Elizabeth Brubaker: Greener Pastures: Decentralizing the Regulation of Agricultural Pollution

Abstract

As researchers in the field of agri-food studies turn their attention to the institutional mechanisms that enable industrial agri-food systems to persist in spite of their ecological contradictions, environmental regulation is likely to become an increasingly important topic (Harrison 2008; Harrison and Wolf 2008). That regulatory systems contribute to the resilience of regulated industries is nowhere more apparent than in the industrial livestock and poultry feeding sectors. State legislatures in the United States have enacted right to farm laws that shield livestock and poultry feeding operations from nuisance lawsuits. State legislatures have also enacted environmental statutes that pre-empt the authority of municipalities to ban feeding operations or regulate them more stringently than they are regulated by state and federal law. By creating a relatively uniform, certain, and predictable regulatory environment for investment capital, state legislatures have attempted to attract and retain the footloose agribusinesses that dominate industrial livestock and poultry feeding. Greener Pastures analyzes how the shift of power from individual litigants and municipalities to higher levels of government has played out in Canada. Focusing on provincial laws that shield agricultural operations from private nuisance lawsuits and municipal regulation, Elizabeth Brubaker, Executive Director of Environment Probe, refers to this shift of power as the ‘‘centralization of control over agricultural pollution’’ (10). Brubaker criticizes centralization, arguing that it has facilitated the industrialization of agriculture and legalized agricultural pollution. And as the subtitle of the book suggests, she advocates the decentralization of agricultural pollution control. Indeed, Brubaker sees decentralization as an effective tool for building more sustainable agri-food systems. The book is divided into seven chapters. Academic researchers looking for a theory chapter will be disappointed. This is a book written not for social theorists but for concerned citizens and policy makers. The first chapter introduces the reader to the problem of centralization. The second is a useful review of how Canadian courts have interpreted the common law of private nuisance. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters describe how Canadian provinces have shielded agricultural operations from nuisance lawsuits. The sixth chapter is about how provinces have stripped municipal governments of their authority to regulate agricultural operations more stringently than they are regulated by the federal government and the provinces. Finally, the seventh chapter makes the case for decentralization. In the rest of this review I will describe Brubaker’s case against centralization and her case for decentralization. I will also point out two problems with her vision of decentralization. In Chap. 2, Brubaker explains how the law of private nuisance can protect both individual property rights and the broader environment. Using the law of nuisance, a landowner can sue an agricultural operation for engaging in activities that deprive the landowner of the use or enjoyment of his or her land. Canadian courts typically order operations to stop creating a nuisance. In some cases, however, courts allow the nuisance to continue, so long as the operation pays the landowner for having to endure it. In the United States the law of public nuisance differs from that of private nuisance. Whereas the law of private nuisance is used to protect individual private property rights, the law of public nuisance is often used to protect the J. L. Clark (&) Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA e-mail: jlc256@psu.edu