The Sharon-based Maverick Lloyd Foundation has made a donation to Vermont Law and Graduate School that is among the biggest the school has ever received.

Announced in the wake of flooding not seen in Vermont since Tropical Storm Irene, a $2.5 million gift will go toward the newly dubbed Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment, formerly known as the Vermont School of the Environment.

“Environmental law is really an important field for us, particularly in this time, because it seems that we’re going to have to go through the legal methods in order to move effective solutions to climate change forward,” said Arthur Berndt, co-trustee of the foundation, in an interview.

The donation was finalized in June and announced on Wednesday.

“It’s important for us to have more people that are familiar with the law,” he said, “whether it’s in the graduate program that understand policy or whether it’s actual lawyers to protect our interests in democracy and the environment.”

Plus, Berndt — a co-founder of the Energy Action Network — believes that Vermont, known for the glories of its landscape, will also give students firsthand knowledge of what they will be advocating to protect in the future.

“You’re in this magical Green Mountain State, right? In a way, you have the opportunity to have experiential learning here,” he said.

The unrestricted money will be used generally to continue building out the South Royalton school’s master’s and law degree programs, something atypical for cash infusions of this size, according to school Dean Jennifer Rushlow. Usually, larger sums like this come through grant funding, which have very tailored purposes, or donors want to go through a process to “codify their wishes,” she said.

But Berndt and his daughter Lorna Adley, a fellow co-trustee, have been “particularly generous” in giving a no-strings-attached contribution to the school, which has been on a quest to expand its programs since Rushlow’s appointment last September. Some of the funding will specifically be used to hire professors with expertise not in the current curriculum to diversify its offerings, she said.

“It’s really wonderful to see local investment and enthusiasm for the future of the school,” Rushlow said in an interview.

The gift is also the biggest contribution in the history of the Maverick Lloyd Foundation, who’s total assets amount to around $8 million, Berndt said.

His mother started the Maverick Foundation in 1995 to honor the family’s “legacy of social reform” dating back to Texan Samuel Augustus Maverick, whose refusal to brand cattle in the mid-19th century led to the lone-wolf connotation of the word “maverick.” (In this family of word-coiners, Maverick’s grandson Maury, a San Antonio politician, first used “gobbledygook” to describe bureaucratic memos he received while serving as chairman and general manager of the Smaller War Plants Operation during World War II.)

When Berndt’s mother died in the early 2000s, Berndt added “Lloyd” to the name to encapsulate that side of the family’s lineage, which includes activist Lola Maverick Lloyd and muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd.

Berndt, a sugarmaker who said he gains solace from being in nature, noted that the foundation has been donating to Vermont Law and Graduate School for more than a decade. But between wildfire smoke, historically high temperatures across the globe and other climate catastrophes, Berndt, 73, felt “the urgency of now” when signing the multimillion-dollar check.

“When I go outside, quite frequently, maybe most of the time, I just feel like Mother Nature isn’t happy,” he said. “It gets a little harder to breathe, and just (think about) the flooding and the damage that it’s done and the people that are suffering.

“Not enough people are recognizing that we’re in this crisis to make substantive change as quickly as I think we need it,” he said.