Some foundations of modern British environmental law

The recent issue of the Journal of Environmental Law has a review by Stephen Tromans of Richard Macrory's Irresolute Clay: Shaping the Foundations of Modern Environmental Law (Hart, 2020). An excerpt:

In a series of Chapters, Macrory looks at the development of the profession of environmental law: the ‘early sparks’ of environmental law as an academic discipline; practising environmental law as a barrister; and the ‘coming of age’ of academic environmental law. Here of course, the author is on strong ground, having been at the heart of the development of environmental law as an academic discipline since its inception. He has also had some, though very limited, experience of advocacy at the environmental Bar.

Chapter 3 deals with ‘the emergence of environmental lawyers’ in the UK, covering forerunners such as Professor Jack Garner, the Lawyers’ Ecology Group founded in 1972, and the inception of the UK Environmental Law Association (UKELA) in 1986. Having been involved in that process, it is always interesting to read about it, though how interesting generally to later practitioners may be questionable. The key point made is the undoubted development of environmental law ‘as a distinct and vibrant field’—the growth of UKELA reflecting that development. Macrory concludes that ‘the notion of both environmental law and environmental lawyers seems now to be fully embedded in our legal system.’ As in other areas, the possible weakness of the analysis maybe derive from the quite narrow focus of the author’s own personal journey, which does not really provide a full account of why and how environmental law came to achieve that position. In particular, a fuller analysis might have revealed quite a complex synergy between different areas of the law and different types of lawyers.

The strength of an organisation like UKELA has always been that it has drawn together lawyers from private practice, both as barristers and solicitors, lawyers working in house with industry, increasingly—and to be welcomed—lawyers working for environmental NGOs, lawyers within central and local government and agencies, as well as academics (and as Macrory points out, also many members from non-legal professions). The teaching and research in environmental law burgeoned in the late 1980s and 1990s, with many noted academics not mentioned in Macrory’s book—for example, Brian Jones and Michael Bowman working with Professor Garner in Nottingham; the engaging David Hughes at Leicester, who wrote one of the first student texts on the topic; the late Simon Ball at Sheffield, who wrote the other, later joined as co-author by Stuart Bell; Lakshman Guruswamy at Durham; Lynda Warren at Aberystwyth; and others. However, a relatively small cadre of academic lawyers would not have sustained the subject. What was also instrumental in the development of environmental law was that it became possible for people who had studied it to go on and get a job in that field and have the opportunity of making it their career. This occurred in the early 1990s because the major solicitors’ firms, and their clients, particularly US companies, began to regard environmental law as a necessary and even desirable practice area. New legislation such as the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and new EU Directives being transposed into UK law, meant that there was a need for advice on compliance. Perhaps even more important, from a commercial perspective, was the recognition of environmental risk—particularly the risk of liability for historically contaminated land—in transactions. These included loans, with very considerable interest and concern by the mainstream banking industry in such risks. The result was rapid growth in environmental departments in established London firms and the appointment of environmental lawyers as partners to head them, in some cases being appointed from an academic background. This provided strong support for the development of environmental law and the incubation of a future community of environmental lawyers and is a strong factor in it becoming an established practice area.

The Ecocentrists

U.S. Intellectual History Blog just finished a very interesting roundtable, organized by Anthony Chaney, on Keith Makoto Woodhouse's The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (Columbia UP, 2018), the 2019 winner of the Society for US Intellectual History’s award for best book of intellectual history. The roundtable includes insightful essays by Roy Scranton, Natasha Zaretsky, Paul Murphy, and Daniel Wayne Rinn, as well as a response by Woodhouse.

An excerpt from Zaretsky's piece demonstrates the relevance of the series to legal and environmental historians and practitioners alike:

[The] fantasy of a world emptied of people casts humans as an invasive species and the non-human world as bouncing back once we have exited the scene. In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse terms this thinking “holism”—a tendency to portray human civilization as comprised of an undifferentiated mass of people bearing down on a planet with finite resources and capacities. This proclivity toward holism was at the heart of radical environmentalism, where it played a paradoxical role. On the one hand, it gave the movement its teeth and empowered activists to reject the incrementalism of mainstream environmental organizations and engage in direct action, often at personal risk. On the other hand, at its worst, holism could shade into misanthropy, a blindness to social and economic inequality, and even anti-immigrant nativism.

