligence as a Potential Game-Changer for Environmental Justice,” shed light on the contradictions of the clean energy transition and the often overlooked social and environmental costs that accompany it.

The Fourth Annual Shapiro Distinguished Lecture on Global Climate Change and Energy Law delivered by Professor Lyndon W. Jay Huffington.

September 20, 2025October 18, 2025

Book Talk: Prof. Roy Gardner on Waters of the United States

On September 18, 2025, GW Law’s Environmental & Energy Law Program welcomed Professor Roy Gardner of Stetson University College of Law for a book talk and signing of his new book, Waters of the United States: POTUS, SCOTUS, WOTUS, and the Politics of a National Resource.

The event opened with introductory remarks from Randall S. Abate, Assistant Dean for Environmental Law Studies, who welcomed attendees and highlighted the importance of Professor Gardner’s work in the context of ongoing debates over federal wetlands protections.

Prof. Gardner began by tracing the historical reasons why federal involvement in water quality became essential. For decades, common law remedies proved inadequate, and states often failed to control pollution effectively. These shortcomings were underscored by infamous events such as the Cuyahoga River in Ohio catching fire due to unchecked industrial waste — stark reminders of the urgent need for national action.

January 28, 2025February 10, 2025

Galamsey and the Struggle for Ghana’s Future: Environmental Degradation and the Resistance Movement

Benedicta Osei-Boateng

Photo Credit: Ruth McDowall, featured in Detecting Gold Mining in Ghana, NASA Landsat Image Gallery.

The West African nation of Ghana is endowed with natural resources such as water, forests, and substantial deposits of high-value minerals including gold, diamonds, bauxite, and manganese. As a tropical country, Ghana enjoys a significant amount of sunshine to support the development of solar power. It also has an ample wind system and biomass base. Taken together, these renewable and nonrenewable resources make Ghana a resource-rich nation.

As is the case with most countries that abound with natural resources, in recent years Ghana has seen a dramatic rise in the deterioration of its natural resources primarily caused by small and medium-scale artisanal mining, popularly called “galamsey.” The term is a corrupted version of two words “gather and sell,” which connote the gathering and selling of gold. This practice has led to environmental degradation, land and water resource depletion, health hazards for miners, and social and economic impacts.[1] There is also medical evidence suggesting that galamsey activities have resulted in new health challenges including neonatal defects that are traceable to unregulated heavy metals like arsenic and mercury that have found their way into groundwater systems through illegal alluvial mining.

April 3, 2023September 25, 2023

A Primer on Biden’s 30 by 30 Plan

By Johanna Adashek

What is Biden’s 30 by 30 plan?

The plan originated from Executive Order 14008 “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” published on January 27, 2021. Sections 216 of the Executive Order tasked various government agencies with the goal of conserving 30% of U.S. land and waters by 2030, hence the short reference: “30 by 30.” The Executive Order itself did not create detailed directives for achieving this goal, instead, it initiated processes for stakeholder participation, measuring progress, and creating future strategies. While the progress of steps taken to date is hard to measure, this is the first conservation goal that the federal government has ever set. Approximately 12% of land, 11% of freshwater, and 26% of ocean waters in the U.S. has some level of protection to date. This blog post (1) examines why protecting and conserving lands and waters is so vital; (2) identifies steps taken to achieve the 30 by 30 goal thus far; and (3) considers potential future measures that can be taken to reach the 30 by 30 goal.