 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Environment, Sustainability, and Society lecture series, hosted by the College of Sustainability. My name's Steve Monell. I teach the introductory sustainability course, What is Sustainability? Many of you in the audience will know that. But I see a lot of familiar faces, and then unfamiliar faces, and then familiar faces that aren't so familiar because they're not in my class. Does that make any sense? There you go. It's great to have a diverse audience like this here tonight for this event. As I say, my name's Steve Monell. I was founding director of the College of Sustainability and served in that role between 2008 and 2020. And there's a dimension of that story that relates to the person we're honoring tonight, which I'll come to later. I am happy to welcome you tonight. Before we begin, I would want to acknowledge that we gather here in Magmagi, the unceded ancestral territory of the Magma people, to remind us that we're all treaty people, and also to remind us that as we gather in Dalhousie, we gather in an institution whose founding is grounded in profits from the enslaved African bodies of the Atlantic slave trade, and that these challenging legacies are part of the challenges we need to face in building a sustainable future. So working in that context, it's a real pleasure to have an event like tonight in collaboration with the Shulik School of Law and the Marine and Environmental Law Institute to honor our friend and colleague and mentor for many of us, Mineheart Dewelle. And to begin, I'm going to introduce Sarah Sack. Sarah is the Yogis and Kedi Chair in Human Rights at Dalhousie's Law School, and the Director of the Marine and Environmental Law Institute, also known as Mila. Sarah was a close colleague of Mineheart on many projects, and she's going to bring greetings from the dean and also introduce the event tonight. Sarah. Thanks very much, Steve. So first, I would like to share a message from our Shulik School of Law Dean, Sarah Harding, who unfortunately couldn't be here with us this evening. Welcome, everyone, and a particularly warm welcome to the family of Professor Dewelle. I'm sorry I cannot be there in person with you this evening, but I do want to share a few words at this, the first annual Mineheart Dewelle legacy lecture in environmental law. As a brand new member of the faculty at the Shulik School of Law, I did not have the benefit of knowing Mineheart as a colleague. Everything I've heard and learned about him makes me very sad to have missed that opportunity. But I did know him as a law student. We were in the same class here at the law school graduating in 1989. Everything I remember about him, his warmth, his smile, his unfailing intellect, and his commitment to concerns about our environment made him deeply loved here at the law school then and now. I'm glad we will have this annual reminder of his many enduring contributions to Dalhousie, this faculty, and the field of environmental law. And I will now move on to introduce this, the first annual legacy lecture in honor of Dr. Mineheart Dewelle, our beloved colleague, friend, and environmental scholar, who left us too soon in September 2022. Mineheart's contributions to Canadian and international environmental law and policy and to education of the next generation were extensive. His research spanned a wide range of topics, including but not limited to climate change, energy law, invasive species, environmental assessment, decarbonization of shipping, and public participation in environmental decision making, among other topics. His many books included The Next Generation of Impact Assessment, a critical appraisal of the Canadian Impact Assessment Act, From Hot Air to Action, Climate Change Compliance, and the Future of International Environmental Law, and co-edited with myself and published in 2021. The research handbook on climate change law and loss and damage. His co-authored Canadian law casebook, Environmental Law Cases and Materials, was published in multiple updated editions and provided and continues to provide a foundation to students of environmental law across the country. Mineheart taught many courses at the Schulich School of Law over the years, including environmental law, energy law, climate law, and contract law. He served as the Associate Dean Research from 2012 to 2017, as Associate Director of the Marine Environmental Law Institute from 2004 to 2012, and as Director from 2013 to 2016. He then spent two years at the World Maritime University as a Canada Chair. And upon returning to the Schulich School of Law from 2021, he served as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. He was also, as we know, involved in interdisciplinary teaching outside the law school and contributing to the founding, I understand, of the College of Sustainability, where he co-taught a course on humanity in the natural world. This lecture series intends to inspire the next generation of Dalhousie students, whether in law or sustainability, to learn more about the possibilities of environmental law for contributing solutions to local, national, and global sustainability challenges facing people and planet. And we will start the evening by playing a short extract of an interview with Mineheart that was conducted in January 2022 by Chris White and Makayla Cole of the Nova Scotia Environmental Network. And this was as part of a documentary about the NSEN. Still teaching environmental law, so you're still influencing young people, young environmentalists. So I'll ask, what is one or some of the most important lessons that our generation of environmentalists could learn from your generation of environmentalists? Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind to me is that one of the things that I learned at Clean Nova Scotia is that embracing change and a desire to look for solutions is the most important tool for all of us to have. And so resisting the temptation to just focus on a particular solution and convincing everyone that that is the solution, I think, is one of the most important things. Because you can look at any point in history and reflect on what people at the time thought were the solutions to the problems. And inevitably, they were wrong. And that doesn't mean that they weren't the best solutions available at the time. But 10 years later, those are no longer the solutions. So it means that for us to really make a transition to sustainability for us as a global community, to truly become sustainable, we have to embrace change. And we have to develop a motivation to look for problems and ways to solve them, environmental problems and ways to solve them. So I think that's the fundamental thing that I learned from my time in working for environmental organizations. And that has made me probably more humble in the way I teach environmental law in the sense that I don't claim to have the answers. I don't pretend to have the answers. The best I can do is to teach my students about where we are and the importance of finding solutions to the challenges that lie ahead. I guess the other thing I would say, and I don't know if this is answering your question, but the other thing I would say is that one of the things that I learned over time is not to worry about how much progress we're making. Because you don't control the progress. You can control your actions. And it's important to reflect on whether your actions are the best you can do. But that's a different thing from expecting progress and expecting certain outcomes. Because if you do that, this is an area where you're going to get very, very frustrated very, very quickly because you don't control it. There are 8 billion of us or close to 8 billion of us. And to solve climate change, 8 billion people need to change. And that goes for many of the challenges that we face. So to put the pressure on ourselves to say, that's the expectation I have is to make that happen is unrealistic. So to walk this line between, on the one hand, being self-critical and reflecting on whether what you're doing is effective without losing hope by imposing unrealistic expectations on yourself, I think, is an important part. Because it is very worthwhile and rewarding to work in this field. But depending