savoy010

Signing the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, 1946 Douglas de Castro recently posted "The Colonial Aspects of the International Environmental Law – Treaties as Promoters of Continuous Structural Violence" . This is a topic that has come up before in work by Yoriko Otomo and others . De Castro's abstract: The formation of international institutions in the twentieth century occurs under a scenario marked by the rule of colonialism and imperialism. Thus, instead of reducing inequalities in the world system, international institutions reproduce a prevalent logic of material and subjective discrimination based on a colonialist ideology marked by violence, which is communicated in a certain way so that it can justify its importance and legitimacy. The colonial violence is perpetuated under the form of symbolic violence manifested in the language that imposes a universal meaning and systemic violence that manifests itself in the "perfect" function

Toronto Terminals Railway Central Heating Plant, 1929 Working through my backlog, I recently came across Owen Temby's 2015 article in Planning Perspectives,   "Policy symbolism and air pollution in Toronto and Ontario, 1963–1967" . The article has an interesting take on the secular movement of environmental regulation from the local level to higher levels of government. The argument that industry had more influence at the provincial level than at the municipal level is interesting since environmental groups are also often assumed to prefer higher levels of government, where they can better concentrate the diffuse environmental interests of the public. The article also cuts against the assumption that local regulation was relatively weak, and that the national-level regulation of the 1960s and later was some kind of victory for environmental interests. Food for thought. The abstract: In 1967, jurisdiction over clean air policy in Toronto and the rest of Ontario's munic

Aboriginal men obtain water from mallee root at Yalata in South Australia, 1981 (National Library of Australia) Peter D. Burdon, Georgina Drew, Matthew T. Stubbs, Adam Webster, and Marcus Barber recently posted "Decolonising Indigenous Water ‘Rights’ in Australia: Flow, Difference and the Limits of Law" . The abstract: This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial–Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal system’s regulation of water. This prov

The Journal of Policy History  recently published Linda Nash's "From Safety to Risk: The Cold War Contexts of American Environmental Policy" . From the introduction (notes omitted): The late twentieth century marked the rise of “risk society,” to use Ulrich Beck’s well-known term . In Beck’s account, the seemingly endless proliferation of material risks to health and environmental integrity is the outcome of late capitalist modernization, a proliferation that society’s institutions are completely unable to control or address. But without disputing the fact that industrialization has introduced a multitude of new threats to both bodies and environments, their conceptualization as “risks”—rather than merely as “dangers”—was more than a choice of words; it marked both an important policy change and a crucial cultural and political shift. The dominance of risk discourse in environmental and health policy has not gone unchallenged. Since its inception in the 1970s, the assumpt

Yesterday's This Day in Water History had this quote from the AWWA's  Water Quality and Treatment  (3rd ed., 1971) (most comments removed): “On October 21, 1914, pursuant to the recommendation of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, the Treasury Department adopted the first standards for drinking water supplied to the public by any common carrier engaged in interstate commerce. These standards specified the maximum permissible limits of bacteriological impurity, which may be summarized as follows: The bacterial plate count on standard agar incubated for 24 [hours] at 37 C was not to exceed 100/cc. Not more than one of the five 10-cc portions of each sample examined was to show presence of B. coli. The recommended procedures were those in Standard Methods of Water Analysis (APHA, 1912). These standards were drafted by a commission of 15 appointed members. Among the members of this commission were Charles Gilman Hyde, Milton J. Rosenau, William T. Sedgwick, George C.

Bevin Boys report for duty in 1943 ( Express ) The blog "ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly" earlier this week had an interesting post on something I knew nothing about, despite my once-future career as a military historian. It seems that Britain conscripted nearly 50,000 men to work in its coal mines, in place of the military service, during the period 1943-48. From the blog: Coal was essential for military production during WW2; somehow Britain had to match the quotas needed to keep fact­ories churn­ing out the munitions required at the front. And as Britain was unable to import coal in wartime, the production of coal from local mines had to be increased. But how? 36,000 miners were already cons­crip­t­ed for army duty and had left their collieries. Ernest Bevin, wartime Minister of Labour and National Service and a former Trade Unionist, believed the short­age could be remedied by using conscripted men to fill the vacancies in the mines, keeping production at the rates requir­e

The connections between working-class environmentalism and environmental law is an understudied theme that I've had occasion to highlight before (e.g. here and here  and in my forthcoming article on historical analysis in environmental law ). Last year I noted that Erik Loomis won an award for his article, "When Loggers Were Green: Lumber, Labor, and Conservation, 1937-1948". Now Robert Walls has a review  of Loomis's book,  Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge UP, 2015), for Environmental History . From the review: Focusing on everyday labor and the designs of union activists, Loomis provides a complex portrait of how the industry’s base attempted to advance its goals of securing both sustainable forest resources and health and safety protections for men and women in an often dangerous workplace. The result is an informed analysis of labor’s successes and failures, one that broadly encompasses the radicalism of the Industrial Wo

