Earthrise students, fellows, and faculty celebrated a successful 2024–25 school year in early April at a local pizza place. The lunch capped off another eventful year at the clinic.
Seventeen 3L students worked with Earthrise over the school year, most for both semesters. They worked on projects that included water quality enforcement, dam relicensing, Freedom of Information Act litigation, stopping timber sales in inappropriate places, and protecting endangered species. As usual, weekly class meetings allowed all clinic students to learn about and help shape the arguments in Earthrise’s various cases, as well as explore other important topics ranging from obtaining attorney’s fees to using storytelling techniques to give court submissions extra impact (a joint class with other Lewis & Clark clinics). Students also particularly enjoyed the annual employment panel class, in which four Earthrise alums described their career paths thus far and outlined valuable job-finding strategies based on their experiences.
Some of the year’s substantive outcomes include habitat improvements for endangered shortnose sturgeon in the Connecticut River as a result of comments submitted by Earthrise in a state water quality proceeding; reducing by half the cutting of trees in the Sierra National Forest’s Nelder Sequoia Grove, where sequoias are regenerating in many places but the forest is still recovering following a 2017 fire; and initiating another lawsuit to compel meaningful protections for cold water areas critical for salmon survival in Oregon rivers and streams—litigation that builds on successful efforts by Earthrise that have forced both the state and the Environmental Protection Agency to recognize that many of Oregon’s waters are too warm to recover healthy salmon runs.
Earthrise also took on new projects that will provide next year’s students with important—and educational—work to improve the environment. Earthrise will be advising advocates for sea otter restoration along the Oregon coast, as well as exploring how to protect public access to rivers in the Midwest.
The spring semester was marked by the return of Dan Rohlf as Earthrise Director. Along with Professor Craig Johnston, Dan co-founded Earthrise in 1996. His return to day-to-day work with the clinic comes as Earthrise prepares to celebrate its 30th anniversary next year, marking three decades of helping protect the environment across the country while providing generations of law students with hands-on experience in practicing environmental law.
