faulker079

A while back we noted an H-Environment roundtable on Andrew Kahrl's The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South . Now Kahrl has turned his attention to the North in Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline  (Yale UP, 2018), and Law & History Review has a review by Deborah Dinner . Dinner writes: On July 4, 1974, a daring, no-holds-barred activist named Ned Coll launched an amphibian assault on an exclusive Beach Club in Madison, Connecticut. Coll’s comrades included more than fifty children from nearby Hartford’s poor, majority African-American housing projects. The children, their mothers, and staff members of Revitalization Corps, an advocacy organization dedicated to racial equality and justice for the poor, were clothed in bathing suits and armed only with laughter, songs, and excitement. Yet the affluent white parents on the beach saw the newcomers’ entry as an ambush and quickly retrea...

[A guest book review from Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith:] In the newest addition to the Studies in American Politics series from Princeton University Press, David Vogel in California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader  (Princeton UP, 2018) asks how it is that California has had such success in protecting its environment and has become a world leader in making and implementing environmental policy and law. Vogel sketches boldly on a large canvas: This book describes what is in many respects a remarkable success story. It demonstrates how a state government has been able to overcome substantial obstacles and enact a wide range of regulations that have made measurable - though admittedly uneven – progress in protecting its environment and improving the quality of life of its residents. Although California has often seemed on the verge of ecological (as well as economic) catastrophe, it has proven remarkably resilient. The state’s ability to remain the most importan...

The Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law recently published an extended review  by Michael Blumm of Douglas Brinkley's Rightful Heritage:   Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (HarperCollins, 2016). The abstract: Douglas Brinkley, biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and his environmental legacy, has produced a sequel on his distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). In a comprehensive ecobiography, Brinkley shows in some detail how committed an environmentalist FDR was, protecting federal lands, encouraging state conservation efforts, making wildlife protection a national priority, and dedicating the federal government to soil protection and forest replanting. Although FDR’s romance with federal dams undercuts the assertion somewhat, the Brinkley biography successfully shows that FDR has a legitimate claim to being the foremost of environmental American presidents.

[Second and final part of a guest post by Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith - Part I is here .] The second point to take away from Arch’s book is that when organized whaling became established in early modern Japan, under the watchful eye of domainal lords ( daimyo ), who could decide who had jurisdiction over particular whaling areas, or over bodies of whales either washed up on shore or brought to a particular shore for processing, regulation was a way of dealing with the local problems of particular businesses, and of their interrelationships, and of the ways those businesses could benefit the domain through fee exactions, as a kind of tax-like income for the domain. It was not about ensuring the continued availability of whale meat as a food source. Indeed, when it took hold and expanded during the Tokugawa peace, Japanese whaling was not primarily about food. It was about profit and about ensuring the continued supply of a wide range of whale products. Sutter is eloquent on this point: W...

[Sorry for the continued silence, but thanks to  Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith for pitching in with this two-part book review!] At the end of May, the New York Times along with other major news outlets around the world reported that a new round of scientific whaling by Japan during the austral summer of 2017-18 yielded a catch of 333 minke whales, but that of this number 122 were pregnant females and 114 were considered immature individuals [1]. The news invited and perhaps stoked outrage, which history shows can be a powerful force shaping environmental law and policy. Japan took the whales pursuant to a scientific research exemption to the moratorium on commercial whaling enacted by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and effective in 1986 [2]. The first research program under which Japan continued whaling in the Antarctic despite and perhaps in defiance of the moratorium, a program known as JARPA-II, was found in a 2014 decision of the International Court of Justice not to meet ...

January's Environmental History  has a review by Leif Fredrickson of Michael Mix's  Leaded: The Poisoning of Idaho’s Silver Valley (OSU Press, 2016). From the review: The poisonous history of the Bunker Hill Company should be as well known to environmental historians as the Battle of Bunker Hill is to historians of the American Revolution. Located in the Silver Valley in northern Idaho, Bunker Hill mining and smelting operations polluted the surrounding area and poisoned residents and workers with lead for a century. In the 1970s, Bunker Hill’s operations wrought “the worst community lead exposure problem in the United States,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The silver lining to the Silver Valley disaster was that it fueled new and stronger national regulations for lead pollution. In Leaded , Mix seeks to unearth the “root causes” of mining and smelter pollution in the Silver Valley. He argues that pollution went unabated for most of the twe...

