Environmental History
On This Date in History
Exactly forty-two years ago, President Richard M. Nixon signed the National Environmental Quality Act into law on January 1, 1970. Among other remarks, he had this to say: [A] major goal, when you talk about New Year’s resolutions, I wouldn’t say for the next year but for the next 10 years–and I don’t mean that …
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CONTINUE READINGThe First Federal Environmental Law Decision
Of course, it’s a bit arbitrary to pick one case as the first environmental law decision. Many people would probably name the Scenic Hudson opinion, but my nominee would be a decision many decades earlier: Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Co., 18 F. 753 (C.C.Cal. 1884). What makes it reasonable to call this the …
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CONTINUE READINGWhen We Found the Right Words
It’s hard to talk about something if you don’t have the right words to designate it easily. So it’s interesting to look for the first appearance for some of the key words in the legal literature. Presumably, this words were in non-legal use a bit earlier, but their first use in law reviews tells us …
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CONTINUE READINGCall for Nominations: The Five Best Environmental Presidents
About three months ago, my friend Michael Cohen wrote a piece for the Atlantic arguing who were the five best and worst foreign policy presidents of the last century. It got a good bit of well-deserved play in the blogosphere. So what if we tried to do it for environmental policy? The immediate problem is that environmental …
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CONTINUE READINGRemembering Rachel Carson
Earth Day seems an appropriate time to recall past leaders in environmental thought. Few have played a greater role in the development of U.S. environmental law than Rachel Carson (1907-1964), whose books did much to spark the environmental movement. It is good to hear that her books have been reprinted as ebooks by Open Road …
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