Great Lakes Environmental Law Center

The Great Lakes Environmental Law Center is a nonprofit, public interest law organization that specializes in environmental law and policy. We work with residents in Michigan to identify legal and policy solutions to the environmental issues that impact their health and quality of life. While we work on a wide range of issues, some of the most common involve drinking water quality and affordability, water quality, air quality, energy, and urban agriculture.

GLELC places an emphasis on work that furthers environmental justice. We do this by primarily working on environmental issues that are impacting communities of color or lower income, and by engaging in community lawyering. Community lawyering consists of us providing our legal knowledge and skills to residents, community groups, and other nonprofits to help them address environmental issues in a collaborative manner. In doing so, we seek to educate communities about how the law may be used to address an environmental issue in a manner that they deem to be appropriate and effective so that the people we work with are empowered.

Additionally, GLELC works with the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law through its Environmental Law Clinic. Working with the Clinic Director, the staff attorney helps to supervise Clinic students on specific projects.

Through our work, we engage in a wide variety of strategies, including but not limited to: litigation; commenting on and challenging agency permits; transactional services to promote the environmentally sustainable reuse of vacant land in Detroit, including urban agriculture, renewable energy, and green stormwater infrastructure; state and local policy research and development.