Gregg Macey

Gregg Macey is director of the Environmental Innovation Center at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He works to expand the capacity of governments, agencies, nonprofits, and community organizations to serve the public. As an attorney and former patent litigator, he encourages innovation in areas such as climate action and environmental protection. As a mediator and policy designer, he led dozens of workshops and has a deep concern for the management of complex problems and disputes. As a law professor, he taught environmental law, environmental law and science, environmental justice, property and housing law, and land use law to students of law, engineering, and urban planning. And as an executive director, he learned that his best work can be done through partnerships that unleash the potential of diverse groups to solve problems.

Most recently, he served as director of the Center for Land, Environment and Natural Resources at UC Irvine School of Law. At UC Irvine, he raised over 8 million dollars and worked with partners on issues such as climate action and adaptation planning, climate policy, air and water quality, community health, transportation and infrastructure, clean energy, and civil rights. His team brought legal, policy, and scientific expertise to bear, built coalitions, filled gaps in legal and environmental analysis, and through policy design and creative communication of results, encouraged legislators, agencies, and the public to view findings in meaningful ways.

Recent projects include:

1. Contributing author for California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment;
2. Creator and co-P.I. for Integrated and Equitable Climate Action;
3. Co-creator and co-P.I. for the Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network;
4. Work with a statewide coalition of 200 organizations to document civil rights violations, bring together farmworkers to provide testimony at a People’s Tribunal on Pesticide Use and Civil Rights in California, issue findings to the California Attorney General and state agencies, and secure an audit of state and county enforcement practices by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee of the California State Legislature;
5. Work with public health and logistics researchers, environmental leaders, and air districts to analyze the potential for a new category of air quality regulation to reduce pollution exposure near warehouses and freight corridors and document their public health benefits;
6. Work with dozens of planners and state agency staff to document governance challenges that limit climate action planning by cities, counties, unincorporated communities, and other local governments and share findings with members of the California State Legislature;
7. Steering committee for the Title VI Alliance, a national environmental justice coalition;
8. Work with partners in five states on the first community-driven research on air quality and unconventional oil and gas developments, which is chronicled in The Science of Repair by Gwen Ottinger (Oxford University Press, 2026);
9. Work with a statewide coalition of community and union leaders and former utility workers to document “repair failures,” which contribute to substantial greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas distribution systems in Massachusetts; and
10. Work with civil and environmental engineers, transportation researchers, and air quality coalitions to evaluate regional community air monitoring and community emissions reduction plans and national infrastructure equity programs.

Dr. Macey’s articles appear in a number of journals, including Environmental Science and Technology, Georgetown Law Journal, Environmental Health, Utah Law Review, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Arizona State Law Journal, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell Law Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Environmental Management, among others. He published book chapters in Risk Analysis of Natural Hazards and Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States. He coedited a volume on the future of environmental remediation and redevelopment, Reclaiming the Land: Rethinking Superfund Institutions, Methods, and Practices, with Jon Cannon. He taught at Brooklyn Law School (where he received tenure), Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fordham University, and the University of Virginia. Prior to academia, he was a patent litigator with the law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP; Senior Associate with E2 Inc., an environmental consulting firm; Senior Associate with the Consensus Building Institute, a land use mediation firm; and a land use and environmental planning consultant. Dr. Macey has a JD from the University of Virginia and a PhD in urban planning from MIT.