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Restored perennial and season marsh and riparian forest at Wildlands Mitigation Bank, Placer County, California ( EPA ) The always interesting Dave Owen recently posted "The Conservative Turn Against Compensatory Mitigation" , whose primary subject is the recent turn described in the article's title ( compensatory mitigation is a policy that require parties receiving permits for environmentally harmful activities to compensate for them by improving environmental conditions elsewhere). Owen also has something to say about the origins of the practice, rejecting the arguments of critics who have portrayed compensatory mitigation as part of a neoliberal, capitalist resurgence : The proponents of compensatory mitigation reform hardly ever identified their efforts as measures to boost the capitalist system . As one retired departmental employee explained to me, even during the Reagan Administration, debates about compensatory mitigation were driven more by conflicts over regul...

In the last couple of posts in this series I suggested several directions of inquiry for uncovering the history of environmental law. In this final post in the series, I would like to tentatively offer some thoughts on why the historical exploration of environmental law matters. First of all, history can help us better understand current environmental law. For instance, David Driesen has recently advanced a positive theory of environmental law , attempting to explain its salient features, such as reliance on certain types of standards. Notably missing from his account are historical explanations for these aspects of environmental law, explanations which might be provided by works such as those of Morag-Levine .  Or take the argument of 'free market environmentalists' that private law would do a better job of protecting the environment than modern regulation; this type of argument could be checked against the historical experience of legal systems that have relied on private law...

Edvard Munch, Separation (1896) (Continuing the series on historical analysis in environmental law. Links to the full series and the article are here .) In May 2010 Environmental History, the leading journal in its field, published an article by Aaron Sachs on antebellum environmental thought as expressed in contemporary American cemeteries. A few months later legal historian Alfred Brophy published a blog post on American antebellum constitutionalism as expressed in speeches made in cemeteries. Though both pieces focused on the same cemeteries, with rich discussions of the political, social, and cultural contexts in which they operated, neither work made any reference to the other, nor, indeed, to the literature or historical sub-discipline in which the other was located. Three years later, both pieces were released in expanded form , again with no interaction between them or their scholarly worlds. This was not an isolated (non-)incident. Though the fields of environmental history...

More on working-class environmentalism and the law (see, most recently, here ): Jacobin  recently ran a piece by Connor Kilpatrick claiming that "Postwar America’s greatest environmentalist was a labor leader". There's a lot here also about politics, religion, climate skepticism and more. Some excerpts: Today, the AFL-CIO lobbies Congress to pass the Keystone XL pipeline while noted NASA climate scientist James Hansen, one of the first to link global warming to fossil fuels, is repeatedly arrested for protesting such projects. And while in 2017, the idea that the interests between wonky environmentalists and jobs-focused trade unionists would diverge seems like common sense, it’s only because the bad guys won. But it wasn’t a preordained victory. For nearly a decade in the 1960s and ’70s, environmentalism seemed to be on the cusp of a popular reckoning against the powers of capital. And it found an ally in the labor movement which, for a few years, looked like it might b...

The Public Domain Review  recently posted  (courtesy of archive.org) a fascinating and entertaining animated short from 1956 by the American Petroleum Institute, entitled "Destination Earth". As the Review  explains: Produced at the height of the Cold War, and made at the behest of the American Petroleum Institute (still the biggest lobby for the U.S. oil and gas industry), this great little promotional film from John Sutherland Studios champions not only the wonders of oil as might be expected, but also free-market capitalism. The surprisingly humorous cartoon tells the story of how the suspiciously Stalin-like leader of Mars, named Ogg, sends a rather calamity-prone citizen to Earth to find a better power source for his poorly-running “state limousine”. The exploring Martian, of course, lands in the United States and soon discovers the many and myriad delights of petroleum, and that, in contrast to his home planet, competition between companies is rife. His take-home le...