U.S. environmental policy and politics: a documentary history

Pursuing a regional approach to history puts twenty-first-century historians in the strange position of unconsciously echoing their nineteenth-century predecessors, though with differing goals. When historian Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the Mid-Atlantic region “typically American,” he was of course intent upon divining an elusive national character, not currently a goal of historians. But Turner's frontier thesis emphasized geography and region in a way that would still be recognizable to environmental historians today. For example, Turner's observations concerning the Mid-Atlantic region hinged upon the physical geography of place, property ownership, and use of land. He noted that the Mid-Atlantic was a doorway for emigrants from all of Europe, who “entered by New York harbor” and were then intermixed; that the residents were “rooted in material prosperity” based on the land; and that the region, “with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled regions, and with a system of connecting waterways,” was uniquely situated as a mechanism for the admixture of peoples. In this way, the Mid-Atlantic served as a microcosm of Turner's conception of the frontier as a churning machine that intermingled people from regions and nations to create an essentially American temperament.1Putting aside the intent behind Turner's “typically American” label, it is still possible to apply that judgment to the environmental history of the Mid-Atlantic. The region possesses the most significant concentration of urban centers in the nation, a long history of extractive industry, the legacies of early water-powered industrialization, and the remnants of some of the worst pollution disasters in American history. Along with those built environments, the region contains extensive forests with a long history of human management, complex river systems and bays, diverse colonial and pre-Columbian pasts, agricultural systems both past and current, and biological complexity in fields, forests, rivers, mountains, and shores. This diversity does not make the region unique—but it does mean that almost all of the major themes of environmental history appear in the places roughly bounded by the Atlantic, the 36th parallel, the western edge of the Appalachians, and the northern reaches of the Adirondacks.The environmental matters covered in this article have long been under discussion by scholars, but the emergence of the Marcellus shale issue has served to refocus attention on these topics, some of which had seemed to slip at least slightly from the attention of the field of environmental history. I am particularly interested in two intertwined approaches: environmental history that details the politics, policy, and popular consciousness that shape decisionmaking; and environmental history that explores the impacts of those decisions on nature and landscapes. I refer to these approaches as the history of modern environmental politics and the history of human impact on place. The distinction here lies in what the scholar initially sets out to study: (a) a political process, philosophy, or force by which environmental decisions are made, or (b) a place, landscape, topic, or species that may be transformed by those decisions. Despite this attempt at differentiation, much of the environmental history of the region remains intertwined: no matter the locale, tugging at any thread in the weave of environmental issues eventually pulls on the entire mess. Whether by examining politicians, activists, legislatures, cities, markets, corporations, landscapes, forests, or fish, the histories examined in this essay demonstrate that studying environmental topics in the Mid-Atlantic region involves a bewildering welter of forces and effects, no matter the label.Multiple works published in the last decade have focused on individual politicians or historical actors with connections to the Mid-Atlantic, with the goal of explaining their connections to larger issues in environmental politics. Char Miller produced an early example of this with his work on Gifford Pinchot, arguing that the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service “was at the forefront of those seeking international agreements to check environmental devastation.” From an outdoorsy rest cure in the Saranac Lake region of upstate New York to the managed forests of the family's “summer castle” in Milford, Pennsylvania, Miller continually links the peripatetic Pinchot to the Mid-Atlantic region.2 Similarly, Thomas G. Smith's Green Republican and J. Brooks Flippen's Conservative Conservationist attempt to explain how Republican politics were once connected to the roots of environmentalism in a way rarely seen today. Flippen locates some of Republican attorney and EPA administrator Russell Train's conservationist impulses in a personal attachment to his farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore, while Smith connects Congressman John Saylor's political action to his personal experience of nature in western Pennsylvania.3This attempt to interpret individual actors as bellwethers of larger events also frames recent studies of liberalism. A recent article by Peter Siskind on Nelson Rockefeller, for example, concludes that he “proved the most powerful and influential governor in the nation during the 1960s era, and New York continued in the vanguard of social policy experimentation.” As such, “the unfolding of racial and environmental politics explored here reveal important facets of the evolution of and tensions within post–World War II American liberalism at the state and local level.” In a similar vein, Adam M. Sowards's The Environmental Justice details the life and evolving environmental ethic of the politically active Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, complete with stories of his hearty and physically demanding outdoorsy life, and his mid-1950s public defense of the Chesapeake and Ohio Path in Maryland.4It is obvious that many historians have chosen biographies of individual political figures as a means to narrate historical change in the politics of the environment, but there are a few scholars with the even larger