Michael Wise reviewed Miles Powell's Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Harvard UP, 2016) in October's Environmental History. From the review: As environmental historians, our frequent assertion that “humans are a part of nature” often comes with little recognition of the fact that slave owners, eugenicists, and a variety of other white supremacists insisted on the very same thing for generations before we first noticed a trouble with wilderness. Miles A. Powell’s Vanishing America directly assesses the converging project of American race-making and American environmentalism over the last two centuries, and it does so with sophistication and uncompromising clarity. The troubling stories that Powell uncovers implicate many of the founding figures of American environmental thought within a tradition of white nationalism that positioned the problem of species extinction as a symptom and symbol of America’s racial degeneration. Far...

October's Environmental History  had a review by Erik Loomis of Adam Tompkins's  Ghostworkers and Greens: The Cooperative Campaigns of Farmworkers and Environmentalists for Pesticide Reform (Cornell UP, 2016). Tompkins's book seems to add to a growing body of work on the labor movement as a force behind important developments in environmental regulation . From the review: Because legislation excluded agricultural workers from the New Deal’s labor protections, farmworkers lacked political power, forcing them to seek alliances with middle-class organizations to win their battles and protect themselves from the chemicals used by growers. Environmental organizations needed farmworkers to counter accusations of being anti-worker and to ground their claims in the lived experiences of the most affected populations. The UFW’s 1970 grape contract included provisions that banned growers from using chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT and dieldrin. This laid critical groundwork for ...

October's Environmental History  carried a review by Robert Gioielli of Cody Ferguson's  This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century (Rutgers UP, 2015). Gioielli writes that the book's case studies of local environmental movements show the importance of the flowering of grassroots activism after the “regulatory reform revolution” of the 1970s when American citizens had access to new avenues of environmental protest via federal legislation. Far away from the large centralized environmental groups in Washington, D.C., to these activists, environmental issues were as much about the future of local communities, good governance, and justice as they were about the health of ecological systems. Ferguson also contends that these stories show how “environmental and democratic reforms were intertwined in the late twentieth century” (p. 6). The book begins with the Northern Plains Resource Council, a group of Montana residents formed in the 1970s to ...

The website of the Institut Heritage Studies has three reviews of the oddly titled (or translated)  40 Years World Heritage Convention: Popularizing the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage by Marie-Theres Albert and Birgitta Ringbeck (De Gruyter, 2015). Some excerpts from Klaus Hüfner's review: The Convention for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention) was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 1972, but only came into force in 1975. The Convention, to date ratified by 191 States, belongs without doubt to the most successful international legal documents; it enjoys a tremendous popularity not only in Germany but also worldwide. ***** The volume consists of seven chapters. The introductory Chapter 1 postulates the preservation of heritage as “an exceptional political, participatory and interdisciplinary act” (p. 2). It follows that it is necessary both in the nomination as well as in measures for the preservation of cultu...

In developments close to home, the latest issue of the New York Review of Books  has a review by Raja Shehadeh of Gary Fields's Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror  (U. California Press, 2017). Some excerpts: Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of legal developments in the Ottoman Empire—which ruled Palestine until 1917—had enabled the growth of... large land holdings. They included the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which attempted to eliminate the musha system, whereby land was held in common, and required that the cultivator-turned-owner register his land with Treasury officials. ***** The legal processes the Ottomans had begun were continued in the years after the end of their rule—first by the British military occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1922, and then when the League of Nations granted the British a mandate over Palestine from 1922 to 1948. During both periods, the British continued to revise the land laws with a vie...

I recently came across Tapio Katko's Finnish Water Services: Experiences in Global Perspectives (Finnish Assn. of Water Utilities, 2016). It's been reviewed in several journals; here are some excerpts from Glen O'Hara's review in Scandanavian Economic History Review  (references to page numbers omitted): Particularly impressive sections include those on the post-Second World War growth of transnational water governance systems through the auspices of the United Nations, including the International Hydrological Decade of 1965–1974, the subsequent International Hydrological Programme and the regional Baltic agreements that followed the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm and then, in a further burst of maritime co-operation, after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Perhaps because of Finland’s small population, and her traditional Nordic role within the international aid and development network, the international situation plays a key role in thi...

The latest American Historical Review has a review by Neil Maher of Darren Speece's  Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (U. Washington Press, 2017). Some excerpts: Speece begins with the conflict’s prehistory, describing the rise in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a “corporatist” logging industry that was permitted, with encouragement from the California Board of Forestry, to self-regulate cutting practices on privately owned land. Redwood preservation during this period most often involved elite groups, such as San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, purchasing groves from timber companies. The next four chapters, which jump to the late twentieth century and the “Redwood Wars” themselves, follow local activists and their two-pronged strategy—involving lawsuits and direct action campaigns—that all but halted old-growth logging on the North Coast and, in doing so, weakened the corporatist reign...

