Search results

What, is truly "environmental" about environmental law? This Article is the first attempt to answer this question by integrating Law & Literature scholarship with the study of environmental law. I argue that competing narratives of nature and culture common to the American environmental imagination play a more significant role in environmental law and litigation than previously acknowledged. These competing narratives, communicated through a known set of environmental stories and tropes, are used by attorneys to establish, frame, narrate and argue their cases, and they are absorbed, reimagined, reframed and retold by judges in their written opinions, making environmental law a kind of expressive, literary event. To illustrate this process, the Article examines two important and highly visible case studies: the reintroduction of gray wolves into the Northern Rocky Mountains and the public nuisance climate change lawsuit that culminated in the Supreme Court's decision in Connecticut v. American Electric Power. A close reading of the pleadings, legal briefs and judicial opinions in these case studies demonstrates that courts respond to and reinforce traditional environmental stories, such as wilderness tales and the environmental apocalyptic, but evince a strong preference for a less well-known story, which I call the Progressive Management Machine. The Progressive Management Machine promises reconciliation of competing environmental narratives through administrative process and science-driven decision making, but, in so doing, masks its own contravention of those same narratives. The approach developed here launchesa larger project exploring the dynamic relationship between environmental law, literature and narrative. This Article, like the larger project, seeks to elucidate not only various litigators' and judges' rhetorical strategies but also the purposes, content and significance of environmental law.

This work presents several different points of view regarding the role of environmental innovation as the driving force of public policy designed to promote sustainabilityand reduce environmental impacts. Environmental innovation is analyzed byexamining concrete practices such as sustainable design, green branding, eco-labeling, the use of medicinal plants, and improved plant varieties, among other things, and the individual and collective intellectual property rights that protect and promote these kinds of innovations. While this thematic diversity is directly proportional to the complexity of the author's presentation, it does not detract from the conceptual unity of the text. On the contrary, by examining the concepts as applied in a variety of contexts, the author highlights not only the challenges that must be faced in order to protect the general interest, but also proposes alternative solutions that promise to improve the structure, emphases, and priorities of these rights. This work represents the culmination of a valuable research project that benefited from the cumulative experience of the author and will be of great interest to scholars in the field, It is an important theoretical contribution to the formulation of strategies for environmental mitigation, adaptation, and recovery.

This Note poses the question of whether—and how—lawmaking can create a platform for promoting an environmental ethic. There is a body of scholarship about how values or virtue ethics impact lawmaking, but this Note also explores the opposite—how lawmaking impacts the values or virtue ethics of the public. Environmental ethicists disagree about the very origins of environmental ethics. Some thinkers believe that environmental ethics stem from "core values" that are inherent to human nature. Others posit a set of "green virtues" that can be learned. But there is agreement that education through exposure to the natural world is fundamental to ethical development. Ideally, people develop green virtues that guide their everyday actions but, to encourage a true love of the natural world, their core values must be awakened; this is done locally, via connections to wild spaces. Through the creation of national parks and through public land-granting, law creates a platform that can contribute to the formation of environmental consciousness, from materializing the "wilderness" ideal to demonstrating the value of "otherness." The relationship between environmental law and environmental ethics creates a virtuous circle—in both senses of the word—as virtue drives enriched environmental law as much as environmental law has the capacity to create green virtues. The virtuous circle concept risks the implied instrumentalization of virtues, robbing them of intrinsic realization by using them as policy tools. However, this is a false dichotomy; environmental law is a tool that can be used by a democracy to change itself by creating a different set of experiences to make concrete the values that we hold in abstraction or as aspiration. This Note draws on Aristotle's virtue ethics to posit that lawmaking can create a holistic platform for people to learn how to practice an environmental ethic, which in turn promotes the passage of new regulatory and protective environmental laws.

Introduction, methodology, terminology, basic concepts and tensions -- International environmental law and human rights partially conflict but mainly confirm the anthropocentric conceptions of the directives -- Conflict with human rights : deference to the international civil liability frameworks that applies to oil spills in directive 2004/35 -- Human rights and procedural limitations in the directoves : complement and conflict -- Conclusions