goal of narrating transformations in philosophy and culture. Ben Minteer takes this approach when arguing that Benton MacKaye's cofounding of the Wilderness Society, his writings, and his commitment to creating the Appalachian Trail justifies elevating him into the company of great environmentalist writers such as Lewis Mumford and Aldo Leopold. Similarly, Char Miller's immensely readable biography also argues that Pinchot's “conviction that the power of politics and government … must be employed to expand the benefits of democracy to those often excluded from civic life remains an article of faith among contemporary progressives.” Along the same lines, Adam M. Sowards declares that in increasing public involvement in resource management, Justice Douglas and the larger conservation movement “democratized conservation [as] part of a larger reform process to open up the process of governing.”5These works demonstrate that using the examples of individual actors may certainly be a fruitful route for historians to portray larger stories of environmental politics, but the increasing availability of the archival records of environmental organizations also offers a new path to the same end. Frank Uekoetter's The Age of Smoke compares air pollution control policy in Germany and the United States, with much of the focus on Pittsburgh. Uekoetter ends up analyzing eras of cooperation and confrontation in policymaking, concluding that “the age of smoke emerges as even more crucial: never before or since was the nation-state so well suited to defining and enforcing codes of acceptable conduct and creating institutions to that effect.” My own Citizen Environmentalists fits into this category. This project sifted newly available archival records to more closely examine Pittsburgh's environmental policy in the 1960s and 1970s.6 Dyana Furmansky's 2009 Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy, demonstrates how new archival sources both create and complicate new narratives of movements history. “Before Rachel Carson, Rosalie Edge was the nation's premier example of how one person could wed science to public advocacy for the preservation and restoration of the wide natural world,” writes Furmansky, but it was only through using letters and materials from the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, uncatalogued before 1999, that the author could tell this story.7Possibly the best example of a new scholarly focus on political activism within the narrative of a well-known topic comes from Elizabeth Blum's Love Canal Revisited, which re-examines the famous incident through archival records of a variety of environmental groups, producing a topical analysis distinct from that previously offered by the historical actors involved. Shifting the attention from the story of the individual activist displays the complexity of issues, ending with the argument that “environmental activism can be used to measure the acceptance of other social movements and general ideas about race, class, and gender by different groups over time.” Along the way, Blum calls our attention to the multiplicity and complexity of activist groups at Love Canal, extending the story from Lois Gibbs's Love Canal Homeowners Association to include the Ecumenical Task Force and the Concerned Love Canal Renters Association, and placing all of this in context with the contemporaneous group Women Strike for Peace. Re-examining a well-known story through newly available archival sources has yielded a very different history of environmental activism and its meaning.8While neglected overall, activism as a subject of inquiry is still at the center of many historians' work, including Olga Polmar on New Jersey's toxic heritage and unequal distribution of risk, and Heather Fenyk and David Guston on citizen activism and wetlands in Maryland.9 Michael Egan has attempted to locate models for environmental activism in nineteenth-century New York's battles over regulating milk for public health purposes, starting with the undeniably engaging declaration that “this essay is a fraud.” With the reader's attention firmly in hand, he explains that “this essay is a fraud, because it trades on the anachronistic notion that the urban reformers who pushed for quality control and public health were early environmentalists.” Still, he continues, such a mental trick is useful in understanding the roots of activism.10 Explorations of environmental activism can occur in studies of a bewildering array of environmental issues: in thinking about the sources and shapes of popular environmental protest, scholars have explored topics ranging from activists' attempts to ban logging altogether in the Allegheny Forest, to reconstruction of the devastated Nine Mile Run in Pittsburgh, to activism and real estate in New York, and to the century-long battles over development and industry on the Hudson River.11Whether concerned with an individual political actor or a group of activists, the histories of involvement in environmental politics are highly dependent on the available sources. While new sources are prompting revision, a lack of archival documents has left obvious gaps in our narratives of twentieth-century environmentalism. For example, activism that grew in response to nuclear power and weapons seems to have been barely scratched, with Thomas Peterson's book on local activism in Allegany County, New York, a rare example that demonstrates further opportunity for work. It seems odd that antinuclear activism can be such a major part of European Green politics and yet receive fairly little attention in the United States, with several major clashes in the region remaining unexamined by historians using archival sources. For example, further research is needed on Ralph Nader's Critical Mass, a mid-1960s national antinuclear group based in Washington, DC. Other organizations and nuclear plants remain unexamined, including the Indian River site on the Hudson, the Calvert Cliffs site in Maryland, and the formation of the Shad Alliance in opposition to the Shoreham site on Long Island. Calvert Cliffs seems particularly promising for future research, with late-1960s opposition to the site leading to an important 1971 federal case testing the