Diversity is variety. Biodiversity is the variety of life.

Maintaining variety across all aspects of life is integral to ensuring healthy, robust, and resilient conditions for growth and continuity. Farming and agriculture, neighborhoods and communities, our diets, political candidates, classrooms and learning environments, forest flora and fauna: all these aspects of life rely on diversity for sustenance.

There is an outcry on global, national, and local levels to address our quickly depleting biodiversity.

For this blog post, East Coast Environmental Law’s Communications Coordinator, Taylor Milne, interviews Payton Tench and Mike Kofahl, our organization’s two previous Articled Clerks, on their experience in the field of environmental law.

Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have held unique cultural, social, and economic identities that are embedded in the ecological and natural resources that are found throughout their lands. Historically, Indigenous peoples’ daily life cycles relied on the natural environment and the exploitation of its natural resources, which was undertaken in accordance with Indigenous cultural understandings. Indigenous hunting, fishing, and resource exploitation were all done in accordance with cultural values, which were commonly established with the goal of protection, sustainability of resources, and the importance of the ecological integrity of the environment.1

If not us, then who? If not now, then when? I wonder if those are questions that the youth of this small blue planet asked themselves when they made the courageous decision to enter the very adult world of litigation in a last-ditch effort to save their future. Youth speak eloquently and passionately at local, national and international venues, they leave their schools to march collectively for climate action, they draw on their social media savvy to try to make the point, and yet they are not heard. So, the youth who will live to deal with the consequences of our indecision and lack of action are going to court.

Many jurisdictions are trying to enact new laws to protect their coastlines from various pressures, such as offshore oil drilling and climate change. Recent examples include the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act and the Atlantic Coastal Economies Protection Act in the United States. Both of these statutes are limited to protecting marine habitats along the American coast by prohibiting specific activities associated with offshore oil and gas drilling. They are not examples of comprehensive coastal protection legislation that would indicate the range of activities permitted in a demarcated zone along a coastline. The provincial government of Nova Scotia has recently set out to create such a regime through a proposed Coastal Protection Act (CPA).

What’s in my drinking water? What’s in the air that I breathe? What’s in the food I’m eating?