This Article examines the nature of the threats that climate change poses and will continue to pose for salmon recovery, as well as possible legal responses to combat these threats. It also considers the future prospects of Pacific salmon in a world that will include significant climate change and other threats to preserving and equitably apportioning the salmon resource, whose environmental sensitivity and expansive life cycle will continue to pose substantial challenges for the foreseeable future.

Underregulation is a common and persistent environmental law problem, with recent scholarly focus on individual contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), whose harm is not fully known. But little attention has been given to the general trend of underregulation with respect to these chemicals, or explaining why this systematic underregulation occurs. This Article posits that federal agencies have been unacceptably slow to initiate protective regulations, and even once regulations are promulgated, they leave regulatory gaps that continue to expose populations to harmful effects.

The field of environmental law has seen many changes over the years, with demonstrable legal and policy victories for cleaner air and water. While the face of the environmental movement in its beginnings was predominantly male, women have become more prominent and influential within environmental law and policy over the decades.