boundaries of the new National Environmental Policy Act.12While the histories of environmental politics discussed in the previous section start with individual politicians, activists, political battles, or organizations, the works in the next category seem to focus on a place and subsequently examine the impact of changing policies on that subject. The works grouped below begin with a locale, landscape, flora, fauna, ecosystem, or region as a subject. By necessity, they also include explorations of the attempts of institutions, organizations, and governments to choose and pursue a certain path in relation to that subject.There are a few trends among these works on the national level. For example, it has become standard practice for environmental historians to adopt a city or a region as a topic, with prominent examples dealing with Seattle, Boston, and St. Louis. The particular advantage here is the opportunity to narrate the long-term impacts of changing policy on a specific environment. Matthew Klingle's account of Seattle, for instance, shows the human alteration of land and water that latecomers to the city might assume were natural formations, while Michael Rawson demonstrates the surprising interplay of science, politics, and culture in fashioning both the city of Boston—built in large measure from landfill—and the expectations of its inhabitants.13Another scholarly trend is the way that environmental historians have been pulled into newly invigorated discussions of the developing powers and responsibilities of governments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following William Novak, many scholars outside of environmental history are describing a complex evolution of conflicting and competing forces within a multilayered and occasionally contradictory American state. These historians question the traditionally derided weakness of federal government in the nineteenth century. Many explore the foundations of private property, the police power to infringe upon that property, and alternative locations of power within municipal, civic, or voluntary institutions.14 This has obvious implications for those who are writing histories of human impacts on the environment. A 2012 article by Jessica Wang that is ostensibly about dogs and animal control in New York City, for instance, actually ends up being an example of “one of innumerable areas of everyday public policy in which voluntary associations continue to wield police power, perform public functions, and exercise state authority alongside formally constituted governmental agencies.”15 These words could clearly apply to hundreds of different conservation agencies, sportsmen's groups, county foresters, and state departments of natural resources.Within the Mid-Atlantic, choosing to write about a region, watershed, or metropolitan area can the and impact of government the for example, is a that an wide array of to on the complex at the of the The of this work both with and from their concluding that “the Chesapeake story is a for those who would to on the of a very or understanding of the way the a long of on fish, and William the concluding essay for the that are as many of the past of the Chesapeake as there are and scholars to The here the of any government or decisions based on an understanding of the physical on a the other recent works have attempted the same of analysis on the state and metropolitan with an on government New Jersey's on both the natural and the of the region that have in an that New important for understanding the twentieth-century and their natural Similarly, on and its and the the use of power to or that who from that produced environmental and who the health and on race, class, and work is also to scholars outside of the field of environmental and ends with a essay from that all historians of environmental activism on the of these David The of New York attention in the category of regional environmental While it does not extensive new research, it is a argument for the of regional environmental to a general or it is possible that many could be examined in this way, in history While still that the of human using as a category of argues that boundaries often are the physical boundaries of even more that policies have in environmental and in New York the state as a him to examine the specific and long-term physical impacts of state policy on forests, air and urban or preservation of forests, and to be a popular topic for historians. historians have focused on the forests of the Mid-Atlantic region in the last including on and in on and on New York's David on the on activism and the and on the in Many of these are concerned with and preservation and the powers and of organizations and with those project is as argues for the of and New policies in the early twentieth the state of Appalachian forests today. is of the of conservation in New York, an approach that to the that early also how the human and natural of a were to be these there is also significant work on the the of New York and New and in the of process by which private or public into has been particular in the of state and This is a subject that explores in his on the Allegheny while at a popular also G. on the political battles groups, private property and state and federal Similarly, Adam Sowards's The Environmental Justice an of the over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal into a national This in the a prominent for Mid-Atlantic as it the to nature in places were The over often larger policy to who declares that examining the complex history of the Appalachian Trail of the complex conservation and social of water that the Mid-Atlantic seem to have significant attention from scholars, particularly in attempts to explain policy This of takes this approach in Long Similarly, The and examine the histories of Maryland's and battles environmental groups, the industry, and are also of particular with and David works on the River as to a more obvious example of John New York's River as one of its case studies of the of actually an essay that explores both the of urban water policy and a regional understanding of urban environmental David has built on a long of historical writing about New York water the development