The Human Right to a Healthy World starting this Wednesday, January 9, 2019.
The course is a collaboration between renowned Canadian environmental author and educator Silver Donald Cameron and me. The course will use Dr. Cameron’s unique collection of in-depth video interviews with leading environmental lawyers and defenders around the world—available via The Green Interview website—as a springboard to explore the legal, moral and social issues surrounding the global environmental rights movement. Available live online and for archived viewing at your leisure, the course is offered through Cape Breton University in a free “curiosity” version. If you want an official record of your participation, a non-credit “certificate of participation” version is available for $75 Canadian.
The course meets every Wednesday at 12:30-2:00 pm Eastern time for twelve weeks, starting January 9. It is taught by Dr. Cameron at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada, with frequent guest appearances by me from the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The course will also feature live video appearances by several of the environmental lawyers who have been interviewed for The Green Interview, including (if all goes to plan) Professor David Boyd (the current UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment), Marjan Minnesma (Director of the Urgenda Foundation), Tony Oposa (who needs no introduction to this list), and Professor John Borrows (a leading indigenous legal thinker).
The course integrates law and journalism in a highly innovative way, using the personal stories of remarkable environmental lawyers to bring issues of human rights, rights of Nature, public interest lawyering and environmental activism to life in a highly relatable way. Issues and stories to be covered include the history and theory of green rights; holding governments to account (including the Mendoza case in Argentina and the Urgenda case in the Netherlands); holding industry to account (the Chevron/Ecuador saga), the lives and deaths of environmental defenders; parties, standing and novel legal theories (including atmospheric trust litigation and rights of future generations); wild law and the rights of Nature; the law of Ecocide; and indigenous laws of nature.
The online course is accompanied by for-credit course offerings in the JD program at the Allard School of Law and a senior undergraduate political science course at Cape Breton University.
