Customer Reviews

The Making of Environmental Law

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Here, Richard J. Lazarus has delivered a very unique look at the history of environmental law from an evolutionary or holistic perspective. This book will be a valuable resource for anyone looking for an in-depth look at environmental law as a field, but without the need for tedious policy descriptions or scientific minutiae. Lazarus covers the social and political history of environmental thought and how those phenomena shaped American environmental law as we know it. Lazarus also offers rewarding coverage of the challenges faced by concerned lawmakers in a legal system that resists long-term regulatory schemes, redistributions of costs and benefits, and scientific uncertainty. He also shows how environmental law needs to remain both heavily detailed and flexibly dynamic as the natural world and knowledge about it change over time.

This holistic approach to the law is fascinating and highly insightful, but just watch out for Part III in which Lazarus adds too much unnecessary supporting material on technical specifications (Chapter 8); and derails his unique legal history with unenlightening condemnations of American consumerism and high-speed lifestyles, complete with fairly bizarre complaints about sped-up baseball games, pre-faded jeans, and internet dating services. The tail end of the book is also stretched out with many repeated points and brief introductions of post-modern concepts like "convergence" that Lazarus fails to completely explore. But overall, despite the problematic third part of the book, Lazarus has delivered a unique summary and insightful overview of a complex topic that will be of use to both concerned citizens and researchers in a variety of disciplines. [~doomsdayer520~]

Lazarus places environmental laws in broader context, drawing on history and an extraordinary variety of cultural, scientific, and political details to make candid generalizations. This is unusual in a time of fragmentation and compartmentalization of U.S. academic research disciplines, as well as society, beginning in the 1960s.

Thus, for example, many textbooks on environmental policy and history and most environmental organizations tend to focus on the Scottish immigrant advocate of environmental preservation, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt as U.S. environmental pioneers. In contrast, Lazarus points out George Perkins Marsh's 1864 book, "Man and Nature" as the groundbreaking study of the interaction of human society with ecology. Among other things,Lazarus notes the significance of public health awareness and advances around 1900, early "municipal efforts to control pollution", the municipal zoning movement, and the enactment by Congress of the Food and Drug Act, and Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

Lazarus' unquenchable curiosity nourishes his ability, found in a minority of scholars, to use concrete detail in ways that clarify the big picture, rather than letting it confuse or obfuscate. An example is citation of the effects of DDT to control malaria by public health workers in Borneo in the 1960s.The well-intentioned efforts of public health workers caused decimation of the lizard population when they ate DDT-contaminated food. This in turn decreased the local cat population that had been dependent on lizards for much of their diet. Reduction of the cat population led to an explosion of caterpillars that destroyed the thatched roofs, and rats that spread disease within the village. In short, the story illustrates the complexity and sensitivity of ecological relationships.

The author also offers probing and significant detail on political interactions relating to environmental policy. He cites President Nixon's order to his staff to "get his administration out front on the environment" in 1969 and 1970, and the Nixon Administration's early initiatives. He also notes that in time Nixon cooled on environmental action, "becoming convinced that environmentalists were running amok".

Lazarus points out in his introduction that the 1970s environmental laws were "enormously radical" , and that in spite of intense and continuing reform efforts, these laws continue to dominate the U.S. environmental management system. He is mindful of some of the problems with current environmental law, including its patchwork nature and objections by business and other groups. However, he embraces the necessity of centralized command & control law and decries the paralysis in extension of lawmaking. Based on my own historical research (that gained valuable material from Lazarus's book) and comparisons with EU policy*, I believe the book overlooks important issues that have come into ever sharper focus since the publication of Lazarus's work.

Most important is the fact that the U.S. system remains dominated by an outdated system of labyrinthine laws enacted in response to an atmosphere of crisis more than 35 years ago. They were based on assumptions that the greatest threat to the environment came from industry, and that economic forces would overrun federal regulators if not checked. The response not only created an adversarial, rigid framework of law and regulation selectively applicable to manufacturing,other industry, and activities involving land use. The key laws gave exclusive legal standing to environmental protection (excluding economic or other values), empowered citizen enforcement, and transferred leadership roles in environmental management from professional agencies to Congress and civil courts. This politicized system is unique among advanced nations. It not only created a rift in U.S. society, but fostered subsequent hemmhoraging of U.S. manufacturing and industry, decay of infrastructure (which inevitably involves land use), and hamstrung attempts at innovation in environmental management (except in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments). Regulatory problems are now increasingly recognized as barriers to renewable energy development.

*Manheim, The Conflict over Environmental Regulation in the United States, 2009