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This weeks addition to the digital library of historical environmental law is Joshua Toulmin Smith's  The Laws of England Relating to Public Health , published in London by S. Sweet in 1848. The full title continues: Including an Epitome of the Law of Nuisances, Police, Highways, Waters, Water Courses, Coroners, Burial, &c. Relating Thereto; with an Historical Review of the Law of Sewersl and an Examination of the Proposed Measure of Sanatory* Legislation Now Before Parliament. As you can tell from the title, "public health" in the Victorian era included much of what we would today label "environmental law" . You wouldn't know it from the title, but Toulmin Smith was a major critic of England's mid-nineteenth century public health legislation, as Noga Morag-Levine has explained . A sort of "free-market environmentalist" of his time, he argued that the new centralized, administrative regulatory mechanisms enacted under Edwin Chadwick's...

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...

This past summer H-Environment published a Roundtable Review of Richard Newman's Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present (OUP, 2016). An excerpt from Stephanie Malin's contribution: While the Superfund Act [CERCLA] resulted from national awareness of Love Canal, and though Newman focuses on the success that legislation represents, we conclude with a troubling denouement. Love Canal is now Black Village Creek, filling up with a new round of working-class residents enticed by homes priced 10 – 20% below market value. Though former residents including Gibbs fought the relocation, they lost this battle. Developers won. The results have been tragic; as Newman recounts, health problems and toxic exposures have reemerged in this ‘remediated’ community, despite the extensive, state-of-the-art environmental engineering schemes used to filter leachate and otherwise remediate the site. Newman’s Love Canal succeeds in highlighting for readers an exceptionally timely...