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COLUMNS
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University of Florida Update |
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Alyson C. Flournoy |
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We usually report largely on events and activities in Gainesville in this
column, but this summer UF faculty and students took to the field and so we are
including a “Notes from the Field” section as well.
Upcoming Conferences and Speakers
13th Annual Public Interest Environmental Conference
2007 PIEC student Co-chairs Ryan Baya and Adrienne Dessy traveled to the
Section’s Annual Update and met with the Public Interest Committee to begin
planning the 13th Annual Public Interest Environmental Conference (PIEC). Mark
your calendars to be in Gainesville on March 1-3, 2007 on the newly renovated
Levin College of Law campus. This year’s conference is tentatively titled “Talk,
Technology, & Techniques: Strategies for Sustainability.” The conference will
feature a three-track panel: Green Building and Design, Green Infrastructure,
and Green Institutions, with each track highlighting strategies, techniques, and
communication methods designed to further and encourage environmentally friendly
practices. Possible panel topics include Affordable Housing and Green
Architecture, Green Covenants and Restrictions, Greenways, and Everglades
Adaptability. Conference organizers are beginning to contact a list of potential
speakers who promise to make for a stimulating and informative conference. Visit
the PIEC website for
updates, or email eluls@law.ufl.edu
to be added to the conference email list.
Richard E. Nelson Symposium on Local Government Law
This annual event will be held on February 2, 2007 in Gainesville. Stay tuned
for details on topic and speakers.
Environmental Speaker Series
The theme for the Spring 2007 Environmental Speaker Series is “Techniques for
Conservation.” Those speakers confirmed for the series so far are:
J.B. Ruhl, Professor of Law at Florida State University (Feb. 15)
Amy Sinden, Associate Professor of Law, Temple University Law School
(Feb. 22)
Marc Mihaly, Acting Associate Dean for the Environmental Program, Acting
Director of the Environmental Law Center, and Associate Professor of Law Vermont
Law School (Mar. 29)
Alyson Flournoy, UF Research Foundation Professor UF Levin College of Law
and Director, Environmental and Land Use Law Program (Date TBA)
We’re grateful to Hopping Green and Sams, P.A. and Lewis Longman & Walker, P.A.
for their support of this series. We’ll provide more details on the times,
location, and topics as the dates draw near.
Student Honors
Third year student and 2006 PIEC Co-chair Heather Halter is one of approximately
40 students nationwide who was selected to receive a Sea Grant Dean John A.
Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship. Heather will have a chance to apply her
expertise as a coral reef biologist and her knowledge of marine law and policy
in a placement in Washington, D.C., with an executive or legislative office. Her
year-long placement will begin in January.
Cathleen Kennedy, of the University of Miami, won third place in the Section’s
Dean Frank Maloney Essay Competition for her paper entitled “A Survey of the
Bush Administration’s National Energy Policy and Its Potential Environmental
Justice Implications,” which was written in Professor Joan Flocks’ Environmental
Justice Seminar while she was a visiting student last year.
Faculty Retirement and Search
Professor James Nicholas retired this summer after many years as an affiliate
law school faculty member. Jim provided a wonderful bridge between the Urban and
Regional Planning program and the College of Law. A joint search by URP and the
law school is under way to fill a shared position in law and planning. Professor
Mark Fenster is representing the law school on the search committee. We hope and
anticipate that Professor Nicholas will still be teaching in the land use
curriculum occasionally.
Notes from the Field
South by Southeast and East by Southeast
Richard Hamann and three law students began the summer immersed in the Florida
Everglades as part of an interdisciplinary class of graduate students and UF
faculty. Over the course of two weeks, the group traveled from the Kissimmee
River to the Florida Keys, meeting with local experts and reviewing restoration
projects from a variety of perspectives- hiking, biking, flying, swimming,
boating and driving. One theme of the course was learning how adaptive
management is being employed in the management of the Everglades.
Hamann and other UF faculty and eight of the graduate students then traveled to
the Okavango Delta in Botswana for the remainder of the summer to learn about
how wetlands, wildlife and related resources are managed in Africa and to
explore the potential for the use of adaptive management in that environment.
South by Southwest
Second-year University of Florida law student Angelica Saavedra may have had one
of the more interesting summers on record with the College’s environmental and
land use law program. Saavedra, who is a joint degree student in anthropology,
began her summer by traveling to Peru to study indigenous knowledge of medicinal
plants in the western Amazon, culminating with her participation in the UF Law
Center for Governmental Responsibility’s Law and Policy in the Americas
Conference in Lima. Also attending the conference was UF legal skills professor
Tom Ankersen, who presented a recently published article on property law in
Latin America.
From Peru, Saveedra traveled directly to San Jose, Costa Rica where she
participated in UF’s environmental law study abroad program where Ankersen was
joined on the faculty by Professors Mary Jane Angelo, Christine Klein and Joan
Flocks. Angelo and Klein taught segments of a course on Environmental Dispute
Resolution, and Flocks taught a course on International Environmental Justice.
In addition to participating in the program, Saveedra interned at the
Inter-American Court for Human Rights. She completed her summer as the only law
student in a two week tropical forest policy field course for UF PhD students in
the Maya Forest of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize where Ankersen also served as an
instructor. In that course, students from diverse fields worked in small groups
exploring the internal and external policy forces affecting the management of
large blocks of tropical forest by local communities. The groups traveled to
remote villages, explored Mayan ruins and ended the session with presentations
to governmental and non-governmental organizations with management
responsibility over the forest. All told, Saavedra traveled to 6 Latin American
countries, and encountered Ankersen in four of them. Rumor has it that the UF
environmental and land use law program may be working with the section to
organize a CLE workshop or seminar in Costa Rica in 2007.