Colorado water law continues to spur scholarship. The recent issue of Environmental History has a review by Michael Weeks of  Robert Crifasi's  A Land Made from Water: Appropriation and the Evolution of Colorado’s Landscape, Ditches, and Water Institutions  (University Press of Colorado, 2015). From the review: While the book presents no definitive argument, Crifasi is skeptical of claims that water management in the West has been synonymous with concentrated power. Rather, his often meandering narrative suggests that water developed roughly along practical and evolutionary lines, with users and institutions responding logically to changing water needs. Most of the text centers on the period from Colorado’s 1858 Gold Rush to the early twentieth century. Heavy doses of environmental determinism appear throughout. Crifasi argues that failed adventures in ditchdigging and the need to move water across property lines pushed farmers to enlist the aid of the territory/state of Colorado t

Environmental History  recently published Elisabetta Novello and James C. McCann's "The Building of the Terra Firma: The Political Ecology of Land Reclamation in the Veneto from the Sixteenth through the Twenty-first Century" .  The abstract: The 1963 Vajont disaster and the devastating floods that hit the Veneto as well as other areas of Italy in 1966 brought about a significant revision of the policies on soil defense and civic protection. This was the last step in a long process of environmental management intending to build a balanced human-environmental system from the early modern period to the present. This essay explores the changing political ecology of soil and water management in the Veneto region in northern Italy. More specifically, the study traces the evolution of land reclamation works in the longue durée —in particular over the last five centuries—and the economic and social consequences of human actions on the territory. In order to fully outline the pol

Water Alternatives  recently published a review by Joe Williams of JJ Schmidt, Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity  (NYU Press, 2017). From the review: The central argument – which might rankle were it not so meticulously made – is that as critical hydro-social scientists we have been getting things wrong for years. Schmidt contends that the old story about the separation of society and nature under modernity and the entrenchment of binary Enlightenment thinking does not apply to water management. The conceptual starting point of many critical scholars, of the transformation of naturally occurring and materially messy 'water', to the industrial product 'H 2 O', delineated, separate from nature, is, according to Schmidt, a false premise. The logic of water management conceived in the United States in the late 1800s, that has since spread across the world, has instead always connected human society, through water, to the land and geological hi

A while back Environmental History  carried a review by Daniel Simberloff of Ian Rotherham's Eco-history: An Introduction to Biodiversity and Conservation (White Horse Press, 2014). Simberloff notes: The high point of Eco-history is a remarkable 42-page “Timeline,” detailing in linear fashion 224 key points in the history of British nature conservation from AD 1000 to 2000: laws especially, but also extinctions, introductions, establishment of nature reserves and environmental organizations. Rotherham concisely lists the impacts of each event, with further explication for about half of them. This section alone could be published as a short book that almost any environmental historian would value. I don't think they're related, but there's also a very elaborate website called "Environmental history timeline" , itself packed with little known nuggets of environmental-legal history, such as the fact that in 1970 US President Richard Nixon "issued an execut

The Tennessee Valley Authority continues to produce environmental-legal history. Now (as we learned from Legal History Blog and Legal Theory Blog ) Atif Ansar has posted "The Fate of Ideals in the Real World: A Long View on Philip Selznick's Classic on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)" . The abstract: Philip Selznick’s first book — TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (1949) ("TGR")—tells the story of how the the ideals of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were thwarted by the reality of political pressures from its environment. Although TGR boasts one of the highest citations for a scholarly work in management, project management scholars do not cite it. Why has project management scholarship lost one of its founding classics? We investigate why TGR meets the criteria of a classic. We show that TGR’s focus on societal outcomes and ideals is an improvement on conventional project management’s focus on technical outpu

Robert Fischman and Lydia Barbash-Riley recently posted "Empirical Environmental Law Scholarship ". Beyond taking a look at the recent history of environmental law scholarship, the article is interesting for our purposes both for its view on what constitutes empirical scholarship and for its argument about the connection between descriptive and prescriptive work. The abstract: The most important development in legal scholarship over the past quarter century has been the rise of empirical research. Drawing upon the traditions of legal realism and the law and economics movement, a variety of social science techniques have delivered fresh perspectives and punctured false claims. But environmental law has been slow to adopt empirical tools, and our findings indicate that it lags behind other fields. There are several clear benefits from an empirical agenda to explore how to make environmental law more effective. But no previous article has applied the lessons from empirical schol

A little while back AJIL Unbound published a piece by Mathilde Cohen, "Animal Colonialism: The Case of Milk" . The abstract: Greta Gaard writes that “[t]he pervasive availability of cows’ milk today—from grocery stores to gas stations—is a historically unprecedented product of industrialization, urbanization, culture, and economics.” To these factors, I would add colonialism and international law; the latter understood broadly to include the rules considered binding between states and nations, transnational law, legal transplants, international food aid, and international trade law. Until the end of the Nineteenth Century, the majority of the world population neither raised animals for their milk nor consumed animal milk. Humans are unique in the mammalian realm in that they drink the milk of other species, including beyond infancy. With the European conquest of the New World and other territories starting in the Sixteenth Century, dairying began to spread worldwide—settlers