faulker079

The current issue of Water History  has an article by Anna Mazanik, "Industrial waste, river pollution and water politics in Central Russia, 1880–1917" . First, an extract (footnotes and references omitted): Imperial Russia did not have a unified legislation on water pollution comparable, for example, to the Rivers Pollution Prevention Act of 1876 in Britain. This did not mean that the tsarist government made no attempt to protect water resources and that the questions of industrial discharge and water pollution were not legally regulated. Rather, their regulation was dispersed across several legal statutes and decrees, often in unclear, repetitive or somewhat contradictory formulations, which meant that even contemporary bureaucrats and experts found it difficult to apply. Czar Alexander II The basic principles of water protection were stipulated in the state legislation such as the Medical and Building Statutes and the Statute of Industry. The Medical Statute forbade “conta...

“Roast Yard no. 2” in Copper Cliff (c. 1903), providing a good idea of the damage the heap roasting inflicted on the local environment (City of Greater Sudbury Heritage Images, Copper Cliff Museum Collection, CC0115) Mark Kuhlberg and Scott Miller recently published "'Protection to the Sulphur-Smoke Tort-feasors': The Tragedy of Pollution in Sudbury, Ontario, the World’s Nickel Capital, 1884–1927" in the Canadian Historical Review . First, the abstract: While there are many tales of mining companies polluting the Canadian communities in which they have operated, Sudbury’s early history stands out. It is arguably the most extreme example of an industry dictating to government how the latter dealt with the local pollution problem–in this case, sulphur dioxide emissions. The capstone achievement was the creation of an extrajudicial solution to the problem that permanently suspended the legal rights of residents seeking redress for their grievances. Moreover, the Ontario...

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...

This week's installment in the digital library of environmental law moves ahead to the twentieth century with Carl E. Geuther's Compendium of Water Pollution Laws ,  published in 1959 by the Manufacturing Chemists' Association, headquartered in Washington, DC. This was the fifth in a series of "Water Pollution Abatement Manuals" published by the trade organization, evidently with a target audience of engineers, managers, and other non-lawyer employees of the chemical industry. Geuther, a lawyer, worked at the time for Du Pont Chemicals; he also seems to have represented them and other chemical companies in court at various times. The Preface explains that the manual is: a compendium of the laws of the forty-nine states (including the District of Columbia, the Territory of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the federal laws of the United States as they pertain to water pollution and water pollution abatement). Statutes and regulations of archaic vintage that are ignored by ...

UC Davis recently hosted a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the California Air Resources Board . Richard Frank reports at Legal Planet : CARB convened for the first time in January 1968, following enabling legislation prompted by the chronic, crippling smog that enveloped Southern California, its residents and economy in the 1950’s and `60’s.  The Board quickly became a national and international leader in air pollution regulatory strategy and pollution control technologies for stationary and vehicular sources alike.  That leadership was reflected in the 1970 Clean Air Act, when Congress granted California–alone among the states–the authority to adopt vehicle emission standards more stringent than those promulgated by the federal government.  (Attendees were reminded at the “CARB at 50” conference that this longstanding federal deference to California auto emission standards is due in large part to strong and successful lobbying by then-California Republica...

Following up last week's post on Michael Lobban's piece on the British Rivers Pollution Prevention Act, 1876 , the second work to be added to our digital library of historical environmental law is Clement Higgins's  A Treatise on the Law Relating to the Pollution & Obstruction of Watercourses ,  published in London by Stevens and Haynes in 1877 (a year after enactment of the water pollution legislation). (An 1882 advertisement for the work is here .) Just as the treatise on game law covered here last week emphasized the inherent conflict of interest between different social groups and the distributive effects of the law, Higgins writes in the Preface: It is to the interest of the public, and to the majority of riparian proprietors, to protect the purity of our rivers, whereas it is generally to the convenience of sanitary authorities and of manufacturers to pollute them. An attempt is made in this book to place before the protectors of our rivers the nature of their ri...

