Events at Reed

Donnell (Trip) Van Noppen is president of Earthjustice, the nation’s premier public interest environmental law firm. He holds degrees from Yale and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1998, he joined the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and became director of that organization’s Carolinas office. Both in private practice and at SELC, Trip has handled a variety of cases involving the environment and access to the courts. In this lecture, Van Noppen will describe the unique American system of citizen environmental enforcement through the use of public interest litigation and will address the pressing threats to citizens’ ability to use the courts. He will focus on both historic and current examples that shape life in the Pacific Northwest, including old growth forest protection, salmon restoration in the Columbia and Snake River system, plans to export coal and crude oil, and climate change. Sponsored by Environmental Studies.