Woodhouse is keenly aware of this paradox, and the portrait of radical environmentalists that emerges are nuanced. This book neither pathologizes nor romanticizes radical environmental activists. Much of the book centers on the story of Earth First!, and at one point, Woodhouse stresses that Earth First!ers saw themselves as part of a movement rather than an organization. It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the depth of that distinction. Earth First! was founded in April 1980 at the start of a decade when the radical energies of many social movements of the 1960s and 1970s would be routed into a dense and well-funded liberal apparatus comprised of non-profit organizations, think tanks, and lobbying groups that sought to reform the system from the inside. Modern environmentalism was particularly vulnerable to this kind of institutional capture because of its reliance on litigation strategies. But Earth First!ers were “movement” people. To be a movement person is to set oneself apart from the dominant society, to feel swept up by the forces of historical change, and to place political commitment at the center of your everyday life in ways that people outside the movement often find baffling and inexplicable. These tendencies arguably ran even deeper for radical environmentalists, who were motivated by a sense of urgency predicated on the prediction that the planet was running out of time. The Earth First! slogan—“no compromise for Mother Earth”—captured the movement’s single-minded drive.

But that single-mindedness also created contradictions that dog radical environmentalism to this day. The portrait of an existential standoff between an imperiled earth and “human civilization” overlooked the histories of global capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, enslavement and coercive labor structures, the appropriation of indigenous lands, concentrations of wealth and resources in the global north, and widening social and economic inequality. When radical environmentalists simplistically argued that “people were the problem,” they failed to grapple with how these histories were entwined with assaults on land, air, and water. This critique of a “universal humanity” will be familiar to anyone who has followed the more recent debate about the Anthropocene, the geoscientific term used to mark the moment when human activity became traceable in the geological record. Scholars such as Jason Moore, Andreas Malm, and Donna Haraway reject the term “Anthropocene” for its universalizing tendencies, introducing instead clumsier but more precise designations such as the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, and the Plantationocene. Woodhouse’s book reminds us that the current Anthropocene debate has deep historical roots. It has long proven difficult for radical environmentalists to simultaneously combat both the planetary threats posed by humans and the inequalities that exist among humans. (Radical environmentalists are not the only ones who struggle with this. Activists focused on human inequality have also tended to subordinate the non-human world, but that is a different–if not unrelated–story). 

Ghostworkers and Greens

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 environmental groups’ final push for an EPA ban on DDT in 1972. As the 1970s went on, the Sierra Club and other leading environmental organizations developed a growing awareness of social justice and believed they had a natural alliance with farmworkers. This can be overstated, as the 1990 letter sent by the Southwest Organizing Project to major environmental organizing accusing them of “racist and exclusionary practices” demonstrates. Perhaps Tompkins could have evaluated these accusations in the context of his work on environmentalist work with farmworkers, but he does not.

Three later chapters on state-level activism in Arizona, California, and Florida are where Tompkins digs deep into the details of coalition building. In Arizona, years went by with suburban white environmentalists and rural Latino farmworkers missing each other as they each went through waves of activism over pesticides. Finally, the two groups built a meaningful alliance after agricultural pesticide drift threatened expanding suburbs in the mid-1980s, leading to the Arizona Environmental Quality Act in 1986. In California, both groups fought Governor George Deukmejian’s deregulation efforts in the 1980s, but often with different priorities that hampered close cooperation, even as good relationships between them were cultivated and maintained. Finally, Tompkins closes the book with an examination of how farmworkers and environmentalists worked together in Florida and California against methyl bromide after growers’ associations launched a battle to resist the limitations on its use the United States agreed to in the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to fight ozone depletion. Greens and workers could not completely counter the growers’ power, but their work did raise public awareness about the chemical and led to growers seeking alternatives, even as it is still used today. 

Grassroots environmentalism

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 prevent coal strip mining that eventually expanded to deal with other local issues. Ferguson was formerly a professional lobbyist for the council, and clearly his work with the group was in many ways the genesis for this project. Many of its founders and most dedicated members were farmers and ranchers, deeply conservative both politically and culturally, not “wild eyed and fuzzy headed” environmentalists (p. 68). Their activism was sparked by the federal North Central Power Study that called for the massive development of Northern Plains energy resources that would have had a devastating impact on their farms, local air and water quality, and local culture.

Ferguson has an abiding respect for the members of the council, and he tells their story with verve and plenty of historical context. The narrative is based on sound primary and secondary research but also a significant number of oral history interviews. These strengths continue into the other case studies. The next two chapters examine Tucson’s Southwest Environmental Service that primarily fought against air pollution caused by Arizona’s copper smelter industry. The final part of the book looks at Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), an eastern Tennessee organization that began by fighting for strip mining regulations but expanded to work on a number of regional environmental issues. These case studies are the strength of the book, with Ferguson exploring the political and social forces behind the various environmental problems. Although sometimes the narrative gets bogged down in blow-by-blow discussions of legislative and regulatory fights, in general it is exceptionally well written and fast paced.

