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
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 outlined a few of the great hopes for natural resources management under the Biden Administration and this next cycle of "reform." It examined 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
Marcilynn A. Burke
Dean Marcilynn A. Burke studies leadership, property, environmental and natural resources law. At Oregon Law, she serves as the Dean and Dave Frohnmayer Chair in Leadership and Law. Her scholarly works have included features in the Notre Dame Law Review, the Land Use and Environmental Law Review, the University of Cincinnati Law Review, and the Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum.
From 2009-2013, Dean Burke served in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Initially she served as Deputy Director for Programs and Policy in the BLM, and then as the Acting Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of the Interior over the BLM following a 2011 appointment by President Barack Obama. In that role, she helped develop the land use, resource management, and regulatory oversight policies that are administered by the BLM, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, with a geographic scope that encompassed the continental U.S. and Alaska. Following her term at the BLM, she resumed her role as associate dean and associate professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, where she had served as a member of the faculty since 2002.
Dean Burke earned her bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, having been named to Phi Beta Kappa. She then earned her law degree from Yale Law School, where she was an editor for both the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism and the Yale Journal of International Law. She clerked for the Honorable Raymond A. Jackson of the Eastern District of Virginia, and later joined the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton where her practice focused on environmental law, antitrust, and civil and criminal litigation. Dean Burke had also served as a visiting professor of law at Rutgers School of Law in Camden, NJ in 2001.