on the mindset you take to this, it can also be very depressing. I agree with that, too. All right, so I'll invite, yes, sure. I'll invite our panelists to join us here at the front. I could introduce them as they come in, but I think I'll wait till they sit down. So going that way, stage right from me, I'd introduce you to Sarah Sack already. Next to Sarah is Lisa Mitchell. Lisa is the executive director and senior lawyer with the East Coast Environmental Law, which is an organization which MindHeart was instrumental in founding with Lisa as founding board member. And Lisa is a collaborator with MindHeart on many projects. And next to Lisa is Bel-Lehi. Bel is the president and vice chancellor of the University of King's College. He was a very close personal friend and colleague of MindHeart's both here at Dalhousie through the law school and also as co-author of regulatory reports on Nova Scotia aquaculture on the importance and the review of the Nova Scotia Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, among many other things. It's a busy time of year, but certainly all of our panelists were very keen to be part of this inaugural event, honoring MindHeart's legacy for Dalhousie, for Canada and for the world at large and for the world of environmental law. And so please do welcome all of our panelists tonight. So got hardball questions to ask you here. And we're going to start with thinking about the past and like perhaps for you to reflect on how you knew MindHeart and what your keenest memories are of projects or activities done together with MindHeart in collaboration. So it just occurred to me about an hour ago that the last time I participated in this lecture series was about, I'm pretty sure it was 2015. MindHeart and I were the guests for that night. We were talking about the aquaculture report that we had just finished a few months ago. So that's actually a pretty poignant memory that just occurred to me today. You mentioned the aquaculture report and maybe for continuity reasons that's the thing that I should talk about because that's what MindHeart and I were here talking about. We were colleagues at the law school and in a kind of strange way we developed a real close relationship when I temporarily left the law school to be the deputy minister of environment and labor for three years. And I was constantly calling MindHeart for advice including in the creation of something called the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act which was, I do think has made a huge change in the trajectory of our problems. So we did the aquaculture report commissioned by the government in 2013 and 14. And that report called for a total revamping of how we regulate an industry in Nova Scotia with a view to the regulations creating something that we called low impact, high value aquaculture. And in many ways it was the two of us trying to figure out how to put the principles of the eggspa as we call it into action in a particular regulatory context of particular industry. So it's almost a companion piece I think to the legislation. I hadn't read the report for a long time and I'm sure there's other people here who when you have the experience of reading something that you worked on a long time ago it's like you're reading it for the first time. And so I read big pieces of it recently and I have to say, it's a hell of a good report. It stood up very well, it has stood up very, very well. And so the question is about the keenest memory and the keenest memory I have is not just recovering my memory of the report but recovering my memory of how mine, her and I worked on every word of that report together and every idea behind it. And for the students here, if you ever have the opportunity to work closely with someone with whom you can disagree passionately but agreeably, you're incredibly fortunate to have that experience. So that's what Meinhard and I had with that report. I'll just end with a little personal memory. We spent a lot of time in a car together driving around the province holding public meetings. And being two A-type personalities, we spent a lot of that downtime talking about aquaculture and regulation. But there was one night when we were coming back from a public meeting in Yarmouth and we came back to the valley way and it was dark. And Meinhard was driving, as I recall, and he said, we just drove by the farm that my family bought when we moved to Canada. And when you're driving in the dark and you're both looking ahead, it's a perfect moment for a certain kind of revelatory conversation. And I learned an awful lot about Meinhard that night in a couple of hours that I hadn't really appreciated spending hours and hours with him over a year, over years. And so to save the earth, we have to love the earth. And Meinhard loved the earth but Meinhard really loved Nova Scotia. He was a true Nova Scotian. So those are some of my keenest memories of Meinhard. Go. Sure, Lisa, let's hear from you. Yeah, I'm noting some themes here. The government asking Meinhard to help them, that's a theme. You're gonna hear from me as well on that. Driving places with Meinhard, that's gonna be a thing too, you'll also hear from me. So Meinhard and I were actually in law school together as well. I didn't know if Sarah Harding was there too, if you were all there together. And the fact that we shared an interest in environmental law was pretty unusual and then public interest environmental laws, like quite rare back in 1989. But we didn't really cross paths a lot until we left law school. And in 1992, Meinhard was working for Stuart McKelvie and he was asked by the government of Nova Scotia to write the text of the Nova Scotia Environment Act. And that was a really unusual thing for governments to do. Normally the text is written by the Department of Justice and it's introduced into the legislature, but they wanted to do a public consultation on the text of the act. So they had a private bar lawyer, and that was Meinhard, actually write it. And it happened that at the same time, I was a member of the Nova Scotia Roundtable on Environment and Economy. Youth member, I will add. And the Roundtable was tasked with taking the work that Meinhard had done out for public consultation. So I was one of a panel of three people that toured the province and did public consultations on that text. And ultimately, with obviously some changes and revisions and whatnot, that is what became the Nova Scotia Environment Act in 1994 and is still our primary piece of environmental legislation today. So that was kind of when our past first started to cross. And then when Meinhard was the executive director of Clean Nova Scotia, which he was in the late 90s, into early 2000, I think he asked me to come and do some public workshops with him on climate change, climate change, mitigation and adoption, but going around the province again and chatting with people about what they thought of climate change and how we might address the issues. So that was a really interesting time. And it reminds me to the theme of driving with Meinhard. We did a number of drives together as well and one that's always stuck out for me. I think it was around 2005. We drove from Halifax to Summerside to go to a meeting. And we, like you and Meinhard, we had lots of discussions about environmental law and talked about environmental issues and we talked about our families and all of those sorts of things. But in our discussion, I'll have to add, I was driving. And maybe sometimes I drive like a tad fast, not a lot, but you know, a tad. And as we were driving along, we were talking about climate change. Meinhard just sort of dropped, well, you know, if you drive 100 kilometers per hour, not only do you save fuel, but also you reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, of course you do. So I slowed down a little bit. So there were a number of places. We also worked together in 2007 on the strategic environmental assessment of title power in the Bay of Fundy. Another like novel concept, the government again, came to Meinhard, asked him to do this strategic environmental assessment. It was like a whole new thing for them. So he was always out there on the edge, leading new ideas and innovative ideas. But the most innovative idea