The Full Story
About Us
Sapiens is not from nature; it is part of it. Science shows that our relationship with our environment is defunct. Law’s response is developing. ADELA’s mission is to catapult the professional development of McGill law students in environment to increase the pace of law’s environmental changes.
​
Sapiens ne vient pas de la nature; il en fait partie. La science démontre que notre relation avec notre environnement est dysfonctionnelle. La réponse du droit est en développement. La mission d’ADELA, c’est de catapulter le développement professionnel des étudiants en droit à McGill intéressés en environnement pour augmenter le rythme de changement du droit.
​
ADELA is open to all law students at McGill with any interest in environment. As our operations develop, members will gain access to networking opportunities, join casual and formal discussion groups on environment and law with our community, connect with alumni mentors and benefit from consolidated resources for aspiring law and environment professionals. ADELA also hosts and supports its members in academic and non-academic environment and law projects.
Becoming a member requires no upfront time commitment. Environment and law students are busy accomplishing themselves: our mission is to catapult their development. We rely on our community and executive to support our operations.
Mission
Our mission is simple: solve climate change. It's no easy task. We strive to teach students how to use a law degree to solve climate change. We strive to act on a scale large enough to count. We strive to create networks that last forever, helping our members solve the complex problem of climate change for decades to come.
Vision
ADELA was founded in response to the climate crisis. Our work is deployed urgently. We do not research, we ACTION research. We are aware our of limited time before feedback loops are triggered.
Le Logo
ADELA est identifiée dans son logo par une bille bleue dans un plateau isolé de la balance de Thémis.
La balance de la Justice contient l’énorme poids de la Terre. Les deux cordes reliant le plateau à son attache semblent fragiles. Il n’y a pas de deuxième plateau permettant une comparaison. Le plateau étant petit, la bille bleue semble prête à tomber. La balance est fabriquée en bois, un produit de Mère Nature. La Justice, attachée à rien comme la balance, est seule entre notre bille et ce vide.
La bille bleue réfère à The Blue Marble, la première photographie d’une Terre éclairée dans son ensemble, prise par l’équipage d’Apollo 17 en 1973 et à The Pale Blue Dot, une image de la Terre, captée par Voyageur 1 en quittant le système solaire. La Terre, entourée de l’océan noir d’un espace vide de tout, y est belle, fragile et insignifiante.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
​
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
