NRLC Summer Conference: "Shifting Baselines and New Meridians--Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West"
The Natural Resources Law Center held its annual summer conference at the Law School June 4-6. This year’s theme for the conference was “Shifting Baselines and New Meridians – Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West.” The conference examined the effects on the West due to population growth and Climate change and how these factors are beginning to affect the legal and political institutions.
Director of the NRLC and professor, Mark Squillace, said that “the legal and political institutions that evolved to manage these natural resources have, for the most part, served us well, but it is far from clear that these institutions are capable of adapting as quickly and as extensively as may be necessary to serve us in the future.”
Several of the panels included “Water for the 21st Century,” “The Urbanizing West – Limits to Water, Limits to Growth,” and “The Politics of Change and Natural Resources.”
Noteworthy was a lively exchange between Lynn Scarlett who is the current Bush Administration Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior and David Hayes who is the former Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior under the Clinton Administration, on the issue of natural resources as it should be addressed in the upcoming elections and by the next administration.