for me, which would be my keenest memory, was when he started the East Coast Environmental Law Association. So that's the organization that I am the executive director of today. And as Steve mentioned, I was on the original board of East Coast Environmental Law. Meinhard brought together a group of peoples and law students and some lawyers and others in various different professions and capacities because he had this idea that we needed in Atlantic Canada to fill a gap and that gap was public interest environmental law. There was not a service out there to try and provide information and support to environmental matters from the public interest perspective. And I think having spent a number of years previous working with him in various different collaborations and projects, I knew sort of from the beginning that even though starting something like an environmental law charity in Nova Scotia in 2007 was a big lift that he had both the commitment and the passion, but also the leadership skills to really make that happen. And in fact, he did. And so that is by far my keenest memory. Great, thanks Sarah. Okay, so I am the junior in terms of when I met Meinhard and really started working with him because I joined the law faculty here in 2017. And I had met Meinhard before that here and there, but I came here in 2017 after 10 years at a different law faculty and I was very familiar not so much with Meinhard, but with Meinhard's work and in particular with the environmental law casebook that he co-edited with Chris Tollefson. So this I think is a starting point as a bit of a shout out to those people working in the environmental law and other fields who dedicate so much time to actually developing teaching materials in areas where we need teaching materials. And as somebody who was teaching at Western and for me it was just this incredible gift to actually have access to an up-to-date environmental law casebook that was then regularly updated over the years. And when you're teaching from an environmental law text it's also really interesting to reflect on what it is that the people who put this together thought was important and how they structured it. And so the usual suspects are going to be in it. Environmental law is a very diverse, there are a lot of different things that go into this. One learns about public law dimensions in terms of regulatory prosecutions and standard setting but also private law dimensions in terms of tort litigation and these kinds of things. It covers pollution offenses. It also covers biodiversity, species at risk and then climate change. But the thing that to me as somebody who came into the teaching of environmental law from an international law perspective, the thing that struck me as particularly interesting about this book is that the first chapter is actually about international law and international environmental law and how that relates to domestic law. And that's kind of unusual. And I think it's certainly a theme that speaks a lot to me given where I was sort of coming into this from. But overall, you know, the book has been, I think it continues to be, again, updated and very valuable for people all over who are moving in this area. In terms of just a couple of specific other reflections, I note I do have some keen memories of being at workshops with him and having after joining Dalhousie being in Glasgow at the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law workshop and having conversations with him also about family and friends and other things. And then the other, I think, in terms of favorite other things we would have done was co-supervising Atabayo Magicalagbe, graduate student who completed his PhD after just after mine had passed. This is another sort of piece of what people do as academics. We work with graduate students. And, you know, Minehart and I have complementary but also different approaches. And I think when you work with graduate students and you bring your complementary but different approaches together and you see the graduate students kind of internalize those and also add in their own ideas, it's a really wonderful experience and outcome. And I think I know Minehart was very proud of Bia's work as MI. Great. I'm going to share a story that's very different from these ones. So I live on Jubilee Road and my first encounter with Minehart was as a professor in the School of Architecture and someone interested in sustainable architecture or what in those days we would call greener environmental architecture. And someone said to me, you should check out this house on Shirley Street. Like there's this kind of crazy Rube Goldberg house on Shirley Street with all these panels on and all the rest of it. I don't know who it is, who's done this thing. And someone said to me, that name seems foreign. It must be some foreign person because no Nova Scotian would ever make a contraption like that. And I went by the house and you know, because it's five minutes from my house and I looked this thing and I thought this is someone who is deeply committed to what they're doing. And I never got the name right at that point. But that was my first encounter with Minehart was encountering the house. And I don't even know what year it was, but it was really stuck in my memory is this very vivid image of someone deeply committed to the principle of a thing and to understanding it. Was it cost-effective? I don't know. So I sort of, so Minehart for me began as a man of mystery. All right, let's reflect a bit on the present. I'm interested in where you see the legacy of Minehart's contributions to the most today in your work. So where are you seeing the legacy of Minehart in what's happening today? And how do these relate to the big and pressing issues of the environment today? I don't know if we want to take a different order or yeah. Sure, do you want me to talk? Yeah, Lisa. I was always prepared to be second. Yeah, we'll make you first now. Okay, thank you. Okay, well thanks for that question, Steve. I think for me to answer that question, I really have to tell you a little bit about East Coast Environmental Law, which celebrated 16 years this April and being in existence. The organization has three staff. So there's myself as executive director and we have two staff lawyers that work full time. And we also have a very active volunteer board of about 15 members I believe and two of those are also law students, which is something that was always really important to Minehart to maintain that connection with students and an organization like ours. Our mission is to thank you, advocate for progressive environmental law and policy in Atlantic Canada. It's to provide public legal education on environmental law and policy and ultimately to share our legal skills with individuals and communities and organizations that are seeking or working to prevent or redress environmental harm. So on a day-to-day basis, that means that the lawyers at East Coast Environmental Law are involved in all kinds of different projects. Working on issues may be related to the regulation of agriculture, the work that Bill and Minehart did to the new issues and management ideas around renewable energy, particularly offshore wind energy that's being proposed for Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. We also provide direct support to communities who have environmental issues or concerns that they need help with. So that could be that maybe a goldmine is being proposed in their community or maybe there's a wetland that they know about and it's being destroyed or is going to be destroyed. Maybe their water is contaminated. There can be any number of issues that folks are facing that our organization would seek to help with. We also offer a free environmental law inquiry service and that means anybody can contact East Coast Environmental Law with a question about environmental law or an environmental law question and we'll do our best to provide support and answer those questions. And we support students. We work with a mentor students at the law school who are interested in environmental law and we provide placements and internships and opportunities for them to work with our organization. And then finally, and I mean these are all important and we're all there from