Rethinking Environmental Law

Rethinking Environmental Law PDF

Author: Laitos, Jan G.

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2021-08-27

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1788976037

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Challenging historic assumptions about human relationships with nature, Jan G. Laitos examines how environmental laws have addressed environmental problems in the past, and the reasons for the laws' inability to successfully prevent environmental contamination and alterations of critical environmental systems. This forward-thinking book offers a creative and organic alternative to traditional but ultimately unsuccessful environmental rules. It explains the need for a new generation of environmental laws grounded in the universal laws of nature which might succeed where past and current approaches have largely failed.

Unnatural Law

Unnatural Law PDF

Author: David R. Boyd

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 0774840633

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While governments assert that Canada is a world leader in sustainability, Unnatural Law provides extensive evidence to refute this claim. A comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Canadian environmental law, the book provides a balanced, critical examination of Canada's record, focusing on laws and policies intended to protect water, air, land, and biodiversity. Three decades of environmental laws have produced progress in a number of important areas, such as ozone depletion, protected areas, and some kinds of air and water pollution. However, Canada's overall record remains poor. In this vital and timely study, David Boyd explores the reasons why some laws and policies foster progress while others fail. He ultimately concludes that the root cause of environmental degradation in industrialized nations is excessive consumption of resources. Unnatural Law outlines the innovative changes in laws and policies that Canada must implement in order to respond to the ecological imperative of living within the Earth's limits. The struggle for a sustainable future is one of the most daunting challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Everyone - academics, lawyers, students, policy-makers, and concerned citizens - interested in the health of the Canadian and global environments will find Unnatural Law an invaluable source of information and insight. For more information on Unnatural Law visit David Boyd's site, www.unnaturallaw.com.

The Common Law and the Environment

The Common Law and the Environment PDF

Author: Roger E. Meiners

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780847697090

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Since 1970, when the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the primary means for addressing environmental problems in the U.S. has been through comprehensive federal statutes and detailed regulations. Evaluating almost three decades of experience with the Clean Air Act, Superfund, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other major federal environmental statutes, the contributors to this volume question the effectiveness and impact of the legal regime that created these regulations. While most studies of environmental policy paint a picture of improvement through government initiatives, these essays argue the contrary. Pointing to Cleveland's burning river, the death of Lake Erie, smog in Los Angeles, and Love Canal, the contributors demonstrate that command-and-control regulation of the environment has not delivered the great improvements in environmental quality as promised. The Common Law and the Environment offers principles for a new approach to protecting the environment and looks to evidence of the successes of alternative legal systems to address significant problems.

Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics

Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics PDF

Author: Nicholas Askounes Ashford

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 1125

ISBN-13: 0262012383

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The past twenty-five years have seen a significant evolution in environmental policy, with new environmental legislation and substantive amendments to earlier laws, significant advances in environmental science, and changes in the treatment of science (and scientific uncertainty) by the courts. This book offers a detailed discussion of the important issues in environmental law, policy, and economics, tracing their development over the past few decades through an examination of environmental law cases and commentaries by leading scholars. The authors focus on pollution, addressing both pollution control and prevention, but also emphasize the evaluation, design, and use of the law to stimulate technical change and industrial transformation, arguing that there is a need to address broader issues of sustainable development. Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics,which grew out of courses taught by the authors at MIT, treats the traditional topics covered in most classes in environmental law and policy, including common law and administrative law concepts and the primary federal legislation. But it goes beyond these to address topics not often found in a single volume: the information-based obligations of industry, enforcement of environmental law, market-based and voluntary alternatives to traditional regulation, risk assessment, environmental economics, and technological innovation and diffusion. Countering arguments found in other texts that government should play a reduced role in environmental protection, this book argues that clear, stringent legal requirements--coupled with flexible means for meeting them--and meaningful stakeholder participation are necessary for bringing about environmental improvements and technologicial transformations.

The Green State

The Green State PDF

Author: Robyn Eckersley

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-03-05

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0262550563

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What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state—seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent years, most environmental scholars and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain of much current thinking, this book argues that the state is still the preeminent political institution for addressing environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of the global order, and greening the state is a necessary step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international policy and law. The Green State seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology" expands the boundaries of the moral community to include the natural environment in which the human community is embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a "good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional and multilateral arrangements that could help transform the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic state. Rethinking the state in light of the principles of ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role: that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory.