of the water system from the nineteenth through the the of a regional approach to urban echoing William and Matthew and have all about the and the and environmental legacies of that as with its natural the extensive systems its and past and the impact of political of to historians of the are the in which in the nineteenth had and often on a of and As writes in an of system of water a new built that the emergence of a in the of both and Peter have situated and the of the Canal with the formation of the modern American state. As puts the history of the demonstrates a the of the United as a power and as a in the and focus on the of the private the of federal and state action in the This is as an history by seemed to a in a multiplicity of to the over as to significant urban the Mid-Atlantic would seem to many more for ranging from metropolitan to the of in the and of the Hudson River air pollution is also of to historians studying a region that was once the center of and is still to its urban These historians often out that the impact of air pollution is rarely about the it also the larger and of As David writes about smoke the and could which of urban such as and and which such as the of private property and private and have all on air pollution topics in New York City, Pittsburgh, and the pollution and its control is clearly a significant topic of research, but New York and there is work on the topic, with the possible of Mile of from water to air to the built has significant attention in the The Mid-Atlantic was the of the first and the area is with for historical analysis of the and impact of The topic is immensely at the municipal, and all to the and of and historical subject of the twentieth century. Adam emphasized the of in his work The in the on the New locates a powerful and a activism that from major As he “the was a in a in public in a of private and public many other scholars have examining of in New The of is one of works in that has a book on Pittsburgh's while works on and to topic a decade has an of on that explores the racial and of as have environmental so to or control The impacts of those and policies on and are clearly an area of The Mid-Atlantic has produced significant on extractive industry, with and and being offers into the impact on and culture of an that nineteenth-century that as well as the their very of the its and how those be managed and has examined the of state in producing different in the of nineteenth-century and arguing that the evolution of impacts of major extractive industry in these histories of and make it surprising that has so little for this and political By and in have been the of and many to the and local response in historical For example, while with a land ethic that with also that the region was a for opposition and policy was in the Appalachian that the first state and a for federal of the and had such major is as a to historians because it takes place essay with a to Frederick Jackson Turner and his that the Mid-Atlantic was the one “typically American” region in the historians are not of but there is an of his of politics and place in the works As a regional Turner many of the of historians interested in environmental politics and his thesis on the of upon defining regions by physical and with the of industry, and resource by that and these topics once recent studies of the Mid-Atlantic noted this significant for further work in the region The environmental twentieth-century with topics to the activism of the environmental movement has left explored by scholars in environmental or political but by environmental historians. As such, there are important gaps in the to histories of environmental organizations and The the Mile and the the Shoreham nuclear power in more histories through archival and about Marcellus and the of for histories of land in New York and work on the history of antinuclear activism is as new have been in 2012 for the first nuclear plants to be built in the United since Mile has other western nations to from nuclear of specific also seem at least by environmental has a story as complex as the Hudson has as many stories to tell as the the metropolitan of the Eastern a regional and the subject of could be as as The of from power plants the forests, and of the region for a and to international attention in the and but the subject has not yet been explored through archival sources. For that in the environmental impact of the War could be the in Maryland, of in and even more in the works on the Mid-Atlantic, and environmental policy in there also to be a lack of focus on policy institutions and the of the individual city or and the large of federal David The of New York is an and the way to a new for environmental This of work to a larger while for of different environmental or and within is still much work to be at this of as by recent work the of and federal policy work would with the of many both from within and environmental who are in of the of the American these the larger matter of the of the environmental movements of the twentieth The here is over the of modern environmentalism had any significant impact on the course of history. In the published The of Environmental several historians question the of an environmental For example, Frank Uekoetter upon the of to on policy and “the environmental may one more a In the same declares while “the as an important … never was influential to as a for an in the history of modern the of the of this Adam argues that the environmental and in was a of of and a to make a a of activists, and This is a and any of the political or movements to human action in relation to their change the course of human or are the forces of and of property very the question environmentalism Mid-Atlantic might be an place to any to these and it is that environmental historians be in the region for some to Environmental never to refocus our in a history that explores the foundations and of that and while Marcellus shale is our the next is the with trends in the nature of archival and a in environmental this means that the history of recent environmental politics and the physical impacts of policy is into a more of published research in environmental and most continue to in the

