Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy

I (Josh Galperin, Associate Director, Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy) have two forthcoming publications that argue against the growing "eat the invaders" or "invasivore" movement. Invasive species are a serious ecological and economic problem. The invasivore movement supposes that we can control biological invasions with a fork and knife. My collaborators and I see several problems with this argument. One of the leading problems is that generating enough culinary interest in an invasive species to actually impact its population will lead to cultural endearment. There are examples of invasive species, despite manifest ecological and economic damage, becoming important cultural icons. Even though it has nothing to do with food, the eucalyptus tree in California is one such example. 

The following post, written by Professor Eric Biber and originally published on Legal Planet highlights problems of cultural endearment of invasive species by focusing on attempts to remove eucalyptus from the campus of UC Berkeley.

In recent decades, ambient levels of several different types of harmful air pollutants have fallen significantly in Canada’s urban centres, according to the report.

According to the internationally respected Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Canada is a world leader in this area.

The United States Supreme Court didn’t do anything particularly interesting on Monday, May 13. All they did was issue a sound ruling on a reasonably simple legal question. The problem is that the facts of the case deal with thorny social issues that fuel the blogosfire:  genetically modified foods and the role of multinational corporations.

In the our second annual Policy Workshop Webinar Series, we looked at “Emerging Issues in Shale Gas Development” with the help of a distinguished group of experts from multiple sectors and fields. In case you missed any of our events this year, or would like to review a presentation, I have catalogued our shale gas webinars and interviews, including links to summary blog posts and video recordings.

On Friday, April 12, Kate Sinding from Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) discussed fracking from the perspective of an environmental organization as part the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy’s Policy Workshop Webinar Series on “Emerging Issues in Shale Gas Development.”