Rethinking Sustainable Development in Terms of Justice

Rethinking Sustainable Development in Terms of Justice PDF

Author: Lorena Martínez Hernández

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1527527395

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The need to reassess the discourse of sustainable development in terms of equity and justice has grown rapidly in the last decade. This book explores renewed and distinctive approaches to the sustainability and justice debate, integrating a range of perspectives that include moral philosophy, sociology and law. By bringing together young and senior scholars from the field of global environmental law and governance from around the world, this work is divided into three sections, covering sustainable development and justice, sustainable development in context, and sustainable development and judiciaries. This book will appeal to academics, law practitioners and policy-makers interested in shaping future socio-legal research on global environmental law and governance.

From Exception to Promotion

From Exception to Promotion PDF

Author: Elena Cima

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9004467564

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From Exception to Promotion: Re-Thinking the Relationship between International Trade and Environmental Law tells a new, unconventional story of the nexus between international trade and environmental law - a story in which the keyword is synergy rather than conflict, and where the trade regime was always meant for something greater than simply trade liberalization. This ‘something greater’ was peace in the first half of the 20th century. Today, it is sustainable development, environmental protection, and social inclusion. Environmental protection is therefore neither antithetical to the overarching purpose of the trading system nor simply a ‘non-trade’ issue to be incorporated within the trade regime, but rather part of its very nature and purpose. By telling this ‘untold’ story of the nexus, this book intends to raise historical awareness and open a constructive discussion on the future of the trade regime and of international economic law governance at large.

Rethinking Food Systems

Rethinking Food Systems PDF

Author: Nadia C.S. Lambek

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9400777787

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Taking as a starting point that hunger results from social exclusion and distributional inequities and that lasting, sustainable and just solutions are to be found in changing the structures that underlie our food systems, this book examines how law shapes global food systems and their ongoing transformations. Using detailed case studies, historical mapping and legal analysis, the contributors show how various actors (farmers, civil society groups, government officials, international bodies) use or could use different legal tools (legislative, jurisprudential, norm-setting) on various scales (local, national, regional, global) to achieve structural changes in food systems. Section 1, Institutionalizing New Approaches, explores the possibility of institutionalizing social change through two alternative visions for change – the right to food and food sovereignty. Individual chapters discuss Vía Campesina’s struggle to implement food sovereignty principles into international trade law, and present case studies on adopting food sovereignty legislation in Nicaragua and right to food legislation in Uganda. The chapters in Section 2, Regulating for Change, explore the extent to which the regulation of actors can or cannot change incentives and produce transformative results in food systems. They look at the role of the state in regulating its own actions as well as the actions of third parties and analyze various means of regulating land grabs. The final section, Governing for Better Food Systems, discusses the fragmentation of international law and the impacts of this fragmentation on the realization of human rights. These chapters trace the underpinnings of the current global food system, explore the challenges of competing regimes of intellectual property, farmers rights and human rights, and suggest new modes of governance for global and local food systems. The stakes for building better food systems are high. Our current path leaves many behind, destroying the environment and entrenching inequality and systemic poverty. While it is commonly understood that legal structures are at the heart of food systems, the legal academy has yet to make a significant contribution to recent discussions on improving food systems - this book aims to fill that gap.

Rethinking Private Authority

Rethinking Private Authority PDF

Author: Jessica F. Green

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-12-22

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0691157596

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Rethinking Private Authority examines the role of non-state actors in global environmental politics, arguing that a fuller understanding of their role requires a new way of conceptualizing private authority. Jessica Green identifies two distinct forms of private authority--one in which states delegate authority to private actors, and another in which entrepreneurial actors generate their own rules, persuading others to adopt them. Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence spanning a century of environmental rule making, Green shows how the delegation of authority to private actors has played a small but consistent role in multilateral environmental agreements over the past fifty years, largely in the area of treaty implementation. This contrasts with entrepreneurial authority, where most private environmental rules have been created in the past two decades. Green traces how this dynamic and fast-growing form of private authority is becoming increasingly common in areas ranging from organic food to green building practices to sustainable tourism. She persuasively argues that the configuration of state preferences and the existing institutional landscape are paramount to explaining why private authority emerges and assumes the form that it does. In-depth cases on climate change provide evidence for her arguments. Groundbreaking in scope, Rethinking Private Authority demonstrates that authority in world politics is diffused across multiple levels and diverse actors, and it offers a more complete picture of how private actors are helping to shape our response to today's most pressing environmental problems.

Rethinking Sustainability

Rethinking Sustainability PDF

Author: Jonathan M. Harris

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2003-03-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780472089246

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DIVProvides important guideposts toward a more complete theory of sustainable human and economic development /div