Rooted in Nature: Earth Law Center Summer Internships in Durango, Colorado
Engineer Mountain near Durango, Colorado.
It’s 5:30 AM in Durango, Colorado. As the morning sun begins to spill over the peaks of La Plata Mountain Range, I brush my teeth and fill my water bottle. I’m getting ready for work, but today I won’t be reviewing legislation or combing through Tribal treaties. Today I will come face to face with my boss, my client, and my ward: Mother Nature.
In an era of seemingly boundless workplace connectivity, losing touch with your mission is easy. At Earth Law Center (ELC), pursuing a paradigm shift toward ecocentric law entails all the usual work of grassroots environmentalism and keeping a nonprofit running: stringing Zoom calls together, emails galore, and hours upon hours of scrutinizing words on a page.
It’s a comical cruelty that in order to defend the Rights of Nature, one must remove oneself from wild Nature, confined to the four walls of the twenty-first-century workspace.
But today, I close my laptop in search of a new meaning of the word remote. I join a carpool with my fellow ELC interns and navigate a winding ascent to the Engineer Mountain Trail Head, located about forty miles from ELC’s office in downtown Durango.
We arrive at the base of this nearly 13,000 foot mountain and step into the pristine morning air. The four walls of our office fall away to reveal four cardinal directions, each one featuring a dazzling and untouched landscape.
With each step I climb, the Natural elements enshrined in the legal documents I review daily become more vivid. It’s surreal to be in an environment with Nature’s integrity more intact than any I’d seen before. We walk through mature pine forests and burbling creeks, noticing mushrooms, wildlife, and a gorgeous array of wildflowers in the meadow that sits beneath the mountain’s rocky peak.
ELC Summer 2024 interns Elijah Bullie, Sofia Houts, and Una Šverko approach the summit of Engineer Mountain above tree line.
One of the spectacular views during the hike.
I’ve spent my whole life in cities. While urban environmentalism is a core tenet of the ecological movement, I now realize the extent to which my metropolitan notion of land protection was based on pictures and imaginings of distant imperiled landscapes.
ELC is headquartered in Durango, Colorado, a town nestled under the shadow of the La Plata Mountains, mere minutes from the desert, with the Animas River flowing through the heart of downtown.
Now, just days after arriving in Durango, I find myself in conversation for the first time with my long-time pen pal, Nature. This experience has given me a deeper appreciation of all that environmentalists have achieved and a clearer vision of why the work to enshrine the Rights of Nature in law, policy, and governance must continue to be rooted in Nature.
ELC Summer intern and University of Chicago undergrad Elijah Bullie at the summit.