the beginning in terms of the work that Minehart put in place but I think collaboration has always been one of the key elements of our organization and we do, we collaborate with a lot of organizations so the Ecology Action Center or the Conservation Council of New Brunswick or Nature Canada or the World Wildlife Fund or institutions like the Marine Environmental Law Institute and the Law School and others. And I think that that collaboration is really key to enabling our organization which is not large. We're a small organization, free full-time staff but it enables us to reach much further and provide a lot more support because that collaboration brings us into all kinds of other, working with all kinds of other people. And so I think for me, maintaining that collaborative model is one of the ways of maintaining the legacy that Minehart put in place for East Coast Environmental Law and he talked about it in the video there of his advice and I should quote, he said, resist the temptation to focus on one solution. And when you are an organization the size of ours and collaboration is the key to actually getting something done, you must resist the temptation to focus on one solution because although we may all have the same goal in terms of improving environmental protection and seeking sustainability, there are many solutions to that and there are many paths to those solutions. So for us and for me, what I really see as a legacy of Minehart in the context of East Coast Environmental Law is for us to always be thinking that way and always be seeking opportunities to collaborate and build on that model. Thanks. Sarah, would you like to go next? Okay, I guess I'm going next. I'm going to speak a little bit about Minehart's climate law work and the book that we co-edited on climate law and loss and damage for a number of reasons, but one of which, if Minehart were still with us, of course he would have experienced the recent hurricane and then all of the extreme weather events that we've experienced in Nova Scotia, recently the fires and so on, which really bring into focus in a local context the importance of having conversations about climate change that aren't solely focused on the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but really bring into focus also the need for climate adaptation and also questions of financing climate loss and damage and turning one's mind to climate loss and damage. And Minehart and I, I think we're a very good fit for pulling together this book, which has co-edited and has collaborated, has contributions from around the world. We had met both as senior fellows with CG, the Center for International Governance Innovation and its International Law Research Program, which no longer exists, but did briefly. Minehart was working on, with Aldo and others on decarbonization of shipping and so the mitigation aspects. I was doing some work with CG on human rights approaches to climate change and including business responsibilities. And so after that, once I had joined Delhousie, we decided that Minehart had been approached about doing a book on this topic and he approached me about joining him in this work. And I think in the loss and damage conversation within international climate law, first of all has historically been very sidelined. It was, it has taken a lot of pushes from, in particular low-lying island-developing state CAOs to bring the loss and damage concerns into the international agenda and sort of in the last, at the last climate negotiations, there was talk of a loss and damage fund and before that, you know, there being sort of little bits and pieces coming in. But the loss and damage conversation in the international climate regime is very much first, marginalized and secondly, focused on drawing attention to the needs of and funding and assisting the poorest and most vulnerable states. But the conversation about loss and damage in rich countries that have failed to prepare, failed to adapt, failed to draw attention to what the consequences of climate change are, is a conversation that is really just starting to happen. And so I think the work and the thinking that we did in this book in terms of thinking about loss and damage both within the climate regime, but also outside the climate regime in terms of how are other legal systems, how are domestic litigation approaches, all kinds of other areas going to address climate change and loss and damage over time. I think that work is still evolving, but I think it's an important contribution and you know, it would have been great to continue to work with Meinhard on that, but we will continue on. Okay, thanks Sarah and Bill. So I'm in a different situation than I think Sarah or Lisa in that environmental work has never been my full-time job. And I think in many ways, Meinhard made me into an environmentalist working with Meinhard. And so I'll just speak to some of the influences that hanging out with Meinhard had on me. So one of the things I've done for the last 14 years while I've been an academic, while I've been president at King's is chairing the board at what we know as efficiency Nova Scotia. And you know, so we use rate payer money, government money to provide incentives to people to make changes in their homes and businesses which reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And you know, that's a solution among the toolbox of solutions that Meinhard would always talk about. And you know, it's not just about the immediate impact, it's about giving people a sense of hope that they can do something to speak to what he said in the clip and to be feel proud about what they've contributed. Even if their immediate motivation might be they don't want the house to be quite as cold or drafty or they want to save some money, right? And one thing leads to another. And if there are any King's students here, we have made energy efficiency improvements at King's, these are things we don't always see, but we have quite bold plans to make King's net zero because I think it's incredibly important that we don't simply think that we're gonna get there because of what the government does or governments do. We have to take accountability and responsibility and all different aspects of our life. But the other thing I just wanna talk about a minute for a minute is after the aquaculture approach, I tackled force practices in Nova Scotia and I had to do it without minehards because minehards wasn't Sweden then and I had left the law school by then, I was at King's and that report calls for a new model of forestry, a new paradigm I called it a forestry called ecological forestry. And the way I see it is that it's really volume too of the work that minehard and I started with aquaculture even though I did it independently of minehard because like the aquaculture report, it's a deep effort to make the general principles and values of the environmental goals and sustainable prosperity act operational in a very important natural resources sector that's important economically, environmentally, socially, culturally and indeed much more important in many ways than aquaculture is in Nova Scotia. And I couldn't have done that without the work I did with minehard. And then at a more technical level, the main recommendation of that report is that we try to operationalize ecological forestry by the adoption of what's really a land use planning model, a triad model where the vast majority of the forested land is either managed for wilderness conservation or for forestry only by ecological methods and then a much smaller part of the landscape managed intensively or industrially or yes with clear cutting. And that parallels very much one of the core recommendations that minehard and I developed for aquaculture which is a coastal classification process which is essentially a zoning process. What they have in common in this idea is to try to right size economic activities to the ecological environment and to the extent possible make our work on the landscape a replication of what would be happening in the natural world independently of what we're doing as human beings. So, you know, I don't know how minehard felt about the Lehi report it's called on forestry. We never did get much of a chance to talk about it but I very