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56 Env't L. [i] (2026)

handle is hein.journals/envlnw56 and id is 1 raw text is: ENVIRONMENTAL LAW Lewis & Clark Law School VOLUME 56 WINTER 2026 NUMBER 1 DISTINGUISHED VISTOR ESSAY The Whale Who Danced the Blues: Some Thoughts on Saving the World's Ocean..............................................................1 Rob Verchick This Lecture uses the story of Tahlequah, a Southern Resident orca who carried her dead calf for seventeen days across the Salish Sea, as a narrative entry point into a broader inquiry about the vulnerability and resilience of the world's marine habitats. The world's oceans and coastal waters-on which we depend for food, oxygen, and climate control-are in desperate shape because of poorly managed human activity, namely pollution, overfishing, and unwise development and extraction. As if that is not enough, climate breakdown has now turbocharged the ocean's unravelling. Existing ocean governance regimes have failed us. They are too fragmented, fixed, and detached from both ecological reality and coastal communities to meet today's challenge. This Lecture proposes an alternative approach, one that is deep, dynamic, and engaged. This approach emphasizes ecosystem-scale management, adaptive legal tools capable of responding to rapid ecological change, and meaningful participation by local and Indigenous communities. Using examples of marine protected areas, mobile conservation zones, dam removal in the Pacific Northwest, and emerging rights of nature movements, this Lecture shows how law can be reimagined to support ocean resilience and climate justice. Ultimately, it argues that effective ocean protection is not only a scientific or legal necessity, but a moral project-one that transforms grief and empathy into collective action to sustain the ocean systems on which human and nonhuman life depend. ARTICLE Of Fires and Floods: Why Courts Should Adopt a Flood-Based Analysis to Evaluate Fire-Based Fifth Amendment Claims ... ......................................................................................19 William J. Shapiro In the last several years, litigants have filed numerous Fifth Amendment takings claims arising out of the federal government's