Lessons for a Warming Planet

""Lessons for a Warming Planet provides an expansive treatment of the impact of environmental law in its broadest sense on our nation's lands, resources, and peoples. In doing so, it offers a valuable perspective on our present-day contestations over natural resource extraction, climate, equity, and environmental protection."" - Alexandra B. Klass, University of Michigan Law School ""A comprehensive, lively, and timely history of U.S. environmental law by two of today's most insightful legal experts. The authors give hope for a more sustainable future by showing how, even during eras of unconstrained development, innovative legal arguments and initiatives can ultimately give rise to the type of critical environmental protections needed today."" - Barton H. Thompson, Jr., Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law, Stanford Law School ""Professors Camacho and Daniels provide an engaging history of U.S. environmental and natural resources laws, and a fresh framework for understanding what features and challenges have emerged and endured in our laws over the past 250 years. Their insights into law, history, and culture provide important lessons for the future of U.S. environmental law."" - Sean Hecht, Managing Attorney, California Regional Office, Earthjustice and Former Evan Frankel Professor of Policy and Practice, UCLA School of Law. ""This book appears at a time when the United States Government seems determined to abandon or reverse any energy and environmental policy that mitigates global warming and it could not be more needed. Examining American legal history from the earliest impact of European settlement to the present, the authors explore the broad array of policies that have been adopted both to encourage and rein in the impacts of economic exploitation on nature. The results of this unusually deep assessment of the evolution of environmental law take us well beyond the march of legislation and litigation and inspire new thinking about how to address the current crisis."" - Mary Nichols, Distinguished Counsel for the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UCLA School of Law ""Lessons for a Warming Planet is a remarkable and ambitious book. It manages to recast the entire field of environmental law to show that law and policy has always affected the environment, from the beginnings of the republic to today. Its categorization of five major periods of environmental history provide an accessible way to understand which issues were most salient and how contestations over power, technology, economics, and politics helped shape their resolution. As we face our greatest existential environmental threat ever, Camacho and Daniels remind us that there are important lessons to learn from this history."" - Ann Carlson, Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, UCLA School of Law