One of the prices those of us who publish chapters in edited collections pay is that our writing often does not get the exposure it would were it published in a journal. So I'd like to bring special notice to a piece by Michael Lobban, "Tort Law, Regulation and River Pollution: The Rivers Pollution Prevention Act and its Implementation, 1876-1951", published in Tort Law and the Legislature: Common Law, Statute and the Dynamics of Legal Change , edited by TT Arvind and Jenny Steele (Hart, 2013). From the introduction: By 1850, the massive urbanisation and industrialisation which Britain experienced over the previous century had generated unprecedented problems of pollution. The mid-century laissez-faire state, with its small central government and fragmented local regulatory bodies, was largely unprepared for these problems, and environmental protection was left in the hands of private litigants - usually wealthy landowners - invoking the common law. However, reform at bot...

At the end of  the previous post in this series  I argued that the history of environmental law remains in need of extensive work both in uncovering the legal roots of contemporary environmental law and in making the lateral connections between historical environmental law and other historical topics. I would like to suggest that of these two dimensions—we might think of them as longitudinal and lateral—the first order of business should be longitudinal, deepening the temporal dimension of environmental law. We will be hard pressed to assess the significance of historical environmental law or its interactions with other areas of law and life without knowing what it was or what people thought about it. However, given that 'environmental law' is a recently coined term, where are we to look for historical environmental law? I will offer several directions of inquiry, some of them already explored by environmental and other historians, though often without the sensitivity to...

Edvard Munch, Separation (1896) (Continuing the series on historical analysis in environmental law. Links to the full series and the article are here .) In May 2010 Environmental History, the leading journal in its field, published an article by Aaron Sachs on antebellum environmental thought as expressed in contemporary American cemeteries. A few months later legal historian Alfred Brophy published a blog post on American antebellum constitutionalism as expressed in speeches made in cemeteries. Though both pieces focused on the same cemeteries, with rich discussions of the political, social, and cultural contexts in which they operated, neither work made any reference to the other, nor, indeed, to the literature or historical sub-discipline in which the other was located. Three years later, both pieces were released in expanded form , again with no interaction between them or their scholarly worlds. This was not an isolated (non-)incident. Though the fields of environmental history...

From Legal Planet : On Friday, January 19, 2018, the University of California, Davis, will host a major conference commemorating the California Air Resources Board’s 50th anniversary.  The conference represents a three-way partnership between UCD School of Law’s California Environmental Law and Policy Center, UCD’s Institute for Transportation Studies and CARB. Since its creation in 1967, CARB has been a model of environmental stewardship, pollution control innovation and public service.  Years before passage of the federal Clean Air Act, CARB pioneered the nation’s first air pollution emission limits and pollution control technologies for motor vehicles—accomplishments that served as a model for the nation and the world.  More recently, CARB has led California’s multifaceted strategy to curb the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, again serving as both an inspiration and model for the global community. The January 19th conference at UC Davis will both celebrate CARB’s past...

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...

More on working-class environmentalism and the law (see, most recently, here ): Jacobin  recently ran a piece by Connor Kilpatrick claiming that "Postwar America’s greatest environmentalist was a labor leader". There's a lot here also about politics, religion, climate skepticism and more. Some excerpts: Today, the AFL-CIO lobbies Congress to pass the Keystone XL pipeline while noted NASA climate scientist James Hansen, one of the first to link global warming to fossil fuels, is repeatedly arrested for protesting such projects. And while in 2017, the idea that the interests between wonky environmentalists and jobs-focused trade unionists would diverge seems like common sense, it’s only because the bad guys won. But it wasn’t a preordained victory. For nearly a decade in the 1960s and ’70s, environmentalism seemed to be on the cusp of a popular reckoning against the powers of capital. And it found an ally in the labor movement which, for a few years, looked like it might b...

Toronto Terminals Railway Central Heating Plant, 1929 Working through my backlog, I recently came across Owen Temby's 2015 article in Planning Perspectives,   "Policy symbolism and air pollution in Toronto and Ontario, 1963–1967" . The article has an interesting take on the secular movement of environmental regulation from the local level to higher levels of government. The argument that industry had more influence at the provincial level than at the municipal level is interesting since environmental groups are also often assumed to prefer higher levels of government, where they can better concentrate the diffuse environmental interests of the public. The article also cuts against the assumption that local regulation was relatively weak, and that the national-level regulation of the 1960s and later was some kind of victory for environmental interests. Food for thought. The abstract: In 1967, jurisdiction over clean air policy in Toronto and the rest of Ontario's munic...

