The 37th Annual Environmental Distinguished Visitor Lecture - Rob Verchick

The Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law Program is excited to host Professor Robert Verchick as the 37th Distinguished Environmental Visitor. In this recording, Professor Verchick will present his lecture entitled The Whale that Danced the Blues: Our Battle to Save the Ocean. Rob Verchick is one of the nation’s leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and a former EPA official in the Obama administration. He holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law and directs Loyola’s Center on Environment, Land, and Law (CELL). He is also the President of the Center for Progressive Reform and a former Harvard Radcliffe Fellow. Verchick has written more than 60 articles and four books, including the best-selling, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (2023). His work has appeared in many venues, including the California Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the environmental law reviews at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. He has taught as a visiting professor at Yale University, Peking University, and Aarhus University in Denmark. He has received several teaching awards, including at Loyola, Tulane, and Harvard. Verchick comments frequently on radio shows such as NPR’s All Things Considered and has written commentary for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and other publications. In 2009 and 2010, Professor Verchick served in the Obama administration as Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In that role he helped develop climate change adaptation policy for the EPA and served on President Obama’s Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. Verchick, who grew up in the sun-scorched Las Vegas desert and survived Hurricane Katrina as a resident of New Orleans, has spent a career studying environmental resilience across the country. Committed to “place-based” analysis, he has paddled swamps, scaled glaciers, and dived among endangered corals, all to understand what is at stake and how we can protect the things we need—and love. Verchick graduated with distinction and honors from Stanford University and with honors from Harvard Law School. ​For more information, including videos of interviews and keynotes, visit his personal website here.