The Evolution of Property Rights: A Study of the American West

Environmental JusticeVol. 13, No. 3 RoundtableRoundtable on the Pandemics of Racism, Environmental Injustice, and COVID-19 in AmericaModerator: Sacoby M. Wilson, Participants: Robert Bullard, Jacqui Patterson, and Stephen B. ThomasModerator: Sacoby M. WilsonAddress correspondence to: Sacoby M. Wilson, 4200 Valley Drive, 2234D School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA E-mail Address: [email protected]Dr. Sacoby M. Wilson is an associate professor and director of Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health (CEEJH), Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health, School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA. Search for more papers by this author, Participants: Robert BullardRobert Bullard is a distinguished professor of Department of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy, Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Jacqui PattersonMs. Jacqui Patterson is senior director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.Search for more papers by this author, and Stephen B. ThomasDr. Stephen B. Thomas is a professor, Health Policy & Management; director, Maryland Center for Health Equity; School of Public Health, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:16 Jun 2020https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2020.0019AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookXLinked InRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byLearning on Health Fairness and Environmental Justice via Interactive VisualizationCommunity Perspectives and Environmental Justice in California's San Joaquin Valley Humberto Flores-Landeros, Chantelise Pells, Miriam S. Campos-Martinez, Angel Santiago Fernandez-Bou, Jose Pablo Ortiz-Partida, and Josué Medellín-Azuara12 December 2022 | Environmental Justice, Vol. 15, No. 6Identifying environmental factors that influence immune response to SARS-CoV-2: Systematic evidence map protocolEnvironment International, Vol. 164Beyond fairness: the Covid-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice20 March 2022 | Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 6Selecting Data Analytic and Modeling Methods to Support Air Pollution and Environmental Justice Investigations: A Critical Review and Guidance Framework8 February 2022 | Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 56, No. 5The Social and Economic Implications of Environmental Justice for the Elderly: A Case for Social Work Interventions in the Caribbean10 July 2022The Analysis of Urban Park Catchment Areas - Perspectives from Quality Service of Hangang Park -31 December 2021 | Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture, Vol. 49, No. 6Building Adaptive Capacity Through Civic Environmental Stewardship: Responding to COVID-19 Alongside Compounding and Concurrent Crises11 November 2021 | Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, Vol. 3COVID-19: Evidenced Health Disparity5 August 2021 | Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, No. 3Pandemic disruptions in energy and the environmentElem Sci Anth, Vol. 8, No. 1At the Edge of Resilience: Making Sense of COVID-19 from the Perspective of Environmental HistoryJournal for the History of Environment and Society, Vol. 5 Volume 13Issue 3Jun 2020 InformationCopyright 2020, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:Moderator: Sacoby M. Wilson, Participants: Robert Bullard, Jacqui Patterson, and Stephen B. Thomas.Roundtable on the Pandemics of Racism, Environmental Injustice, and COVID-19 in America.Environmental Justice.Jun 2020.56-64.http://doi.org/10.1089/env.2020.0019Published in Volume: 13 Issue 3: June 16, 2020Online Ahead of Print:June 5, 2020PDF download

We address a debate over the effects of private versus customary property rights on external investment. Despite political economists’ claims that external investors favor private property rights, other experts argue that customary systems enable large-scale “land grabs.” We organize these competing claims, highlighting trade-offs due to differences in legibility versus the ability to displace existing landholders under both systems. We study a natural experiment in Liberia, where law codifies parallel private and customary property rights systems. We use this institutional boundary and difference-in-differences methods to isolate differential changes in external investment under the different property rights systems following the global food crisis of 2007–08. We find a larger increase in land clearing where private property rights prevailed, with such clearing related to more concession activity. Qualitative study of a palm oil concession reveals challenges external investors confront when navigating customary systems.

Market value is the most common compensation basis for expropriation of both private and customary property rights. Private property rights are generally exchangeable while customary property rights are conceptually not as exchangeable. It is hence critical to analyse the applicability of current compensation theories, which are founded on private property rights, to different property rights and in different social settings. By using existing literature and empirical evidence from Africa and other countries where customary property rights dominate, this paper undertakes a theoretical analysis of the applicability of existing compensation theories and the methodologies used to achieve the desired compensation goals. The analysis concludes that whilst current compensation theories are broadly applicable to customary property rights as they aim to protect property rights and prevent expropriatees from impoverishment, various ontological and methodological factors limit the realisation of these goals in settings dominated by customary properties. Such factors include ontology and dominance of customary property rights, use of market value as a compensation basis, and capacity of compensation assessors. Broadly, these factors lead to inadequate compensation and impoverishment of affected people.

This chapter examines the effect of occupation on private property and contract rights within the context of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In doing so, I examine how the treatment of private property in the Iraqi occupation compares and contrasts with Japanese, Italian, and German occupations after World War II. Furthermore, I show how non-European occupations have been characterized by a disregard of occupation rules safeguarding private property as opposed to European occupations. This disregard of the private property under occupation is similar to the disregard with reference to territorial acquisitions of a much earlier period, which I addressed in Chapter 2. In this chapter, I also demonstrate the importance placed on the private property of Europeans in non-European contexts and the lack of focus on the private property rights of non-Europeans. It is therefore not surprising that, following the U.S.-led conquest of Iraq in early 2003, most scholarly and press coverage focused on the status of foreign corporations’ property in Iraq before the war.

