Law professor Mary Wood breaks down how people can protect their right to clean air, water, and land as well as fortify their climate change resiliency.

By Aric Sleeper

With the reality of climate change becoming more apparent in the form of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, and floods, it is clear that the future of all life on the planet is in peril. To stress the immediacy and seriousness of human-caused climate change and its effects, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the leaders and representatives of nearly 200 countries at COP27 in November 2022.

“Our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” said Guterres at the conference. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

As the climate rapidly changes largely due to the environmentally damaging practices of large corporations, unchecked by government officials that receive campaign contributions from the polluting industries, it may seem like there isn’t much that can be done to combat this problematic pattern.

However, there are underutilized legal weapons already on the books that can help fight big corporations and preserve the planet’s natural resources, such as watersheds and large forests, like those in Oregon—which can either serve as a sponge for carbon dioxide or an emitter when the forest cover is cut down. That legal weapon, a component of property law, is a concept known as the public trust.

“The public trust lies in the realm of fundamental rights law,” says University of Oregon Philip H. Knight Professor Mary Christina Wood. “Its roots actually go back to Roman law and the institutes of Justinian, which does seem like a long time ago, but every court case today that deals with the public trust mentions those Roman roots, literally.”

The institutes of Justinian or Justinian the Great, a Roman emperor ruling in the sixth century, declared that certain natural resources are always considered under public ownership, and those resources are air, water, and coastlines, according to Wood.

“The public trust has its origins in public property rights,” says Wood. “The Roman law became the basis of civil and common law systems around the world.”

The Roman concept that the public has ownership of natural resources subsequently became embedded in English law. After the Magna Carta was established in 1215, the king of England could not assert full dominion over fisheries, forests, or water, according to Wood.

In the law of the United States, the public trust principle is also present but is expressed in a slightly different way than the English monarchy.

“In this country [the U.S.], it was announced as the most simple and logical principle,” says Wood. “The government is a sovereign with the people giving it power, and the government does not have the power to fully privatize resources that are crucial. Those stay in trust for the people—and the government works as a trustee or fiduciary steward of those resources, and the beneficiaries are present and future generations of citizens.”

Wood points out that the public trust has always been a part of United States law, but isn’t always utilized in the context of protecting natural resources, with statutory laws such as the Clean Air Act of 1963 and others being more commonly used in court cases.

“I’m just sort of taking it off the shelf,” says Wood.

When Wood was a student at Stanford Law School, one of her professors was Joseph Sax, who was a pioneer of public trust scholarship. Wood was inspired by Sax’s work and took the concept of the law further by devising a litigation strategy based on the public trust, which continues to evolve.

She has also written a book called Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, which critiques statutory environmental law, in the sense that the laws don’t go far enough to protect natural resources. She also discusses established public trust principles in her book and identifies the responsibilities the government has to protect natural resources in the context of the public trust.

To put the concept in different terms, Wood explains the public trust through a financial example.

“Say you have a college-age daughter and you have $500,000 to pay for her college, but you don’t want to deal with the money management because you’re too busy,” says Wood. “So you appoint me as a trustee for the college account. As the trustee, I am the legal owner of that account. I manage it, safely invest it and pay [your daughter] the dividends, and she is the beneficial owner. If I screw up in some way or buy a condo with the money, which is what our political representatives are kind of doing by using our resources as a payback for political contributions, I have violated a fiduciary obligation to your daughter.”

In all, there are about 10 fiduciary obligations or legal responsibilities that the government has to its citizens with regard to vital natural resources that are a part of the public trust, which are outlined in Wood’s book and recent talk.

“The most basic fiduciary obligation is the duty of protection,” says Wood. “You protect the wealth of the trust.”

Wood notes that clear-cutting of forests is a violation of the public trust, as it releases large amounts of carbon. Although she points out that it is debatable whether a forest is considered part of the public trust, there is no debate about water and air’s inclusion. When a forest is clear-cut, it affects the watershed and releases carbon into the atmosphere, which violates another fiduciary obligation.

“That violates the duty to maximize benefit to the public,” says Wood. “The public has many interests in that ecology. It serves as a watershed and a habitat, and typically speaking, the agencies are taking actions for the primary benefit of a private party and not for the public.”

Because of the Citizens United court case, Wood can’t legally do anything about timber companies that give contributions to political campaigns, but with the public trust law she found a loophole with the fiduciary duty of loyalty.

“The government has many functions, and one of those is dealing with natural wealth,” says Wood. “The agencies in those dealings are public trustees, and courts say this across the board.”

In this context, when a legislator accepts a campaign contribution and makes a decision about the wealth of the public trust—say, a watershed—that benefits the contributor, then that is a violation of the public trust. This allows lawyers like Wood to challenge and legally invalidate the actions of legislators who try to give favors to their financial backers, but only in the sphere of natural resources protected in the public trust.

“It’s a full frame change of the law,” says Wood.

One group fighting to protect natural resources in the public trust in Oregon is called North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection (NCCWP), a grassroots organization of Oregon residents. The group is concerned with the protection of drinking water that comes from forested watersheds, and air quality, which are both negatively impacted by common timber industry practices like clear-cutting, slash burning, and pesticide spraying in forests that surround communities in Oregon. The group’s awareness-raising petition, launched in summer 2022, calls for the cessation of logging operations and pesticide use in drinking watersheds across the northern Oregon coast. Because the petition is not a legal petition but instead aims at increasing public awareness, anyone from anywhere can sign it. The group plans to present the petition to city, county, and state-level lawmakers in Oregon, as well as a number of relevant stakeholders, in an effort to increase consciousness about the ways communities are impacted by industrial timber practices.

