ecosystem management

Recentering Environmental Law: A Thought Experiment

If we had understood then what we know now. . . .

In 1965, scientists sent LBJ a memo mentioning the risks of climate change. Imagine if history had been a little different. Suppose it had been this memo and a follow-up report, rather than Rachel Carson’s attack on pesticides, that sparked the environmental movement. How would environmental law look different and how might we be thinking about …

CONTINUE READING

The BP Deepwater Horizon Blowout and the Social and Environmental Erosion of the Louisiana Coast

  In a lecture that I gave last week at the University of Minnesota, I discussed how the Louisiana Coast was under grave threat from erosion, rising seas, and pollution even before the explosion on the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon platform. Whole communities have vanished under the rising water, and the livelihoods and communities of …

CONTINUE READING

The Ebb and Flow of Eastern American Forests

As today’s WaPo explains, “Between 1630 and the nadir of Eastern forests in the late 1800s, the East lost about 1,000 acres of forest a day.”  Over the course of the 20th Century, the forests came back.  But now they are under threat again from invasive insects, uncontrolled deer populations, and other ecological imbalances.  “Already, …

CONTINUE READING

TRENDING