much see it as a continuation of the work we did together on the environmental goals and sustainable prosperity on aquaculture and the work that I did on forestry. In terms of present legacy this might be a good time to talk a bit about the College of Sustainability. And while I led the college from when it was officially formed in 2008 recognized by the Senate through till 2020 there was a period of about a year and a half before that where the College of Sustainability was a thing that we called the entity because we didn't have a name for it. And it was the product of a group of people coming together, faculty members and students who managed to convince the then provost Alan Shaver and President Tom Travis to give us some money to get them to force deans to support us in imagining a different way of doing environmental education at Dell but then to leave us alone and not ask us to report anything to them for two years. And so my heart was one of the faculty colleagues on that and we met every week for an hour and every week for an hour we tried to advance the project and if you missed a meeting that's okay but you couldn't complain about anything that happened when you weren't there. And it's hard to pin down anybody's particular contribution to that. Peter Tidemurs was part of that group and many others were part of that group. It's hard to pin down anyone's specific contribution but what was important there was that the range of contributions was there and various people brought different kinds of credibility, different kinds of ideas. And that was a different kind of participation so that often we hear about my heart as being this real leader of something or an inaugurator of something but he could also be someone who led from beside or led from behind after the college was formed and I became the director. He put his career where his commitment was in the sense that he took a third of his time out from the law school to teach with us and that I think was both costly and rewarding like personally and professionally. It's a big change to make that kind of thing to go from teaching law students to second year undergrads in all kinds of fields. And after he wasn't able to continue teaching he did stick around as part of a kind of informal advisory group that I had where I could look to him and to Peter Teimers and Dave Black and some others to just talk about the difficult problems and he was certainly always there for that as were the others. So there's a kind of I think interesting, there are different modes and what's interesting is one person can be a leader in different modes at different times and to me that's a kind of legacy the college itself but also that your contribution to something important might be just to say one thing at one meeting and not to be the person in charge or the person with the vision. So let's go to the future. If mineheart were still with us what might you be most interested in speaking with them about as we seek solutions? Sarah do you wanna kick us off? Sure. So one of the last email exchanges that mineheart and I had had was over revisions to the next version of the environmental law casebook and in particular we were focusing in on how to integrate human rights dimensions into the casebook. In particular because in July 2022 the UN General Assembly had just voted to recognize the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment with Canada voting in favor and so it seemed important to integrate that as well as work I had been doing on sort of the parallel movement of business responsibilities for human rights which is actually recognized in the UN General Assembly resolution into the casebook. So I think we had gotten started on that and it would be really interesting to be continuing that conversation and I'd say it's part of the environmental law casebook and environmental law has evolved over the years in a human rights dimension in terms of recognition and accounting for the rights of indigenous peoples, implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, Truth and Reconciliation. So we were already seeing in the casebook this human rights dimension sort of coming through and we see this in the design of environmental laws federally and provincially and it certainly is very much a part of the textbook project and I think that the, mine her and I also had been sort of in the middle of I guess the project that was also about the relationship between impact assessment law and responsible business conduct tools that were informed by human rights approaches. We had, he had just edited a book on the new impact assessment act and together with the group we had drafted a chapter on proponents as human rights duty bearers which again is a different conversation in the environment space and this would all be also very important in light of a new project that the, that my law has been taking on under, led by Aldo Hanatuck Clean Arctic Shipping Project which is going to have a huge implementation of the rights of indigenous peoples dimension and so human rights and environment. So yeah. Great, thanks. Bill. Okay. So I'd like to talk to mine heart about a whole lot of things, you know, especially whatever mine heart would be interested in talking about including his crazy house. So I've mentioned the environmental goals and sustainable prosperity act a couple of times. We would have called it something else if someone had said when we were writing the act, you know the acronym will be Expo, right? I'm sure we would have renamed it. So mine heart and I and other people, you know, believed in very, the importance of very strong environmental regulations and this is a simplification but regulations are primarily about preventing people from doing bad things. Absolutely incredible and important but we're both of the view that we also need law in some way needs to also focus on aspiration and forming a sort of governance framework for collective pursuit of big goals. You know, like cleaner air, like more wilderness areas, cleaner transportation, so on and so forth. And that requires a collective planning and action that law typically can't do a whole lot about because it's so focused on the specifics but we were of the view that law could play a role and so, you know, there's only been two academic articles evaluating the effectiveness of the environmental goals and sustainable prosperity act. Both articles concluded that the act was effective and both articles were written by Bill Leahy and mine heart Dole. So, and Sarah, you said over dinner that one of the part of those articles is in the book and frankly in our defense we would say more people should be paying attention to what Nova Scotia has done. Not just because certain environmental goals were legislated but in part because certain environmental goals were legislated and people in government start to, whether even though the legislation doesn't say what's gonna happen to anybody if the goals are met, they start to pay attention and they want to actually meet those targets. So, you know, the current government, after a period of time when it wasn't clear that the provincial government was going to extend this model, the current government has adopted the Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act and part of the Leahy report has been implemented I think because of that legislation and that legislation even holds out hope that the most important parts of the aquaculture report which were not implemented might yet be implemented because it's a designated goal. So, what the concern is of course is what I just alluded to a few minutes ago. What are the consequences if the act isn't followed? It works very well when it's reinforcing the existence of political will. But what happens when that political will isn't there? And I'd like to talk about that with mine heart. There might be a third article in it and not having the chance to write that third article with them is one of the many reasons I miss mine heart. Okay, thanks Bill. Lisa. So true, Bill, thinking about accountability, using those goals to create accountability. Strong. So, yeah, for me as well, all kinds of things, many things. I was, really bad with the microphone apparently. So I was known, I have been known about