Wood points out that the work of groups like NCCWP is vital to combating environmental degradation and fighting climate change, but changing the status quo will take even more audacious actions.

“We are going over Niagara Falls, all of us,” says Wood. “We really need some bold thinking, and I think that the public trust is that because it reorients government back to the basic principles of substantial impairment. So I try to create legislative approaches that hit hard and hit big. 

A militant labor strike by workers at 10 UC campuses comes after the state university system failed to offer compensation commensurate to the cost of living in California.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Nearly 50,000 academic workers at the University of California launched a historic strike on November 14 after contract negotiations with their employer failed. Postdoctoral scholars, researchers, trainees, fellows, graduate student instructors, readers, and tutors, who are from 10 UC campuses across the state and are unionized with United Auto Workers, walked out of their jobs.
Such workers are not traditionally associated with militant labor actions as intellectual work has historically been well-compensated in the United States. But, as universities have increasingly adopted corporate models of operation, the same sort of delineation in pay seen in other industries has taken hold in academia, with administrative executives earning top dollar while rank-and-file workers have seen their wages shrink relative to inflation. At the top of workers’ list of demands is better pay, one that is tied to the cost of living, and especially the cost of housing.
“What the UC is proposing in terms of… small percent increases in annual salary, essentially that results in a net loss” to workers, says Joyce Chan, a postdoctoral scholar in neurosciences at UC San Diego. Chan, who serves on the bargaining team for UAW 5810, is referring to the fact that California is one of the most expensive states to live in. She says, “our proposals are not only realistic, but we feel they are necessary.”
The university’s bargaining position can be boiled down to an expectation that its core academic workers simply have to accept a life of hardship. UC Provost Michael Brown, in a letter responding to the union’s demand, wrote, “Tying compensation directly to housing costs… could have overwhelming financial impacts on the University.”
But Chan counters that “30 to 80 percent of our income goes toward making rent alone.” Indeed, Brown did not dispute the fact that rent consumes too much of a graduate student’s paycheck. He only countered that it would be too hard for the university to do anything about it. In other words, if workers cannot afford to live, that’s their problem.
According to FairUCNow.org, a website set up by the UAW unions involved in the UC contract negotiations, academic workers “do the majority of teaching and research at UC, yet UC is refusing to offer us a fair share of the record-setting grant and state funding that our labor brings in.”
Chan points out that “our working conditions are our student’s learning conditions”—a logic familiar to one adopted by unionized school teachers in K-12 public schools. “If the UC meets our demands for fair compensation, we would be far more able to focus on the teaching, on the research, on everything that makes the University of California great,” she adds.
Brittany Drake, a PhD candidate at UCLA, tweeted in support of the strike, saying, “I do not doubt that many brilliant students research, careers, and health are being compromised due to the added financial stress, and hope that they will receive the support they deserve rather than admonishment.” She points out how, during her first two years in graduate school, she slept on friends’ couches, in her office, and even in her car. University administrators “admonished” her for spending nights in her office, but, she said, “No one asked if I was okay or needed help.”
Union members say the university can indeed afford to pay its academic workers more. “As California’s biggest [public] employer, the UC has a $46 billion annual budget,” says Chan, adding that “the [UAW] proposals for graduate workers would end up being less than 3 percent of the UC budget.” That academic workers cannot afford rent on their salaries is tantamount to them paying UC to work, instead of the other way around. In other words, it’s stolen labor.
“We have the right to demand better pay and better working conditions, and also to be able to demand things and to be heard,” says Chan. “We’re united and we’re ready to hold them accountable.”
In addition to sending a message to the university that workers demand better than what is being offered, the strike is also alerting the entire university community to the long-standing plight of graduate students and postdoctoral workers. The sight of thousands of UAW members rallying and picketing at UC campuses has inspired solidarity from faculty members who rely on the labor of their researchers and teaching assistants. James Vernon, chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, addressed a UAW picket on UC Berkeley’s campus, saying, “The system is broken and you’re going to help fix it and we are here as faculty to support you in that effort.”
UC’s academic researchers and workers are responsible for ushering critical intellectual work—not only to California, but also to the U.S. and world. “Our students in the sciences, they go on to become doctors, they go on to become engineers, that contribute to infrastructure, and also medicine,” says Chan. “I think it can’t be understated how important the university’s research is in social mobility, in improving people’s futures, and also in the arts as well, in creating work that moves people.”
The UC strike is also part of a broader trend of labor actions nationwide. In the same week that the strike began, Starbucks workers in more than 100 stores that have voted to join a union held a one-day strike to protest their employer’s refusal to bargain in good faith. UPS drivers, who are gearing up for a potentially major strike of their own next year, have been informed by their union, the Teamsters, that they can show solidarity with UC striking workers by refusing to cross the picket to deliver packages.
“For a lot of the academic workers at the UC, we see this pattern of indignity and unfair wages, unfair contracts, as a sort of universal theme, not only in the States but also worldwide,” says Chan. She cites that UC workers have been inspired by the actions of Starbucks workers in the U.S., as well as other companies and workers throughout the world.
“Not every teaching moment happens in a classroom,” says Chan. “Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.