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...

That's the title of a paper recently posted by Daniel Cole . The abstract: Economists and legal scholars have known for decades that "economic instruments," including cap-and-trade regimes and effluent taxes, can reduce emissions at lower cost than command-and-control regulations. Yet, the US system of environmental law remains heavily dominated by command-and-control. How can we explain this remarkable persistence? This paper considers three alternative explanations: (1) path-dependency; (2) public choice theories of interest-group politics; and (3) social-welfare/economic efficiency. Using examples, mainly from the US Clean Air Act, the paper finds that none of the three alternatives offers a sufficient and complete explanation of the persistence of command-and-control. But all three contribute significantly to a comprehensive explanation.

Douglas Kysar recently posted "The Public Life of Private Law: Tort Law as a Risk Regulation Mechanism" , which, among other things, takes issue with the supposed inability of tort law to deal with complex environmental issues; or as the New York Court of Appeals put it in the leading case of  Boomer v. Atlantic Cement Co. , "the judicial establishment is neither equipped... nor prepared to lay down and implement an effective policy for the elimination of air pollution". Kysar argues that "rather than common law litigation being displaced by more sophisticated regulatory approaches, the latter instead may well have depended on the former for their sophistication", and backs up his claim with a case study (in order not to spoil the suspense in his article, after the jump): Read more »

Water filtration plant at Lake Montebello, Maryland, 1915 This Day in Water History recently posted a Municipal Journal and Engineer  article from 1909 , "Stream Pollution in America", which surveys some of the state-level regulation of water pollution going on at the time. The blogger notes that "we know from other sources that these laws were seldom enforced or had penalties that were too lenient, so they were ignored", but I'm not sure the situation today is so different . Some excerpts from the 1909 article: At a Conference of State and Provincial Boards of Health of North America, held in Washington last June, the Committee on the Pollution of Streams appointed last year presented a report in which it gave some data concerning the extent to which the pollution of streams was being regulated by the various States. Ohio, New Jersey and Kansas have, according to this report, passed laws during the last few years which ”are especially worthy of note as indicati...

(Sorry for the long silence, I've been busy with some other things. As always, if you're interested in contributing posts to the blog, I'd be more than happy to help! In the meantime:) Sarah Milov (a co-founder of this blog) recently published a piece in the Washington Post on the history of grass-roots anti-tobacco campaigns that might serve as a model for climate activism today. Some highlights: Activists won the fight against tobacco by working on the local, not national, level. Neither the Occupational Safety & Health Agency nor the Environmental Protection Agency regulate secondhand smoke. Congress has never passed a Non-Smokers’ Rights Act . Instead, 41 states and 1,354 cities have enacted laws to protect the health of citizens. They did so in response to the sustained activism of men and women who argued that the government was not doing enough to protect their rights. ***** In 1973, the dogged efforts of Betty Carnes, a sexagenarian amateur ornithologist, resul...

Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company’s Campbell Works, Youngstown, Ohio (c. 1960) Ohio Valley History  recently published Allen Dieterich-Ward's "'We’ve Got Jobs. Let’s Fight for Them': Coal, Clean Air, and the Politics of Antienvironmentalism" . From the introduction (notes omitted): Narrating the history of the environmental opposition has grown in importance over the past four decades as the rapid expansion of environmental laws gave way to a conservative antienvironmental movement determined to roll back policies seen as challenging older legal imperatives and in conflict with economic goals. Since the 1980s, first journalists and then historians have focused on the back and forth of environmental policymaking. The basic narrative is of an environmental backlash, which began in the mid-1970s in western states—the Sage Brush Rebellion that formed one of the conservative pillars in Reagan’s coalition. By the 1990s, protests over tightening federal land regulations ...