JASON J. CZARNEZKI

After two weeks of researching food eco-labeling at Uppsala University, we spent the weekend in Tallinn, Estonia. We took a ferry across the very icy Baltic Sea, and then enjoyed the fabulous Medieval Old Town in Tallinn (photo below). It was a fantastic trip; one of the most intact and largest medieval towns in Europe. This week we’re off to southern Sweden and Linnaeus University.

To give you the sense of eco-labels that I’ve been focusing on in Sweden, see the middle column of the photo below. “Miljö” means “environment.”

Check out this short article by my colleagues Adam Moser and Jingjing Liu.

The U.S. – China Partnership for Environmental Law ("China Program") at Vermont Law School invites applications for a two-year graduate fellowship starting in August 2011. The fellowship combines the opportunity to obtain an LLM in Environmental Law from one of the leading environmental law programs in the nation with the opportunity to gain practical international environmental law experience on a variety of policy coordination, research, and educational outreach projects. The fellowship includes a full tuition waiver and a stipend of $35,000 per year.

More info here.

Environmental law and policy is changing/has changed. No longer are the concerns simply stationary sources and localized pollution. Instead, the concerns are diffuse sources (e.g., individuals, homes, cars) and transboundary pollution problems (e.g., climate change). Thus I, and others, have become more focused on the “democratization” of pollution. (See my book, the work of Mike Vandenbergh, and my colleague Tim Duane’s article, Environmental Planning and Policy in a Post-Rio World, 7 Berkeley Planning J. 27 (1992)). But I’m now even more convinced that a second phase must occur where American environmental law professors/policy-makers must look more outward and do more comparative, international and/or global work. Today, I met with faculty of law at the University of Stockholm and recalled my conversations with the faculty at Uppsala University; so much of their work is “international.” Certainly much of this is due to the existence of the European Union, but their eye towards solving global environmental problems is focused on global cooperation rather than domestic law. America could use a similar shift (waiting for the Global Environmental Law casebook by Yang and Percival to be finished). That said, I pause… given the economic and carbon footprint of the U.S. and China it would be very hard to not consider the purely domestic actions of the Americans and Chinese.

In addition to enjoying tea with colleagues and the constant appearance of fresh fruit baskets, today I met with the Swedish National Food Administration and KRAV (Sweden’s largest organic certifier) to discuss the incorporation of environmental considerations in dietary guidelines and developing eco-labeling standards that go well beyond the organic standards to also include such considerations as climate impact, animal welfare, public health, and human rights. KRAV posted about my visit on their Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/KRAV/146338414613.