25 years of Israeli environmental law?

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 (parliament) building on King George Street, Jerusalem

If court decisions are what the organizers have in mind, the early '90s again seem like an odd place to start, given earlier cases such as the 1959 public trust doctrine case Puterman v AG, a series of 1960s Supreme Court cases on air pollution, and so on.

It may be that the organizers have in mind the founding of said environmental NGO (Adam Teva V'din), founded circa 1990, though one might be forgiven for thinking that to be a somewhat self-centered view.

So I'm stumped.

The Trump environmental transition

After a pleasant interlude in medieval English forests, we return to recent history with a recent post by Craig Oren on RegBlog. After laying out some of the possible deregulatory moves we will see from the Trump administration, Oren takes us back in time:

We must remember 1981, when the Reagan Administration came into power. Its choice for EPA administrator was Anne Gorsuch [Neil Gorsuch's mother-DS], who had little experience in environmental matters. Lobbyists seeking deregulation initially had much influence on the agency. During her short-lived tenure, a draft emerged of proposed amendments that would have eviscerated the Clean Air Act, much to the horror of environmental groups. Gorsuch also repeatedly weakened EPA’s enforcement office. Gorsuch warred with the agency’s career staff: a number of high-level executives were transferred—and some lost their jobs altogether—as punishment for not being sufficiently compliant with the Administration’s priorities.

Gorsuch at her farewell news conference

Capitol Hill looked unpromising, too, during the Reagan years. Then-Representative John Dingell (D-Mich.)—a firm environmentalist, but also someone who was concerned with the interests of auto companies, which employed many of the constituents in his Detroit congressional district—joined with industry and Republicans to put together a package of weakening amendments to the Clean Air Act, including a rollback of auto-emission standards l. And a so-called regulatory reform bill, designed to hamstring agencies from protecting public health and the environment, seemed in 1982 to have a considerable chance for some time of being enacted.

Equal access to justice or to obstruction?

As environmentalists deliberate the extent to which the courts can be used to stymie the anti-environmental agenda of the current American regime, the latest issue of Environmental History has a book review by Steve Vanderheiden of Lowell Baier's Inside the Equal Access to Justice Act: Environmental Litigation and the Crippling Battle over America's Lands, Endangered Species, and Critical Habitats (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Baier's book apparently makes a strong argument, and Baier is appreciative but critical:

Adopted in what Lowell E. Baier describes as “the earliest legislative manifestation and harbinger” of the Reagan Revolution (p. 79), the 1980 Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) authorizes reimbursement of legal fees for prevailing parties suing the government. While originally designed to serve a deregulatory agenda that would limit state power over business and persons, the EAJA has frequently come to support environmental groups pressing the federal government through the courts for greater environmental regulation, rather than less. According to Baier... the litigiousness of these groups has paralyzed the administrative state and eroded its capacity to manage the nation’s resources, to the detriment of the environment that such groups set out to protect.

Baier, as a lawyer and historian, is sharply critical of this policy evolution of the EAJA, through which courts and civil society groups came to play an increasing role in environmental policy, challenging the actions or omissions of resource management agencies. Part narrative history of the development, passage, and later evolution of the act, and part polemic against the US environmental movement and its legal strategy, the book is bound to attract two different sets of readers. Historians and other scholars of US environmental politics will find a scrupulously narrated account of the political milieu from which this legislation emerged, along with its evolution over recent decades, in the book’s first four chapters. Assembled from an impressive array of interview notes and archival texts, these accessible chapters detail the original objectives for and later impacts of this important statute.

More polarizing is the polemic that follows, with Chapters 5 and 6 painting the majority of organized environmental groups with a crude and uncharitable brush, Chapters 7 and 9 launching a relentless series of accusations against environmental litigants and their legal strategies, and Chapter 8 offering an alternative to this kind of adversarial politics in the form of “cooperative conservation,” through which polluting industry and the state are touted as better able to protect the environment in the absence of legal accountability to civil society groups....

Nature and anti-immigrant politics

With great timing, the latest Environmental History has a review by Sterling Evans of John Hultgren's Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-immigrant Politics in America (U. Minnesota Press, 2015), reminding us that current events have historical (and environmental) roots. (I note that it's frightening how far the "racial logics" that are "socially acceptable withing mainstream political discourse" (see below) have shifted between the book's publication two years ago and the Trump Era.) Some excerpts:

This highly recommended book focuses on the nature of building US-Mexican border walls, the racism that has accompanied such policies, and the anti-immigration fervor that has followed within some environmental organizations. The term that John Hultgren relies on to discuss this issue is “environmental restrictionism,” and he discusses its efficacy very well in Border Walls Gone Green.

