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Restored perennial and season marsh and riparian forest at Wildlands Mitigation Bank, Placer County, California ( EPA ) The always interesting Dave Owen recently posted "The Conservative Turn Against Compensatory Mitigation" , whose primary subject is the recent turn described in the article's title ( compensatory mitigation is a policy that require parties receiving permits for environmentally harmful activities to compensate for them by improving environmental conditions elsewhere). Owen also has something to say about the origins of the practice, rejecting the arguments of critics who have portrayed compensatory mitigation as part of a neoliberal, capitalist resurgence : The proponents of compensatory mitigation reform hardly ever identified their efforts as measures to boost the capitalist system . As one retired departmental employee explained to me, even during the Reagan Administration, debates about compensatory mitigation were driven more by conflicts over regul...

Environmental History  recently published Elisabetta Novello and James C. McCann's "The Building of the Terra Firma: The Political Ecology of Land Reclamation in the Veneto from the Sixteenth through the Twenty-first Century" .  The abstract: The 1963 Vajont disaster and the devastating floods that hit the Veneto as well as other areas of Italy in 1966 brought about a significant revision of the policies on soil defense and civic protection. This was the last step in a long process of environmental management intending to build a balanced human-environmental system from the early modern period to the present. This essay explores the changing political ecology of soil and water management in the Veneto region in northern Italy. More specifically, the study traces the evolution of land reclamation works in the longue durée —in particular over the last five centuries—and the economic and social consequences of human actions on the territory. In order to fully outline the pol...

Marco Island in 1964 (left) and present day (Michael Coleman) Slate recently published a piece by Henry Grabar, "The Lessons of Marco Island" , on the Florida island that was savaged by Hurricane Irma last week and the legal history that enabled its development while protecting nearby wetlands. Some highlights: Forty years ago, the consensus of the state and federal governments was that Marco Island should not have been built at all. The community was the setting for one of the biggest development controversies in the United States and nearly ruined one of Florida’s largest and most celebrated developers. In a region with a notorious building addiction, it became the site of the environmental movement’s greatest victory over the Florida growth machine. Ecological foresight halted millions of dollars in real estate development and all but ended an engineering technique that had turned the South Florida coast from swampland to resort. ***** When brothers Robert, Elliott, and Fr...