This past summer H-Environment published a Roundtable Review of Richard Newman's Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present (OUP, 2016). An excerpt from Stephanie Malin's contribution: While the Superfund Act [CERCLA] resulted from national awareness of Love Canal, and though Newman focuses on the success that legislation represents, we conclude with a troubling denouement. Love Canal is now Black Village Creek, filling up with a new round of working-class residents enticed by homes priced 10 – 20% below market value. Though former residents including Gibbs fought the relocation, they lost this battle. Developers won. The results have been tragic; as Newman recounts, health problems and toxic exposures have reemerged in this ‘remediated’ community, despite the extensive, state-of-the-art environmental engineering schemes used to filter leachate and otherwise remediate the site. Newman’s Love Canal succeeds in highlighting for readers an exceptionally timely...

The Court of Aldermen and Common Council of the City of London (1780) Last week's  Reviews in History posted a review by Elly Robson of William Cavert's  The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City  (Cambridge UP, 2016, recently out in paperback). (For an earlier review see here .) From the review: Cavert is particularly strong on the complex role of political and legal institutions – both local and national – in managing coal supply and regulating smoke. In his account, the politics of coal and smoke was a politics of governance. Chapter five, ‘Nuisance and neighbours’, deals with the legal category of ‘nuisance’ to cast light on how conflict over pollution was defined and mediated. In it, Calvert investigates a smorgasbord of relatively ineffective litigious avenues for pursuing redress against industrial polluters who infringed on royal or individual property and health. Law Reports form the mainstay of the chapter and Cavert’s frustration is eviden...

The connections between working-class environmentalism and environmental law is an understudied theme that I've had occasion to highlight before (e.g. here and here  and in my forthcoming article on historical analysis in environmental law ). Last year I noted that Erik Loomis won an award for his article, "When Loggers Were Green: Lumber, Labor, and Conservation, 1937-1948". Now Robert Walls has a review  of Loomis's book,  Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge UP, 2015), for Environmental History . From the review: Focusing on everyday labor and the designs of union activists, Loomis provides a complex portrait of how the industry’s base attempted to advance its goals of securing both sustainable forest resources and health and safety protections for men and women in an often dangerous workplace. The result is an informed analysis of labor’s successes and failures, one that broadly encompasses the radicalism of the Industrial Wo...

Colorado water law continues to spur scholarship. The recent issue of Environmental History has a review by Michael Weeks of  Robert Crifasi's  A Land Made from Water: Appropriation and the Evolution of Colorado’s Landscape, Ditches, and Water Institutions  (University Press of Colorado, 2015). From the review: While the book presents no definitive argument, Crifasi is skeptical of claims that water management in the West has been synonymous with concentrated power. Rather, his often meandering narrative suggests that water developed roughly along practical and evolutionary lines, with users and institutions responding logically to changing water needs. Most of the text centers on the period from Colorado’s 1858 Gold Rush to the early twentieth century. Heavy doses of environmental determinism appear throughout. Crifasi argues that failed adventures in ditchdigging and the need to move water across property lines pushed farmers to enlist the aid of the territory/state of Colorado t...

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...

A while back Environmental History  carried a review by Daniel Simberloff of Ian Rotherham's Eco-history: An Introduction to Biodiversity and Conservation (White Horse Press, 2014). Simberloff notes: The high point of Eco-history is a remarkable 42-page “Timeline,” detailing in linear fashion 224 key points in the history of British nature conservation from AD 1000 to 2000: laws especially, but also extinctions, introductions, establishment of nature reserves and environmental organizations. Rotherham concisely lists the impacts of each event, with further explication for about half of them. This section alone could be published as a short book that almost any environmental historian would value. I don't think they're related, but there's also a very elaborate website called "Environmental history timeline" , itself packed with little known nuggets of environmental-legal history, such as the fact that in 1970 US President Richard Nixon "issued an execut...

Public Books recently ran a review by Max Holleran of  Peter Dauvergne's  Environmentalism of the Rich (MIT Press, 2016). Holleran writes that the book traces the shifting tactics of mainstream environmentalism from the radicalism of the 1970s to the corporate partnerships of the 1990s, in which companies accomplished incremental changes through in-house consultations with groups like the Sierra Club. It details how many green groups began as firebrand protectors of the earth, deeply inspired by indigenous movements that opposed the sale and commodification of nature, but have since morphed into something akin to compliance departments for large companies. ***** Green movements of the Global North and the Global South are markedly different; within that divide, unique national experiences have produced a variety of environmentalisms, some of which do not even use the name and prefer to align with indigenous rights or class-based movements. The 1970s environmental movement came of...