Connecting the Climate Dots
“I gave speeches to my fellow classmates during lunch to go vegetarian to help save the Amazon,” he says. “While it was a hard sell to my fellow 13-year-olds in Texas, I stayed committed to the fight against climate change.”
A Sustainability Studies major in college, Shipman wrote a science fiction novel for his honors thesis focused on attitudes toward climate from various philosophical perspectives. Wanting to maximize his role in mitigating climate impacts, he pursued law school — and Berkeley.
Working with Ecology Law Quarterly, Shipman and other journal students saw a gap within Berkeley Law’s robust environmental offerings: a group that considered the impact of law firm decisions on the climate crisis. They created Berkeley’s chapter of Law Students for Climate Accountability (LSCA), which amplifies the legal industry’s roles and responsibilities regarding climate.
“As a school that sends so many students into Big Law, bringing conscientiousness into our career decisions with the tools created by LSCA gives Berkeley students the power to drive change in the legal world,” Shipman says.
The organization’s Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard ranks the “Vault 100” firms by how much fossil fuels work they’ve engaged in over a five-year period and highlights the role firms play in creating, implementing, and safeguarding fossil fuel projects — and in protecting those who profit from them.
Shipman, who interned with the Center for Biological Diversity and did a field placement with the Environment and Land Use Section of the California Department of Justice’s Public Rights Division, helped Berkeley host LSCA’s inaugural conference last year. The event expanded the chapter’s California network and connected interested students and practitioners worldwide.
Several years before law school, he and a cousin created the board game Topper Knocker, where players try to build five towers with various hex tiles, discovering new tiles and drawing cards that enhance or slow their progress. After nearly a decade of prototyping and playtesting, they printed an initial run, sold 100 copies, and last year incorporated as an LLC through Berkeley Law’s Startup Law Initiative.
Shipman is currently designing Drought, which puts the Tragedy of the Commons — an economic theory describing how individuals acting in their own self-interest will deplete a shared, limited resource even if doing so harms everyone long-term — into a game where players represent competing interests fighting over water rights.
“While board game design is unlikely to end up as my full-time career, it provides a fascinating lens to discuss climate change,” he says. “Climate communication is crucial to securing climate justice, and I’m committed to reaching an audience through every possible avenue.”