On September 26th, the Getches-Wilkinson Center and American Indian Law Program presented the 2024 Ruth Wright Distinguished Lecture in Natural Resources. This year’s speaker was Bob Anderson, the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior. 

In addition to his role as the Solicitor, Bob Anderson is a law professor, having taught at the University of Washington School of Law and Harvard Law School. Prior to his appointment as the Solicitor, he served as a political appointee in the Clinton administration under Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. Bob began his career as an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, eventually co-founding NARF’s Alaska office. Bob is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. 

On the day of the Ruth Wright lecture, Bob Anderson gave a talk to students during the lunch hour. Bob speaks like a mentor, humble and thoughtful, clearly committed to his role in fostering the next generation of lawyers. During the lecture that evening, Bob shared stories about his monumental cases and discussed important legal issues, covering topics such as Federal treaty and trust obligations to tribes, Alaska Native Fishing Rights, protecting public lands and offshore areas from oil and gas leasing, and Indian water rights. 

Bob Anderson’s talk felt like an honoring of the work that has been done at the intersection of American Indian law and public lands law, as well as anticipation for the path ahead – the path that will be walked by this generation of lawyers, my generation of lawyers and the next. 

I remember the first Ruth Wright lecture I attended when I started law school in 2022. I was overwhelmed by the blazers and the klick-clacking of heels and well-polished dress shoes across the tile of Wolf Law. I passed out nametags, star struck by the speaker and attendees, leaders in the fields of American Indian law, public lands, and natural resources – people I had dreamed of working for when I applied to law school. As I walked home that September night in 2022, I felt affirmed that I was in exactly the right place. This year was no different. 

The recordings of the 2024 Ruth Wright Lecture can be.

Barb Colombo of captured images of the Ruth Wright Distinguished Lecture. These images are available for .

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Mobilizing the Global Community on Climate Change:
An Indigenous Leadership Perspective

Fawn R. Sharp

Thursday, October 13, 2022
6:00 p.m.
Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom
Livestream/Zoom option available

Indigenous Peoples have long embraced a special responsibility to care for all living beings and steward their lands consistent with cultural, spiritual, and economic traditions. Fawn Sharp will share her perspectives on the relationship between human rights and climate justice, as well as advocacy under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, comparative experiences among Indigenous Peoples around the world, and local needs of tribal leaders and communities in the U.S.

Fawn R. Sharp (Quinault)
Fawn R. Sharp, a five-term President of the Quinault Indian Nation, now serves as President of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the oldest and largest American Indian and Alaska Native tribal government organization in the country. A leading voice in the global movement to address climate change, President Sharp has delivered presentations and published articles on this topic in venues throughout the United States and around the world. In 2021, President Sharp became the first Indigenous leader to be credentialed by the U.S. State Department to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), and she regularly advises UN bodies on the human rights of Indigenous Peoples. President Sharp’s international advocacy on climate change issues is informed by her experience as an elected tribal leader in the Northwest where environmental disasters have deeply affected Indigenous Peoples, lands, and resources.

Sharp graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Gonzaga University in Spokane Washington at the age of 19, and received her Juris Doctorate from the University of Washington in 1995. She has been honored by the National Judicial College at the University of Nevada and the International Human Rights Law program at Oxford University.

Presented by the the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the ����ֱ�� Environmental Law Journal.

The Ruth Wright Distinguished Lecture in Natural Resources

The annual Distinguished Lecture Series is a cooperative venture between the Getches-Wilkinson Center (GWC) and the ����ֱ�� Natural Resources, Energy, & Environmental Law Review to host a distinguished figure in the fields of natural resource, energy, and environmental law and policy. The Distinguished Lecture series provides a public forum for thought-leadership, allowing the speakers to reflect on their experiences and provide insights on the current challenges facing natural resources, energy, and the environment. The articles and transcripts resulting from these lectures are published in the Law Review.

In 2018, the GWC received a generous gift from the Wright Family Foundation to establish the Ruth Wright Distinguished Lecture in Natural Resources in honor of her inspiring legacy as a leader in western natural resources, land conservation, and environmental policy and advocacy. With this support, we look forward to bringing this free event to our community for years to come.

As a legislator, environmentalist, and historian, Ruth Wright dedicated her career to environmental issues and activism. While a student at ����ֱ�� Law, she led efforts to preserve Boulder’s open space and limit the height of buildings in Boulder to 55 feet to protect enjoyment of the unique landscape for the ages. In 1980, she was elected to the ����ֱ�� House of Representatives, where she represented Boulder until 1994. She was also the second woman ever to become the House minority leader, a role she held from 1986 until 1992. While serving in the House of Representatives, Wright continued to be a strategic champion for the environment, and has been recognized by such groups as the ����ֱ�� Wildlife Foundation, the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and ����ֱ�� Open Lands.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuAKZgMKi2A]

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2021 Ruth Wright Distinguished Lecture in Natural Resources: Are We Saved? Tempering Our Expectations for Natural Resources Management Under the Biden Administration

Marcilynn A. Burke
Dean and Dave Frohnmayer Chair in Leadership and Law
University of Oregon School of Law

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Almost forty years ago, Dean Derrick Bell, published the book entitled, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice.  In his book, he tells a story of apparent triumphs, followed by continuing travails.  He describes the United States as a place that seemingly has made great progress in its efforts to achieve racial justice, but how its facial progress actually masks and sustains systemic failures.

