Top 100 environmental blog

I'm happy to report that Feedspot has named Environment, Law, and History one of the top 100 environmental blogs. Thanks to all of you - the readers, writers, commenters, mentioners, and so on - who made it happen!

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Savagery, civilization, and property II: Civilization and its discontents

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(Part II of the series, Part I is here .) The second half of the eighteenth century saw the development, primarily in Scotland (though with significant French and other precedents),  of what would come to be known as “stadial theory” or “four-stages theory.” This group of theories built on an age-old interest in the origins of society and its institutions, sharpened by contact with New World societies that reminded Europeans of societies described in classical Greco-Roman and biblical sources, and raised the issue of what separated “savage” or “barbaric” peoples from “civilized” ones. Stadial thinking offered a theory of progress: In its most specific form, the theory was that society ‛naturally’ or ‛normally’ progressed over time through four more or less distinct and consecutive stages, each corresponding to a different mode of subsistence, these stages being defined as hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. To each of these modes of subsistence, it came to be argued, there c...
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Tort law, regulation and river pollution

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One of the prices those of us who publish chapters in edited collections pay is that our writing often does not get the exposure it would were it published in a journal. So I'd like to bring special notice to a piece by Michael Lobban, "Tort Law, Regulation and River Pollution: The Rivers Pollution Prevention Act and its Implementation, 1876-1951", published in Tort Law and the Legislature: Common Law, Statute and the Dynamics of Legal Change , edited by TT Arvind and Jenny Steele (Hart, 2013). From the introduction: By 1850, the massive urbanisation and industrialisation which Britain experienced over the previous century had generated unprecedented problems of pollution. The mid-century laissez-faire state, with its small central government and fragmented local regulatory bodies, was largely unprepared for these problems, and environmental protection was left in the hands of private litigants - usually wealthy landowners - invoking the common law. However, reform at bot...
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Savagery, civilization, and property I: Introduction

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To cap the series I've been doing on "The Tragedy of the Commons at 50"  (the last post is here ), I'm going to post my own contribution to the issue ( SSRN , Academia ), in installments. I'd be really happy to get feedback. This series makes a simple claim: that the commons theory of the last half century, in its various forms and schools, has been substantially shaped by early modern ways of thinking about the evolution of civilizations. In particular, it has hewed closely to models that gelled in the Enlightenment-era works known as “stadial theory,” passed down to the twentieth century through the disciplines of anthropology and human ecology, and strongly entrenched in the patterns of thought of property theorists to this day. I do not wish to argue that recent thinkers deliberately or consciously based their theories on early modern precedents, nor do I claim that their theories simply recast old theories, pouring old wine into new bottles. What I wish to ar...
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