I passed a threshold this summer as I left the river’s side and entered again into the cornfields. I had been living in Romania for a year and was going on a family walk with my wife and mother- and father-in-law through the agrarian outskirts of my rural second home in the village of Putna. A few minutes before, I had taken off my sandals to wet my feet in the river. There was a small gathering of men down the ways; a barrel lay upturned some 50 feet upstream. My father-in-law yelled at me in Romanian, cautioning me to keep out as I watched a snake race frenetically over shallow milky water littered, I saw, with scores of minute grey fish floating bellied over downstream. Sure enough, the men, who had constructed a make-shift damn of stones, were dosing the water with chlorine. I was outraged and, as a foreigner, unable to march over and speak my mind. My father-in-law did though, and returned rather muted, embarrassed. Of course, they do this every year and it is just them and perhaps one or two other groups, they’d told him, and I saw in my mind the rivers across the country from a bird’s eye view with their intermittent milky streaks.
I have, my whole life, felt occasional waves of a keening sadness at loss that was not mine. I remember, at around ten years old, mournfully clasping the pages of a book where hung museum specimens of dumb island animals beaten down by sailors and gone forever. When I watched my step-father die before my eyes, it was the loss of others that I was most aware of as I picked up the phone and began calling our world. Just recently I was deeply disturbed while writing an essay about the life of a language just now dead in Australia for a graduate course at UPenn.
As I have matured and studied (both in undergrad and, perhaps more importantly, in the years since), there has also grown a central intellectual interest that hovers over the atavistic passion for nature and cultures that resides in me. This would be my interest in the complexity of our simultaneously messy and ordered world and how it changes at different levels. The moment sketched above precipitated a eureka moment, it led to questions important to me, directions where all of these interests came together.
How do you turn policy into practice? How do you get a local decision maker to see themselves as part of a bigger picture? How do translate policy into local, enforceable law? There is a striking necessity for meaningful mediation between, for example, the local environment and stakeholders of a state and the government mechanisms that they helps constitute, or that country and the international organizations that pass sweeping protocols across the globe. In the environmental policy internship I am currently engaged in, I see the same problems here in The States.
I am sure that law is the most powerful tool that I might command to bring these different perspectives together, for without law, so much of the world risks departing forever, and so many perspectives lost in the din of voices. While there was a point when I thought I did, I do not wish to write about that which is vanishing with every word for the eyes of an academic journal, I wish to act.
I do not see law as something simply maintaining the moral, ethical, or fiscal structure of the world, for I see the economic, the ethical, the environmental structure of the world as a shifting thing, and law as a proactive, guiding force. In law school, I will equip myself with a knowledge of land use and environmental law and policy and ready myself to protect both the environment and the communities that live within it and bring them together with state and federal laws and regulations. In this way, the twin red threads that have come to be so significant to me can twine together and I can make positive change, with law and policy as the two vehicles through which I will do this. It is a passion that will not flag and that I have been building towards my whole life.