The challenges in the management of the nation’s natural resources, though very different (and yet not unrelated to racial justice), are nonetheless quite complex and woven into the very fabric of the nation.  The country has many urgent needs with respect to energy development, preservation and conservation, climate change, and climate justice.  This presentation will outline a few of the great hopes for natural resources management under the Biden Administration and this next cycle of “reform.”  It will examine some of the factors that make it more likely for us to be saved or save ourselves, so that at the conclusion of the Biden Administration, we do not utter the words of the prophet Jeremiah. “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”  Jeremiah 8:20

CLE accreditation notice

[video:https://youtu.be/miucRcyAp3U]

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Public Land Policy after the Trump Administration: Is This a Turning Point?

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Professor John Leshy
University of California-Hastings College of Law

Since the Civil War, a strong, bipartisan consensus has developed in support of the national government’s owning large amounts of land. Over the last half-century, that consensus has favored managing more and more of these lands primarily for inspiration, education, human-powered recreation, and environmental conservation.

The Trump Administration has moved aggressively to open previously protected public lands to fossil fuel and other forms of intensive development and to roll back protections in a host of other ways, including starving and shrinking the agencies that manage these lands.
 
Is this the harbinger of a fundamental change in the trajectory of public land policy, or is it an aberration? Professor Leshy will be drawing upon material from his much-anticipated book, forthcoming from Yale University Press, with the working title Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands.

[video:https://youtu.be/RnfoCOxHRQk]

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Cost-Nothing Analysis: Environmental Economics in the Age of Trump

Professor Lisa Heinzerling, Georgetown Law

[video:https://youtu.be/17HPDMO8IOw]

The annual Distinguished Lecture Series is a cooperative venture between the Getches-Wilkinson Center (GWC) and the ����ֱ�� Natural Resources, Energy, & Environmental Law Review to host a distinguished figure in the fields of natural resource, energy, and environmental law and policy.  The Distinguished Lecture series provides a public forum for thought-leadership, allowing the speakers to reflect on their experiences and provide insights on the current challenges facing natural resources, energy, and the environment. The articles and transcripts resulting from these lectures are published in the Law Review.

Now in its fifth year, ����ֱ�� Law is excited to announce a new endowment to bolster support of the Distinguished Lecture series so that we will be able to bring this free event to our community for years to come.  Thanks to a generous gift by the Wright Family Foundation to the GWC, we are thrilled to launch the Ruth Wright Distinguished Lecture in Natural Resources to honor her inspiring legacy as a leader in western natural resources, land conservation, and environmental policy and advocacy.

Cost-Nothing Analysis: Environmental Economics in the Age of Trump

Cost-benefit analysis has always resisted environmental protection. For this reason, presidents since Nixon have used cost-benefit analysis to stifle environmentally protective regulation. The present administration has taken this practice one step further by ignoring or eliminating benefits entirely in many instances — thus ushering in an era of cost-nothing analysis. Cost-nothing analysis assumes it costs us nothing to degrade the environment, even as the evidence grows that it may cost us everything.

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GWC Distinguished Lecture – 2017Atmospheric Trust Litigation: Securing a Constitutional Right to a Stable Climate System

Professor Mary Wood, Philip H. Knight Professor, Faculty Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center, University of Oregon Law

In face of irreversible climate tipping points and the failure of statutory law to control carbon dioxide pollution, youth around the world are suing their governments to act before it is too late.  The campaign, called Atmospheric Trust Litigation, recently won a landmark ruling from a federal district court declaring a constitutional right to a stable climate system. Professor Wood discusses this litigation in the context of climate urgency and the federal government’s policy to spur production of fossil fuels.

[video:https://youtu.be/1g2rffzWKSI]

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GWC Distinguished Lecture – 2016In Love with the Wild: Thoughts ����ֱ�� Public Lands in the 1st Century

Bill Hedden, Executive Director, Grand Canyon Trust

Bill Hedden provided a report from the field, a description from an activist and stakeholder of what it’s like to live surrounded by deep, wild public lands.  The lecture included a personal description of what the public lands can mean to an individual life.  Followed by a broader scope and look ahead related to public lands issues, asking how our societal relationships with these lands must evolve in the 21^st century.  Hedden believes it is necessary to speak in new ways about these matters at a time when the very concept of public lands is once again under assault from the Congress and from state legislatures, attacked through well-funded disinformation campaigns, and, if all the rest isn’t clear enough, the land itself occupied by armed militias—our inheritance under threat from people who have not felt lucky to earn a living off of lands and resources belonging to all of us, but who feel resentful and determined to take the lands for themselves.  Hedden notes the American people are in danger of losing something of inestimable value without really knowing what it is and, more importantly, without having a vision of what role this globally unique endowment might play in helping us find a way to live in harmony with our ever more stressed planet.

[video:https://youtu.be/aRZgvbrZpME]

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Are ����ֱ�� Public Lands Becoming a Sacrifice Zone for Oil and Gas?

Bruce Babbitt is a lifelong environmentalist and outdoorsman. Babbitt served as Arizona Governor from 1976-1987, successfully securing several wilderness designations. As Secretary of the Interior during the Clinton Administration, Babbitt launched a new era in wildlife protection by reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park. Later, he reintroduced the California Condor to the Grand Canyon region. Babbitt also spearheaded Clinton’s ambitious program to protect expansive areas of federal lands as national monuments under the Antiquities Act. Clinton created 20 new monuments and expanded three existing monuments totaling nearly 8 million acres. The creation of these monuments protected some of the most contested and magnificent western landscapes, and this era stands as one of the highest points in conservation history.

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