We use household survey data to investigate the effects of formal, private property rights to agricultural land on agricultural investment, land valuation and access to credit in Tanzania. Results show that while there are no detectable effects of formal, private land property rights (written documentation of ownership) on agricultural investment, land ownership documents nevertheless increase the market value of land substantially (more than 25 percent). One reason appears to be that well-documented private property rights facilitate the use of land as collateral for loans and therefore eases access to credit. The findings suggest that there are potentially significant, economic returns to systematic land titling in Tanzania and other countries, although more research is needed to firmly establish this conclusion.

Between 1964 and 2017, the United States adopted the concept of environmental policy as a new focus for a broad range of previously disparate policy issues affecting human interactions with the natural environment. These policies ranged from environmental health, pollution, and toxic exposure to management of ecosystems, resources, and use of the public lands, environmental aspects of urbanization, agricultural practices, and energy use, and negotiation of international agreements to address global environmental problems. In doing so, it nationalized many responsibilities that had previously been considered primarily state or local matters. It changed the United States’ approach to federalism by authorizing new powers for the federal government to set national minimum environmental standards and regulatory frameworks with the states mandated to participate in their implementation and compliance. Finally, it explicitly formalized administrative procedures for federal environmental decision-making with stricter requirements for scientific and economic justification rather than merely administrative discretion. In addition, it greatly increased public access to information and opportunities for input, as well as for judicial review, thus allowing citizen advocates for environmental protection and appreciative uses equal legitimacy with commodity producers to voice their preferences for use of public environmental resources. These policies initially reflected widespread public demand and broad bipartisan support. Over several decades, however, they became flashpoints, first, between business interests and environmental advocacy groups and, subsequently, between increasingly ideological and partisan agendas concerning the role of the federal government. Beginning in the 1980s, the long-standing Progressive ideal of the “public interest” was increasingly supplanted by a narrative of “government overreach,” and the 1990s witnessed campaigns to delegitimize the underlying evidence justifying environmental policies by labeling it “junk science” or a “hoax.” From the 1980s forward, the stated priorities of environmental policy vacillated repeatedly between presidential administrations and Congresses supporting continuation and expansion of environmental protection and preservation policies versus those seeking to weaken or even reverse protections in favor of private-property rights and more damaging uses of resources. Yet despite these apparent shifts, the basic environmental laws and policies enacted during the 1970s remained largely in place: political gridlock, in effect, maintained the status quo, with the addition of a very few innovations such as “cap and trade” policies. One reason was that environmental policies retained considerable latent public support: in electoral campaigns, they were often overshadowed by economic and other issues, but they still aroused widespread support in their defense when threatened. Another reason was that decisions by the courts also continued to reaffirm many existing policies and to reject attempts to dismantle them. With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, along with conservative majorities in both houses of Congress, US environmental policy came under the most hostile and wide-ranging attack since its origins. More than almost any other issue, the incoming president targeted environmental policy for rhetorical attacks and budget cuts, and sought to eradicate the executive policies of his predecessor, weaken or rescind protective regulations, and undermine the regulatory and even the scientific capacity of the federal environmental agencies. In the early 21st century, it is as yet unclear how much of his agenda will actually be accomplished, or whether, as in past attempts, much of it will ultimately be blocked by Congress, the courts, public backlash, and business and state government interests seeking stable policy expectations rather than disruptive deregulation.

This Article models private property rights as a conflict resolution mechanism and shows that for the Coase Theorem to be consistent on its own terms, private property rights must generate the Pareto-optimal allocation of scarce resources among all feasible conflict resolution mechanisms. This conclusion is termed the Fearon Corollary. Equating the imposition of private property rights to conflict/war, the following question is considered: if pre-conflict common ownership is socially-optimal, under what conditions will disputing parties fail to bargain around the conflict? In addition to the explanations identified by Professor Fearon, the present article offers an additional behavioral explanation evidenced in the institution of private property rights itself, and, in particular, in state “Castle Doctrine” laws that permit the use of lethal force in defense of real property. To promote the socially-optimal shared use of contested scarce resources, a role for the courts is suggested where de facto common property rights are established by rendering private property rights random or unclear — judicial behavior that stands in sharp contrast to the commonly understood normative implications of the Coase Theorem. This uncertainty weakens private property rights, reducing the expected spoils of costly conflict, and, in turn, creates an incentive for disputing parties to cooperate in the form of negotiated settlement agreements. In this way, less secure claims to private property promote social cooperation.