Hultgren, a political scientist, suggests the “central thesis” of the book is that “nature is increasingly being deployed as a form of walling—providing a subtle means of reinforcing ‘territorial’ borders without having to revert to racial and cultural logics that are no longer socially acceptable within mainstream political discourse” (pp. 1–2). That is a meritorious thesis to pursue in this study and one that Hultgren works to prove by the end of the book. “Nature, in this sense,” he posits, “provides a way for immigration restrictionists to expand their alliances beyond the far right while still maintaining the support of nativists,” a scenario that he argues is hardly new with “American greens” (p. 2). For theoretical background he provides some historical context from the anti-immigration stances of members of Earth First!, the Sierra Club, and a variety of environmentalist writers and activists. Thus he unpacks the connections between the “nature” of restrictionists and “narratives of political community” in this “emerging form of territorialization.” In other words, his goal is to shed “light on the discursive and institutional pathways through which nature is subtly woven into exclusionary political projects” (p. 3). In a larger sense, Hultgren’s point is to draw attention to “the complexities of natural-cultural interconnection,” especially how the environmental movement has been guilty of using “nature’s perceived location within progressive politics … to be used for exclusionary purposes by a variety of actors who seek to naturalize their (usually privileged) location within the political community while marginalizing others” (p. 5). 

For more on this issue, see here and here.

William Colby, first environmental law prof?

Ansel Adams, William E. Colby (from Carl P. Russell, One Hundred Years in Yosemite (1947))

In a new twist on the search for the first environmental law course, Dan Farber at Legal Planet says he has identified the first environmentalist law teacher:

I’m pretty sure that William E. Colby (1870-1964) qualifies as the nation’s first environmentalist law teacher, if only because environmentalism was very young at the time..  Colby was a lecturer on mining law and water law at Berkeley for twenty-one years, retiring in 1936.  (That doesn’t make him the first natural resources teacher;  Judge Lindley had taught mining and water law before him.) Colby was a close friend of John Muir. He joined the Sierra Club in 1898 and, except for two years, was the Secretary of the Sierra Club from 1900 to 1946.  The Sierra Club credits him with contributing substantially to saving redwoods, enlarging Sequoia National Park, and establishing Kings Canyon and Olympic national parks.  He was also the first Chair of the California State Parks Commission.

I was originally going to call Colby the first “environmental law” professor, but it’s not clear how much his environmental concerns entered into his teaching or scholarship about environmental law.  Even then, the environmental impacts of mining were not unknown or without a legal dimension: a federal judge in the Nineteenth Century had halted hydraulic mining in California because of its devastating impacts on the state’s rivers.  His Sierra Club bio does link his legal and environmental work, saying that his”notable eminence as an attorney who specialized in mining and water law . . . . served him well in his conservation work.”  He did represent environmental interests in a couple of cases.

At the outset, I called Colby the nation’s first environmentalist law professor.  Obviously, I’d be very interested to learn if there were others from the era, but I’m guessing the title will stand.  (I’d also love to hear from anyone who knows more about Colby). Either way, it’s nice to know that law teachers became involved in environmental issues at such an early stage.

The history of the IUCN

My friend Richard Laster recently brought to my attention Barbara Lausche's Weaving a Web of International Law (IUCN/ICEL, 2008, fully available online), a history of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Environmental Law Programme.

The book traces the program's origins back to pre-war Switzerland and the Netherlands, but things really picked up just after World War II, including efforts in the 1950s to advance a World Charter for Nature inspired by the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Man. The organization was influential in the creation of several environmental treaties, as well as in advancing domestic legislation around the world.

Though it aims only to tell the story of one organization, it seems to me the larger significance of the book in the historiographical landscape is that it shifts attention from both internal-doctrinal factors and (domestic) external-social/political/cultural ones that are usually marshaled to explain the evolution of environmental law, (back) to the realm of institutions and especially international experts, and their role in shaping environmental law across jurisdictions and on a global scale.

Environmental legislation

Susan Olzak, Sarah Soule, Marion Coddou, and John Munoz recently posted "Friends or Foes? The Impact of Political Allies and Social Movement Activity on Environmental Legislation in Congress". The abstract:

This paper challenges implications from leading social movement theories of policy change by presenting results that cast doubt on the benefits of having elite allies. Using event history techniques, we show that bill sponsors identified as strong allies of the environmental movement have a significantly lower chance of enacting pro-environmental legislation. Instead, successful legislators had environmental voting records closer to the median voter in Congress, are members of the dominant political party, and hold positions as chairs of environmental committees. While environmental lobbyist groups positively influence the passage of legislation, contrary to conventional wisdom, peaceful protest has no significant effect on legislative outcomes.