Technology has raised standards of living for people around the world, but technological developments also have unintended and negative impacts on people, places, and the environment. Science, as humanity’s best way of understanding and sharing knowledge of the world, is an essential driver of both technology’s advances and management of its impacts. Yet some long-standing threats, such as climate change, continue to persist and grow despite well-established evidence of harm; emerging advances in fields such as genetic engineering offer grave risks along with great benefits. Meanwhile, public trust in and funding of science are down, and dis- and misinformation are dramatically up, making it harder to agree on the science needed to manage technology’s impacts. On October 23, 2025, ELI convened an expert panel to discuss these issues. Here we present a transcript of the discussion, which has been edited for style, clarity, and space considerations.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “forever chemicals,” present a nearly unprecedented challenge to global health and the environment. That challenge, in turn, raises recurring legal and scientific issues for court systems globally. This Comment examines the issue of whether manufacturers shared adequate information regarding the hazards of PFAS with their purchasers (and regulators), and delivers insights gained from decades of PFAS litigation in the United States and abroad.

In 2025, China made further progress in environmental protection and in developing legislation and rulemaking. This includes adopting the National Park Law, revising the Environmental Protection Tax Law, and promulgating a series of administrative regulations. This Comment summarizes these developments.

In 2025, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) entered the most consequential period of retrenchment in its 55-year history. In a single year, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Donald Trump Administration, and bipartisan lawmakers took coordinated steps to dramatically curtail NEPA, codifying a unique political convergence around the premise that environmental review bottlenecks progress. This Comment does not question the importance of addressing energy and infrastructure shortages. It instead argues that weakening NEPA as a mechanism to achieve those goals redistributes, rather than reduces, the costs of development. As a purely procedural statute, NEPA was designed to surface risks and force careful consideration of environmental and community impacts. It was born from an era defined by miles of oil-slicked beaches, rivers contaminated with radioactive waste, small towns devastated by disaster, and human lives lost. This history shows that the price of speed cannot be framed in economic terms alone.

In 2004, visionary environmental leader Gus Speth’s book Red Sky at Morning warned that “[a] global crisis has unfolded quickly . . . but so far we seem unable to step from the path to disaster.” More than 20 years later, we have made great gains, but the fundamental transition Speth envisioned did not come to pass, and global environmental deterioration continues to intensify at an alarming pace. Approaching Speth’s “red sky world” with “blue sky thinking,” members of the 2025 Environmental Law Collaborative explored new strategies for a more sustainable future. This latest in a biannual series of essays covers a wide range of topics, including the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, monopoly control, the power of local government, reviving international law, encouraging belonging, technology, and more.

As the federal government abandons climate action and environmental protection, advocates and scholars pin their hopes on state constitutional amendments to fill the void. The underlying idea is that state constitutions will change hearts and minds, leading to fast and meaningful action. Detractors argue that these constitutional rights are meaningless. This Article provides original data on the role of state constitutional environmental rights in the day-to-day work of civil servants. It argues that environmental rights amendments are only one small part of complex systems that influence beliefs and actions on the ground, and do not have a direct impact on natural resources managers. It also highlights mechanisms to strengthen constitutional environmental rights: other rights, specifically the public trust doctrine, do have significant influence; advocates may bolster the meaning of environmental rights through trainings, linking them to native cultural rights, and through litigation; and state natural resources agencies need to be adequately funded and staffed.