The United States has a north coast along its ‘inland seas’—the Laurentian Great Lakes. The country enjoys more than 4,500 miles of Great Lakes coastal shoreline, almost as much as its ocean coastal shorelines combined, excluding Alaska. The Great Lakes states are experiencing continued shorefront development and redevelopment, and there are growing calls to better manage shorelands for enhanced resiliency in the face of global climate change. The problem is that the most pleasant, fragile, and dangerous places are in high demand among coastal property owners, such that coastal development often yields the most tenacious of conflicts between public interests and private property rights. Indeed, those conflicts implicate fundamental debates over the state’s authorities and prerogatives to regulate privately owned shoreland (the police power), the public’s interest in coastal resources (the public trust doctrine), and private property owners’ rights to use and to exclude others from their shorelands (referred to collectively here as the private property doctrine). While not tidal, standing water levels of the Great Lakes fluctuate over time substantially. As a result, the lakes have beaches much like ocean coasts, and the public trust doctrine is aptly applied to them, albeit awkwardly. All of the eight Great Lakes states have long acknowledged the applicability of the public trust doctrine to their Great Lakes bottomlands and shorelands. In doing so, they have accepted the now-conventional understanding that the doctrine originated in ancient Roman law. Even so, recent critiques of the public trust doctrine assert that it has been misinterpreted and that its historical pedigree is not so strong or aptly applied to American coasts, especially along Great Lakes coasts. These critiques do not address the historical pedigree and robustness of the police power doctrine, or, more importantly, the pedigree and robustness of contemporary notions of private property rights. If the public trust doctrine is indeed lacking upon reconsideration, how does it fare in comparison to these other doctrines? This Article lays the foundation for an extended study of the public trust doctrine as it applies to Great Lakes shores. We provide an overview of the public trust doctrines of all eight Great Lakes states, noting for illustration and, where appropriate, particulars for the State of Michigan, which enjoys more than 60% of the combined U.S. Great Lakes coastline. To explain our motivations in undertaking this study, the Article first briefly reviews the importance of the lakes to the State of Michigan and the other Great Lakes states more broadly and then frames shoreland management as one of the resource management imperatives those states face. The Article then reviews the historical origins, the contemporary contours, and the ongoing debates surrounding the police power, public trust, and private property doctrines separately. Building on that foundation, we then analyze how courts and legislatures have reconciled those doctrines through application in coastal settings broadly. First, we find that the public trust doctrines of the Great Lakes states fall well within the boundaries of the origins and application of that doctrine throughout the nation’s history, even though the Lakes are not tidal. Second, we find that the concept of a ‘moveable freehold’ inherent in the public trust doctrine—that the boundary separating state-owned submerged public trust land from privately owned upland along the shore—reflects natural dynamic shoreline processes, not arbitrary governmental rulemaking, and is well established and accepted by all Great Lakes states. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this Article, we find that all three doctrines—public trust, police powers, and private property rights—trace their roots to English common law and even ancient Roman law, but all are in fact distinctly American doctrines. All three doctrines were first fully articulated in the context of unique American institutions, values, and conflicts. Each has evolved over time as American institutions, values, and conflicts have similarly evolved. Thus, despite detractors’ assertions to the contrary, the public trust doctrine is no less robust or aptly applied to Great Lakes coasts than is either the police power or private property rights doctrine. In fact, despite case law and commentary rhetoric that can be dogmatically extreme, efforts to understand and reconcile these doctrines in practice generally strike a pragmatic balance between the private rights inherent in shoreland property ownership and the public interest in common access to and use of submerged lands and the foreshore. Following our analysis of these doctrines from a broad perspective, we conclude by providing a brief overview of the several public trust doctrines as adapted by all of the Great Lakes states and finally identifying a number of questions for further study.

Private property rights security is currently seen as central to explaining cross-country differences in economic development. Variation in private property rights security itself is perceived to be best explained by differences in the degree to which the political system is able to constrain the despotic power of state executives. I reassess the existing evidence for these two hypotheses and find that: (1) higher levels and significant changes in private property rights security and constraints on the executive are not correlated with higher levels of income and (changes in) growth rates; (2) the commonly used instrument for constraints on the executive and private property rights security - the natural log of European settler mortality - is invalid because it is associated with current levels of income besides its effect through private property rights security and constraints on the executive; and (3) the regularly cited Korean case is in fact evidence against these hypotheses. I provide explanations for these findings and call for a rethinking of which type of institutions and policies are decisive for growth.

The Real Right Law of the People’s Republic of China is the basic law for regulating and protecting the property rights. The Constitution, as the fundamental law, adjusts the property right relationship too. The protection from Constitution is the precondition and base for protecting property right. The Real Right Law is to fulfill the principle of Constitution that ensures citizen’s private property right. To protect the property right, Constitution mainly aims at defending the country against outside. Its basic function is to define the country activity. As for the Real Right Law, it is to protect the property right by defining the property in case of invasion of other civil subjects. Both Constitution and Real Right Law offer protection for private property right and also impose restrictions on private property right. That is the national requisition system. This system imposes strict restrictions to private property right. Therefore, it is necessary to set up firm restrictions and constraints on the requisition system. According to the legislation of other countries, we can restrict and constrain this system from three aspects, namely the intention of requisition, the complement standards, and the process, driving the government to realize lawful administration, and protecting the private property right properly.

