savoy010

October's Environmental History  had a review by Erik Loomis of Adam Tompkins's  Ghostworkers and Greens: The Cooperative Campaigns of Farmworkers and Environmentalists for Pesticide Reform (Cornell UP, 2016). Tompkins's book seems to add to a growing body of work on the labor movement as a force behind important developments in environmental regulation . From the review: Because legislation excluded agricultural workers from the New Deal’s labor protections, farmworkers lacked political power, forcing them to seek alliances with middle-class organizations to win their battles and protect themselves from the chemicals used by growers. Environmental organizations needed farmworkers to counter accusations of being anti-worker and to ground their claims in the lived experiences of the most affected populations. The UFW’s 1970 grape contract included provisions that banned growers from using chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT and dieldrin. This laid critical groundwork for ...

October's Environmental History  carried a review by Robert Gioielli of Cody Ferguson's  This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century (Rutgers UP, 2015). Gioielli writes that the book's case studies of local environmental movements show the importance of the flowering of grassroots activism after the “regulatory reform revolution” of the 1970s when American citizens had access to new avenues of environmental protest via federal legislation. Far away from the large centralized environmental groups in Washington, D.C., to these activists, environmental issues were as much about the future of local communities, good governance, and justice as they were about the health of ecological systems. Ferguson also contends that these stories show how “environmental and democratic reforms were intertwined in the late twentieth century” (p. 6). The book begins with the Northern Plains Resource Council, a group of Montana residents formed in the 1970s to ...

A strange message hit my email inbox today, advertising an upcoming event hosted by an Israeli law school and a leading Israeli environmental NGO to celebrate 25 years of Israeli environmental law . I'm more than a little puzzled by this as I'm not sure how exactly they came up with 1993 (or thereabouts) as the beginning of Israeli environmental law. Important environmental statutes, including the Regulation of Trades and Industries Ordinance, 1927; Oil in Navigable Waters Ordinance, 1936; Public Health Ordinance, 1940; Wild Animal Protection Law, 1955; Abatement of Nuisances Law, 1961; and the 1971 water pollution amendments to the Water Law (itself enacted in 1959) all predate 1993 by quite a bit. The Abatement of Environmental Nuisances Law, 1992 more or less fits the timing, but it happens to be a pretty unused (and useless) law. (I've written about a number of these statutes in a book chapter, "A Prolonged Recessional" ( Academia and SSRN ).) Old Knesset (par...