faulker079

Eric Biber recently posted a series at Legal Planet based on his recent  Georgetown Law Journal  article, "Law in the Anthropocene Epoch"  (abstract below). The Anthropocene, for those who have somehow missed this buzzword , is (according to its proponents--it has yet to be officially adopted) a new epoch, in which the signs of human changes to the planet are visible in the geologic record. The article and blog posts contain a useful catalog of ways in which current legal doctrines and institutions do a poor job of dealing with environmental challenges, and essentially argue for the desirability of major changes in liberal conceptions of individual rights and private property. That sounds right, but I'd like to quibble over three historical elements of the argument. First, Biber's confidence in the direction of future political and legal change ("Humans will inevitably respond to the Anthropocene", "These responses will ineluctably lead to greater gove...

Water Alternatives  recently published a review by Joe Williams of JJ Schmidt, Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity  (NYU Press, 2017). From the review: The central argument – which might rankle were it not so meticulously made – is that as critical hydro-social scientists we have been getting things wrong for years. Schmidt contends that the old story about the separation of society and nature under modernity and the entrenchment of binary Enlightenment thinking does not apply to water management. The conceptual starting point of many critical scholars, of the transformation of naturally occurring and materially messy 'water', to the industrial product 'H 2 O', delineated, separate from nature, is, according to Schmidt, a false premise. The logic of water management conceived in the United States in the late 1800s, that has since spread across the world, has instead always connected human society, through water, to the land and geological hi...