Overview

Displays how throughout US history, law has consistently been foundational to the nation's environmental exploitation and protection, offering crucial lessons for addressing contemporary challenges The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States has been a tale of countless contrasting, overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Cultivating both the planet's biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health, US laws have been the key driver of both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation. Lessons for a Warming Planet showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of US Environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States: the Allocation Era, Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Era, the Modernization Era, the Environmental Era of the Sixties and Seventies, and the contemporary Contested Era. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced legal change. Camacho and Daniels ask what lessons can be drawn from this environmental legal history to help observers address today's contemporary challenges, from climate change to AI and other emerging biotechnologies. In looking to the past, the book illustrates how others have deployed legal imagination to reckon with similar environmental challenges. Providing a deeply fascinating and insightful history of environmental law, Lessons for a Warming Planet beckons readers to consider: What lessons can be drawn from environmental legal history and its related social, political, and economic movements to address the critical problems of today?

Full Product Details

9781479846993

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Lessons for a Warming Planet provides an expansive treatment of the impact of environmental law in its broadest sense on our nation's lands, resources, and peoples. In doing so, it offers a valuable perspective on our present-day contestations over natural resource extraction, climate, equity, and environmental protection."" - Alexandra B. Klass, University of Michigan Law School ""A comprehensive, lively, and timely history of U.S. environmental law by two of today's most insightful legal experts. The authors give hope for a more sustainable future by showing how, even during eras of unconstrained development, innovative legal arguments and initiatives can ultimately give rise to the type of critical environmental protections needed today."" - Barton H. Thompson, Jr., Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law, Stanford Law School ""Professors Camacho and Daniels provide an engaging history of U.S. environmental and natural resources laws, and a fresh framework for understanding what features and challenges have emerged and endured in our laws over the past 250 years. Their insights into law, history, and culture provide important lessons for the future of U.S. environmental law."" - Sean Hecht, Managing Attorney, California Regional Office, Earthjustice and Former Evan Frankel Professor of Policy and Practice, UCLA School of Law. ""This book appears at a time when the United States Government seems determined to abandon or reverse any energy and environmental policy that mitigates global warming and it could not be more needed. Examining American legal history from the earliest impact of European settlement to the present, the authors explore the broad array of policies that have been adopted both to encourage and rein in the impacts of economic exploitation on nature. The results of this unusually deep assessment of the evolution of environmental law take us well beyond the march of legislation and litigation and inspire new thinking about how to address the current crisis."" - Mary Nichols, Distinguished Counsel for the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UCLA School of Law ""Lessons for a Warming Planet is a remarkable and ambitious book. It manages to recast the entire field of environmental law to show that law and policy has always affected the environment, from the beginnings of the republic to today. Its categorization of five major periods of environmental history provide an accessible way to understand which issues were most salient and how contestations over power, technology, economics, and politics helped shape their resolution. As we face our greatest existential environmental threat ever, Camacho and Daniels remind us that there are important lessons to learn from this history."" - Ann Carlson, Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, UCLA School of Law

Author Information

Alejandro E. Camacho (Author) Alejandro E. Camacho is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author, with Robert Glicksman, of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework. Brigham Daniels (Author) Brigham Daniels is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.  

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