2025 ELQ Symposium: Toxic Exposures, Within and Without

The annual Ecology Law Quarterly Symposium, “Toxic Exposures: Within and Without,” will explore toxic exposures through the lens of environmental justice, looking at both outdoor and indoor exposures. 

By participating, members of our community will be encouraged to ask the question: what are the boundaries of our lived environments and ecosystems? For a long time, our understanding of “the environment” was restricted to the forests, mountains, and rivers. Today, we understand the interrelatedness of humans and the natural world, insofar as humans facilitate the climate crisis. This Symposium proposes an intermediate level of interconnectedness, to be understood on a “micro” scale: our homes, workplaces, agricultural centers, and built communities collectively constitute our “ecosystem,” and we live within them as we do the Great Outdoors. Vice versa, our environment lives within us. We will employ interdisciplinary frameworks to contemplate ourselves as victims of systemic injustices, corporate greed, and limited environmental protections in the same way we conceive of flora, fauna, and the planet itself as casualties of late-stage industrial capitalism.

See program and register here.