Environmental JusticeVol. 14, No. 3 Calls for PapersFree AccessCall for Papers: 30th Anniversary of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership SummitDeadline for Manuscript Submission: December 31, 2021Guest Editors: Peggy M. Shepard and Crystal Romeo UppermanGuest Editors: Peggy M. ShepardWE ACT for Environmental Justice, New York, New York, USASearch for more papers by this author and Crystal Romeo UppermanAclima, Inc., San Francisco, California, USASearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:16 Jun 2021https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2021.29007.cfpAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail The 21st century environmental justice movement will look very different from its 20th century progenitor. Much has changed in the way our world communicates, mobilizes, and governs. This special issue of Environmental Justice will capture the history of environmental justice across the United States, showcasing how the movement has evolved. Moreover, the issue will chart a wireframe of the future of environmental justice in its domestic home of the United States and its international propagation globally.The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, in 1991, where the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice were developed and ratified, propelled the environmental justice movement beyond its antecedent focus to include issues of environmental/public health, worker safety, land use, transportation, housing, resource allocation, and community organizing, base building and enfranchisement. The convening also demonstrated the possibility of building a multiracial grassroots movement around environmental and economic justice, which led to the principles of environmental justice, regional and identity-based networks, academic careers and majors, impact on the EPA, state and city regulations, and advisory boards.This special issue will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. It will explore the following key questions: What is the history of the environmental justice movement from 1991 to 2020, and how has the movement evolved across the regions of the United States?What is the shared vision of environmental justice that can help create action toward curbing environmental externalities and climate impacts for highly burdened communities?Can the international adoption of the tenets of environmental justice advance and lessen the Global North and Global South divide in addressing climate change?What resources, tools, technologies, and new policies are essential to catalyze the environmental justice movement of the 21st century with the rapid adoption of renewable energy as a replacement for fossil fuels?What is the role of funders (foundations and government) and researchers within and adjacent to the environmental justice movement?All manuscripts should be submitted online by December 31, 2021. All submissions will be subject to a rigorous peer review. We are interested in original research, articles, editorials, policy briefs, legal analyses, reviews, history essays, perspectives, tools for education, empowerment and action, and methodology papers on these topics and others from diverse stakeholders representing all sectors (environmental justice organizations, academia, government, nonprofit, community, private sector, etc.).Topics may revisit the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice, discuss their application and propose new principles; discuss how they have been used, how to better actualize them, and how they can be integrated into the manner in which agencies and organizations operationalize environmental justice work.Suggested topic areas may also include, among others:Yesterday, today, and tomorrow: keys that led to the successes of the past and ways to elevate community engagement and mobilization for the future.The role of technology and geospatial tools in bolstering government decision-making toward the attainment of environmental parity.Environmental justice to locally led action: ways in which grassroots organizations in the Global South can move the needle on systemic issues tied to the vestiges of colonization.Building an environmental justice movement that is reflective of shared principles in a global society.Meaningful and authentic environmental justice engagement for sectors that have yet to engage or are looking to reverse historical aggression toward grassroots organizations.Regenerative environmental justice movements: leadership expansion and transition for successful intergenerational organizing.Science to support environmental justice: filling the gaps necessary to make the case for causality and support bold policy actions.Gaps in the law: how jurisprudence and hearty environmental regulation can continue to embrace a connection with environmental ethics and social justice.Visit Environmental Justice at https://home.liebertpub.com/publications/environmental-justice/259 to learn more, read past issues, and view author submission guidelines (https://home.liebertpub.com/publications/environmental-justice/259/for-authors).Queries to the editor to propose a topic prior to submission are encouraged. Please contact Peggy Shepard at peggy.m.shepard@gmail.com and Dr. Crystal Romeo Upperman at crystal.romeo@gmail.com to initiate your query or for any further details.Visit the Instructions for Authors:www.liebertpub.com/envSubmit your paper for peer review online:https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/envFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 14Issue 3Jun 2021 InformationCopyright 2021, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:Guest Editors: Peggy M. Shepard and Crystal Romeo Upperman.Call for Papers: 30th Anniversary of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.Environmental Justice.Jun 2021.233-234.http://doi.org/10.1089/env.2021.29007.cfpPublished in Volume: 14 Issue 3: June 16, 2021PDF download

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism and Eighteenth‐Century English Studies

Zoning and private property rights in land: Static and dynamic boundary delineation