for my list of questions for mine heart that was always on my desk. And that was a real thing. So over 30 years of working with him and being involved in an organization that he founded, I always had questions for mine heart. And they kind of have always fallen into two buckets. One would be legal related questions, questions about environmental law and various things that we would be working on or thinking about. And others would be about the organization itself and strategy around that. So if I was able to talk to him, say tomorrow, I think on the law side, I would probably be really interested to get his perspective on the state of federal jurisdiction and environmental law. And I say that particularly because of two very recent cases, the Supreme Court of Canada decision on the impact assessment act, which was an area of expertise for my heart. And also the federal court of Canada decision on the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and the designation of plastics as toxic substances. And I know that both of those decisions are complicated and nuanced. And I know that mine heart would have a real perspective and an insight into those decisions. And I know that as well, being able to talk to him about it as I talked to other colleagues as well, but being able to have that perspective would help myself to navigate, would help all of us to provide information to others about those decisions and what the impact on federal jurisdiction over environmental law might be and how they may choose to deal with some of the very serious crises that we have in the environment that the federal government has been trying to take steps on. Now, I also would say that it would be every possibility that mine heart would also write about it if he were here, so there would be a blog or an article or a report of some form that he would write. And I think myself, and I'm sure my co-panelists here would agree, the fact that he was a very prolific writer, we're all very thankful for that because we're still, I certainly am still connecting with his work in very impact assessment, aquaculture, many other areas, climate change. And it's so great to have, I can't create my list of questions for mine heart anymore, but I can at least refer to work that he's done and work that he's done with other colleagues like Sarah. So my other bucket, of course, if I could talk to mine heart would be about East Coast environmental law and about how you take an organization like ours and you continue to grow in a really thoughtful and effective way in an environment in Atlantic Canada and continue to do good work. So it would be around strategy and fundraising and all of those things. And really circling back again to the federal government, I think one of the things that would be very much on my mind now to talk to him about would be about the quite real possibility of a changing government in the next couple of years at the federal level and what that might ultimately mean for environmental, non-government organizations, environmental projects, environmental progress, environmental law and so many things. We were both very active in environmental law when Stephen Harper became the prime minister of Canada and for the 10 years that the conservative government sat in that leadership position. And it's really interesting because I recall very clearly the rollback of federal environmental law at that time. I recall the impact that it had on the science in the bureaucracy in both the environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the change in funding to environmental organizations. But as we sat at dinner this evening, we were talking about a little bit of a timeline around stuff that, you know, Mineheart did and so many of us have been involved in over the years. And the College of Sustainability started 2007, 2008, East Coast Environmental Law started at that time and that was the beginning of when that government changed. So I think one of the things to take away from that and again coming back to solutions doesn't matter who's in power or what's happening at the government level, there are always solutions and there is always a way to make progress and some great things can come from it. So I'd want to have a conversation with him about that and how we can best manage that to continue having really positive and effective solutions. Sir, you wanted to add something? I just wanted to add one sort of reflection which is, I mean, I think everybody's sort of being saying what we wish we could be having conversations with Mineheart about but the legacy is there's so many people across the country who worked with him and studied with him and are writing blogs about exactly the kinds of things that we might have questions about. So the legacy is there and I think it's important to sort of, you know, celebrate, right? Celebrate that the legacy lives on. I mean, he did all kinds of really important work in terms of thinking and communicating and writing and teaching and mentoring and so, you know, the work has begun and it continues and everybody's job is to keep seeking solutions and they're out there, right? So let's do it. Yeah, I should bring my story to a close in one way in that a couple of months into doing the College of Sustainability Steering Committee project I was walking from my house up to Quinnpool Road and I walked along Shirley Street and in front of the house there was Mineheart and I put things together. I thought this guy I've been working with for a few months who's got some pretty hard opinions on some things and who's really open on some other things and who's willing to say provocative things and he's the guy that has been the man of mystery with this house, which it's a kind of visible symbol of the complexity that many of us hold in our lives and in our practices that we enact things in different ways in different times. We can be really committed to one thing and we try to find ways to make that live in other areas. The thing I would expect, I would be ready to talk to Mineheart about anything because I know that his initial opinion and mine are not gonna be the same and he'll listen to me for a while and then he'll kind of raise his left eyebrow and say, but Steve, don't you think? And he'll have something that really will make me think. I may not agree with it, but what for me was a really important legacy was the ability to be in good relationship while not agreeing and through that kind of good fellowship and intellectual challenge that you could actually make things move. You could make, you could move people's minds but you could also potentially really move their hearts and that for me is what I would like to have a little bit more of. So we do have a bit of time for questions? Sure, yeah, yeah. So let's start by thanking our panelists before we go on to the question. And so our habit here in this lecture series is to offer the first shot of questions to students. So if there's a question or a comment from a student out there, okay, there's a good question. If a young person wanted to get to know mine hearts thinking, where would they start? There are a lot of different places. There are, there's a long list of books that he's contributed to, but he also founded and ran the Dalhousie Environmental Law News blog. So if you're looking for some easier to read shorter items, which we'll also refer in some cases to some of the work that he did, just look for the Dalhousie Environmental Law News blog and he'll have, you'll see various sort of comments that he'll have made of over different things. But there is, you know, in terms of the books, just put his name into the library search and you'll come up with a massively long list. The question really is which area of environmental law are you most interested in looking at? And you'll have a nice selection. Yeah, the blog suggestion is great though because there's often things that are less fully formed but a little more provocative. Yeah, that's great. Maybe I'll just add to that if I can. So I would say, yeah, and it's funny because Sarah was gonna bring some textbooks of mine hearts this evening. There's lots of texts as well. And I think that point of areas that you happen to be interested in the environment or environmental