By Keemia Soltani-Zhang, B.A. ’26
The realization that politically motivated environmental policies are often justified as “just following the science” turned Nell Green Nylen’s career path on its head. While earning her PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences during the George W. Bush administration, she was frustrated by federal laws and policies like the benignly named “Healthy Forests Initiative,” which changed federal laws and regulations to greatly expand commercial logging on federal lands—including logging of old-growth trees—under the guise of a science-based prescription for reducing fire risk.
“I wanted to know how laws are made, so I might be able to contribute to making them better, to combat the use of ‘science’ as a pretext for government action.”
This desire to translate her science background to the public policy realm set her on a new path, ultimately steering her to Berkeley Law and a, to-date, twelve-year career as a leading water researcher at CLEE.
The Journey from Scientist to Legal Expert
Green Nylen’s academic journey originally began across the Bay. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, she focused on geological and environmental sciences. After graduating she did field mapping and GIS work for two years before returning to Stanford for a two-year master’s program with the goal of eventually teaching high school science. A funny thing happened along the way: she applied for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, not realizing it provided three years of funding, when she only had one year left in her program. When she won a fellowship, she switched her degree program to take advantage of the funding. “I kind of did an accidental PhD,” Green Nylen joked. She studied ancient climatic and environmental change along the northern California coast using an array of different techniques that ranged from the micro (such as analyzing the identity and chemical composition of tiny fossils smaller than sand grains) to the macro (mapping large-scale sedimentary structures along thousands of feet of sea cliffs).
While working on her doctorate, Green Nylen realized her science background could be useful in the public policy sphere. This realization sparked the beginning of a pivot to law and policy. While finishing her PhD, she learned about Congressional Science Fellowships, which enable scientists to work in the office of a member of Congress or on a Congressional committee. Green Nylen applied for several of these fellowships but, ultimately, wasn’t selected. Instead, she worked at museums for a few years while searching job postings for opportunities at environmental NGOs that do policy work. However, she found very few open positions for scientists—most organizations were hiring lawyers instead. So, Green Nylen decided it would be a good idea to add legal skills to her toolbelt. (Ironically, shortly after starting law school, she noticed that environmental organizations had started hiring a lot of scientists!)
At Berkeley Law, she dove into a wide range of activities, taking advantage of opportunities to explore many facets of law while focusing, broadly, on environmental law. Over the summers, she interned first with the Center for Biological Diversity and then, for a government perspective, the California Attorney General’s Office. Because Berkeley Law had no environmental law clinic at the time, Green Nylen participated in an environmental justice practice project course and separately teamed up with other students to research and provide public comments on proposed regulations and other administrative agency actions. As a member of Students for Economic and Environmental Justice, she helped organize symposia on community lawyering, food justice, and rural issues. She was interested in water, among many other topics, and took a water law class, but had no plans to make it her focus, even after a friend “roped” her into helping organize the 2012 California Water Law Symposium.
After earning her J.D., Green Nylen clerked for Justice Gregory J. Hobbs, a Berkeley Law alumnus and renowned water lawyer, on the Colorado Supreme Court. Although most of the cases the Court dealt with were not water-related, a few were, giving her a window into how Colorado allocates and manages water. Discussions with Justice Hobbs about water were always enlightening.
Searching for post-clerkship work, Green Nylen came across a posting for a one-year water law and policy fellow position at CLEE that piqued her interest. Here was an opportunity to delve more deeply into California’s complex water challenges, learn how legal and policy frameworks affect management of this critical resource, and, hopefully, have a positive impact. When CLEE offered her the job, she decided to take it.
A Career at CLEE Defined by Impact
Green Nylen joined CLEE in October 2013, when the center was “still very tiny,” with just a handful of staff members. Over the next twelve years, as CLEE grew, so did Green Nylen’s expertise. She and CLEE’s water team have focused on state drought response, water rights implementation and water allocation in times of scarcity, tools for implementing sustainable groundwater management, improving data for water decision making, innovative water and wastewater management, improving the relationship between regulation and innovation, and more. “I love that we have been able to combine the legal, policy, science, and economic perspectives in our work,” she said.
For Green Nylen, a major draw of this work is the opportunity to make a tangible difference. A common thread throughout CLEE’s water work is informing decision making to improve water governance. She is driven by the need to actively search for solutions to urgent water issues, and the work she does with her colleagues often helps fill critical knowledge gaps for both those who make policy and those who do the work of on-the-ground implementation. For example, she explains that a project focused on developing national guidance for navigating the many technical, legal, and financial considerations for implementing groundwater recharge projects will benefit water users in areas with overdrawn aquifers, including “communities that have historically had their wells go dry.”
Pushing Forward in the Face of Challenges
In May, the U.S. EPA terminated two federal research grants Green Nylen works on. The first grant supported the groundwater recharge guidance project mentioned above. The second grant supported work aimed at building small, rural communities’ capacity to implement water reuse projects that increase their local water supply resilience. In a testament to her commitment to this work, she and her CLEE colleague Ken Alex (who had a third EPA grant terminated) decided to become two of the named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit by University of California researchers to get unlawfully terminated federal grants reinstated across the UC system. While the litigation continues, the grants that support Green Nylen’s projects have been (at least temporarily) reinstated by order of the federal district court.
Despite these ongoing challenges, Green Nylen and her fellow researchers at CLEE’s Wheeler Water Institute remain dedicated to finding solutions to California’s complex water challenges. They understand that, with climate change, precipitation patterns are becoming more unpredictable, making their work more vital than ever.
“Water is an urgent issue in California,” Green Nylen reiterated. “Water touches every aspect of our lives. Our goal with all of our water research is to do work that serves a need. We’re trying to help fill key gaps to get people the information they need to make better decisions about water.”
Beyond her role as a senior researcher, Nell and her husband are longtime members of the “Nerd Herd,” CLEE’s sustaining donor group that gives monthly to ensure the Center can continue its impact. This commitment is another way of giving back to CLEE and Berkeley Law. “I give monthly to boost CLEE’s capacity to rapidly respond to new developments and to help support current students’ research and activities,” she says.