Most Americans-even environmentalists-date the emergence of laws
protecting nature to the early 1970s. But Karl Boyd Brooks shows
that, far from being a product of that activist decade, American
environmental law emerged well before the first Earth Day, often in
unexpected places far from Capitol Hill.
Surveying the landscape from the end of World War II to Earth
Day 1970, Brooks traces a dramatic shift in Americans' relationship
to the environment and the emergence of new environmental statutes.
He takes readers into legislative hearing rooms, lawyers'
conferences, and administrators' offices to describe how Americans
forged a new body of law that reflected their hopes for rescuing
the land from air pollution, deforestation, and other potential
threats. For while previous law had treated nature as a commodity,
more and more Americans had come to see it as a national treasure
worth preserving.
Brooks explores the way key features of the New Deal's legal
legacy influenced environmental law. This path-breaking
environmental history examines how cultural, intellectual, and
economic changes in postwar America brought about new solutions to
environmental problems that threatened public health and degraded
natural aesthetics. Visiting riverbanks and freeways, duck blinds
and airsheds, Before Earth Day reveals the new strategies and
efforts by which the unceasing process of legal change created
environmental law. And through real-world examples-how Los
Angelenos pressed cases about water and air quality, how an Idaho
lawyer helped clients pursue new environmental regulations, how
citizens challenged government and corporate plans to dam
rivers-Brooks demonstrates that key changes in property, procedure,
contract, and other legal rules in those early years stimulated the
national environmental laws to come.
Gracefully written and meticulously researched, Brooks's work
dramatically updates our understanding of the origins of
environmental law. By taking the postwar years more seriously, he
shows that earlier actions across the country played a central role
in shaping the structure and goals of well-known federal laws
passed during the "environmental decade" of the seventies. Before
Earth Day describes nothing less than an entirely new way of
thinking, as environmental law emerged from local jurisdictions to
reshape national agendas, firing the popular imagination and only
then remodeling law school curricula. A long-needed corrective to
standard political and legal history, it demonstrates both the
longstanding environmental concerns of Americans and the resilience
of law.
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