law, but I also would say that, you know, he was the chair of the board of East Coast Environmental Law from 2007 to 2012, I believe, and there's an annual report every year. So you can go on our website and look at the annual report and see his note that he wrote. Yeah, okay, let's. Just to add to that actually, when I was teaching at Western, of course I was using mine hearts textbook but every now and then I'd have students from Atlantic Canada and I'd always point them to East Coast Environmental Law's website because they have really good short summaries of environmental law cases from the Atlantic region. So it's also a really good resource if you're trying to get a sense of what is happening in the legal context in Atlantic Canada. It's a unique and fantastic resource. Yeah, that also speaks. You knew I thought that. I think it speaks to one thing that might be so much in the kind of air that the three of you breathe every day that you might not be evident to you, but not all lawyers think the law is for everybody to know about, right? There's an aspect of the way that mine heart worked in the way that all of you work, which is to say law is to be mobilized. Law is to be something people can engage with. Law is a tool for people making the world more like the way they want it to be. And that's not take, I would be important not to take that for granted. Like that's something that is a particular tradition at particular understanding that's really important and potentially liberating. So yeah. All right, any other students got a question out there? So the disagreeing and learning from each other is the questioner's picking up on that and interested to know an example of the kinds of overturning of thinking that might have happened. So I have a very specific proposal. So when we did the Aquaculture Project, mine heart really, really pushed for process. And it's not that I was against process. Like let's put these people in this very polarized debate together and see what they can come up with as opposed to us going away and writing something for both of them. And I wasn't like oppositional to that. I had done a lot of that kind of work myself as a deputy minister in government. But mine heart really believed in it. And every point of skepticism I'd raise, you know, is that really gonna work? Is it, are we gonna get a return on investment if it's so broad, if it's so open-ended? Every question I asked, if not immediately within a day or two he'd come back and say, I got a solution for that, right? Because he was determined not to let practical considerations prevent us from giving representatives of the people who were in this very polarized debate to find as much common ground as they could find. And we address issues in the report that are beyond that common ground the processes that we created and facilitated created, but a significant part of the relatively positive reception of the report on both sides of the polarization. More so on the communities and the environmental side than on the industry side. But the industry side didn't dismiss it out of hand either. And a lot of that reaction was we were successfully telling people what they had told us. As, and putting it into a framework where we had a totally integrated system rather than sort of a bunch of solutions that were kind of jumbled together. So that's a very particular example of how we, to say we disagreed all the time about these things is overstating it, but there was tension between us on that. And the fact that we were able to have reasoned disagreements within the context of a common goal and a common set of values and objectives made all the difference. And I give, mine had tremendous faith in people. He really had such tremendous faith in people. And in some of these work groups and workshops and forums, there'd be people saying things that mine heart fundamentally disagreed with. And I think I'm better now than I might have been, but my instinctive reaction is to let the blood boil a little bit. Whereas mine heart was always very calm and he'd find something positive to say about what that person had just said. Or he'd have an ability to say something for the purpose of making sure he had understood what the person had said. And that can have a transformative impact on people. To be able to confirm that through your disagreement, you actually understand what the person you're disagreeing with is trying to say because you've restated it respectfully. So that's the example that immediately comes to mind. Thanks, Simka, that was a great question. All right, questions from anybody? So the question is about the Environment Act from 1994 that mine heart wrote. And the remarkable longevity of that and what contributes to that? Is it just such a brilliant piece of work? We can both go. Yeah. So from a deputy minister of environment point of view, I came along after the fact, it was very forward thinking when it was put together. It was the first environment act of its sort in the country. And it was one of the first comprehensive environment acts because a lot of provinces in particular were still dealing with environmental legislation that was in bits and pieces. And so it had a built in capacity to grow and develop that a lot of other legislation that was more about the specifics than it was the general topic of environmental law and progress, those are some of the qualities that were built into it that made a big difference. And I wasn't there, but I have no doubt it made all the difference in the world that mine heart wrote it. But I do wanna say this, I think it made all the difference in the world that certain public servants were in place at the time. Gentlemen who I eventually became a colleague with named Peter Underwood was the director of policy and environment at the time. And a gentleman I never worked with very much, but a conservative minister of environment named John Leif. He made a big difference as well to creating the political appetite for mine hearts good work. So, Lisa. Yeah, I can comment on that too. Gonna have to disagree with you a little bit. It's okay. Actually, the Nova Scotia Environment Act was modeled after a similar piece of legislation from Alberta. And I think mine heart used that sort of as a bit of a foundation. And, but it was, I think as Bill says, it very much was an umbrella statute which was a new approach instead of all the provinces had very piecemeal approaches then before that, like a clean water act or whatever. So, I think there was that. And I think I would support everything else that Bill said, but I also think that process was a big part of it. So, mine heart did a great job writing that initial text, but the government's commitment to take that such a comprehensive piece and actually put that out to the public instead of writing some little summary that didn't really give you anything that you could kind of dig into. And those public consultations, like they were alive, like people were really engaged in all kinds of different sides and perspectives and wanting to contribute and have their say. And I think the other thing the government did with that act and that consultation was they did a response document where they actually responded to the public consultation, not just again a summary, but actually a line by line response to we heard with regard to section 136 on contaminated sites that people felt this way and we've decided we're going to do this for this reason. And we just don't see a lot of that in government. So, it was unique in so many ways and those folks that Bill mentioned that were in government at the time, both in positions as politicians and as senior bureaucrats also had a huge role to play in making that happen. So, yeah, it was unique. Thanks. That's, do you want to? Okay, all right. Other questions out there? Some reason the hands go up and I don't see them. Other people have to point them out. Yes, at the back. So the questioner's interested in how has environmental law and the kinds of legislation and reports that Mineheart and others have you have been involved in? How does that affect someone's daily life in Nova Scotia? What's an example? Is that your question? Okay. Okay, I can talk for a second about that. I mean, I think in fact, like the breadth of the work that he has done and been involved in is probably a huge part of that. I mean, we just talked about the Environment Act and the Environment Act does affect everybody in this room and it affects everybody in the province. And then, you know, I guess for our organization because we are very much an organization that is about helping people understand environmental law and helping supporting people when they're trying to apply the law in a way that Steve alluded to, which I thought was such an important point, but not every lawyer thinks about the value of ensuring that the law is accessible, right? And I think Mineheart was a person who was very interested in making the law accessible. So in terms of, you know, impact on people every day, I think that very fact that he helped create East Coast Environmental Law and the fact that he was involved in things like the Aquaculture Report, which really do have a direct impact on people, those are the things that I would think of as having that practical or some of the practical application. If you want to go. Yeah. So I gave one example earlier, right? We have probably the most at scale, most aggressive energy efficiency programs in the country and one of the things that, well, efficiency Nova Scotia was created in direct response to the environmental goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act. It was the mechanism to achieve a number of the goals on greenhouse gas reduction, air pollution reduction and just higher energy efficiency. So at a very personal level, well Nova Scotia is actually the leading province in the country on wilderness protection, which is to put it in context is we only have 30%, 33% of the land that's crown land that's the lowest percentage in the country and we're at or very close to being one of the highest province in the country in terms of conservation protection. So every fall, as president of the Kings, I organize a wilderness hunt, a wilderness hike because you can't hunt in wilderness areas but we don't hunt a wilderness hike in a wilderness area that is very unique. It may not be totally unique in Canada but it's very unusual. It's actually inside Metro Halifax. And again, that growth in protected conservation comes directly from the environmental goals in Sustainable Prosperity Act. The other kind of impact that I wanna mention it goes back to the previous question. Mineheart was a leading scholar in environmental assessment and strategic environmental assessment. So Lisa, I think you mentioned earlier the work in the Bay of Fundy about title. Now, so you can focus on do we have title power? Was the development of title power sufficiently restricted or facilitated by that work? But the other way to look at it is that stakeholders and communities had an open-ended opportunity to participate in a discussion about whether we're gonna have title power, where are we gonna have it, under what terms and conditions we're going to have it. Mineheart himself was personally involved in that process. He sort of crafted that process for that project but his scholarship on environmental assessment including pushing back on the Harper government's attempts to restrict environmental assessment is not just an academic exercise, it's all about giving citizens and stakeholders an opportunity to have a voice in planning processes that are going to have very significant impact on what kind of progress we make as a society but also what their communities are gonna be like. What are they going to be living? Next door to, or are they not going to be living next door to those installations? So even some of the things that might seem quite esoteric, bureaucratic even, they have all kinds of, I believe, direct, very important impact to so-called ordinary Canadians and people. Thanks, Will. Did you wanna add your? There's other questions, do you think? Yeah. We've got maybe either one more question or one more comment. And since I'm not seeing the question. So this was more just a reflection, I think, on the process part. And again, I tend to think about things through a human rights lens and use the right to clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a framework. And as a framework, the way I teach it and see it is you can think of it as having substantive components which are like clean air, clean water, healthy, resilient biodiversity, safe and sustainable food systems, and kind of so on. But there's also a procedural dimension to it that's hugely important. And so I always think of minehards' commitment to the process part as being part of sort of a rights-based approach to environmental issues. And if you unpack the procedural dimensions, you can think about everybody should have a right to information about environment, things that may have a detrimental effect to your environment. And you should have freedom of expression and rights to participate in decision-making and freedom of association and also the ability to protest. There's the idea of environmental human rights defenders whose work should be supported and they should be treated with respect and as knowledge holders, not people who should be suppressed, right? And so on with access to justice. And then sort of a cross-cutting dimension of equity and attention to the fact that people are differentially impacted by environmental harms and also that colonial histories and other types of discrimination have rendered some people more vulnerable to environmental harms and so they need extra support in order to use their procedural rights to achieve the substantive environmental protections. So whenever I was hearing you talking about, you know, minehards approach to process, to me that's very much a part of a rich sort of rights-based approach. And if you were here, I didn't just reflecting back on the Environment Act, I taught environmental law in Ontario for a long time and Ontario has an environmental Bill of Rights and Nova Scotia doesn't, but Nova Scotia has other kinds of interesting things. I haven't done sort of the study to see, well, what are the pieces from a rights-based approach that Nova Scotia could do better, but what pieces, you know, so anyway, I think that's just a reflection on sort of the process part being hugely important and aligning with I think what we're seeing is this emergence of attention to, you know, really rich understanding of environmental rights. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so thank you for that. I think, so how do we draw an event like this to a close? We have an event which will continue in collaboration between the College of Sustainability and the Marine Environmental Law Institute that will be a celebration of minehards legacy. And when we look at one person's legacy, and we see its impact in all kinds of different ways, I think one of the pieces that I want to bring us back to, in addition to the importance of the legislative work, the environmental work, the process work, is that it's also about being in the world, figuring out how to be with other people in the world and how to live a meaningful and fulfilling and joyful and impactful life. In the face of challenges that for many of us, you know, we just sometimes don't want to get up in the morning. We were talking about the challenge of climate anxiety and climate grief, and at the same time, the empowerment of climate communities and communities of action. And also how we draw more people into those communities of action. So it's really wonderful to gather tonight, people who knew minehard very well and considered him a colleague, a mentor, a collaborator, a father, a partner, but also a neighbor. Hopefully for those of you who didn't know minehard before today, you'll get a sense of the kinds of richness that can be part of a life that's lived well, doing work that is meaningful in community, in collaboration with others and making possibility for others. And I think that legacy is what I'd really love to see us carrying forward and celebrating as we go forward in this lecture over the years and celebrate the kinds of work that minehard would have valued. So I really would thank you so much for your contributions, the panel. Thank you and the audience for your questions and your attention. Thanks a lot.