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[A guest book review from Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith:] In the newest addition to the Studies in American Politics series from Princeton University Press, David Vogel in California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader  (Princeton UP, 2018) asks how it is that California has had such success in protecting its environment and has become a world leader in making and implementing environmental policy and law. Vogel sketches boldly on a large canvas: This book describes what is in many respects a remarkable success story. It demonstrates how a state government has been able to overcome substantial obstacles and enact a wide range of regulations that have made measurable - though admittedly uneven – progress in protecting its environment and improving the quality of life of its residents. Although California has often seemed on the verge of ecological (as well as economic) catastrophe, it has proven remarkably resilient. The state’s ability to remain the most importan...

Title page of Jan Kochanowski’s Satyr albo dziki mąż (1564), a political satire in verse that criticized forest exploitation. (National Digital Library Polona, from the article) Forest law continues to provide grist for scholarship. October's Environmental History published, alongside an article on early Chinese forest law , Mateusz Falkowski's "Fear and Abundance: Reshaping of Royal Forests in Sixteenth-Century Poland and Lithuania" . The abstract: This article analyzes new restrictive forest legislation announced by king Sigismund Augustus (d. 1572) in Poland and Lithuania. In the sixteenth century, eastern Europe remained the most densely forested region on the continent; Poland and Lithuania, however, were blessed not only with resources but also with an unusual combination of plains, forests, rivers, and seaports that facilitated the development of large-scale forest industries. Drawing on a combination of royal documents, domain surveys, correspondence, customs ...

At the end of  the previous post in this series  I argued that the history of environmental law remains in need of extensive work both in uncovering the legal roots of contemporary environmental law and in making the lateral connections between historical environmental law and other historical topics. I would like to suggest that of these two dimensions—we might think of them as longitudinal and lateral—the first order of business should be longitudinal, deepening the temporal dimension of environmental law. We will be hard pressed to assess the significance of historical environmental law or its interactions with other areas of law and life without knowing what it was or what people thought about it. However, given that 'environmental law' is a recently coined term, where are we to look for historical environmental law? I will offer several directions of inquiry, some of them already explored by environmental and other historians, though often without the sensitivity to...

The latest American Historical Review has a review by Neil Maher of Darren Speece's  Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (U. Washington Press, 2017). Some excerpts: Speece begins with the conflict’s prehistory, describing the rise in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a “corporatist” logging industry that was permitted, with encouragement from the California Board of Forestry, to self-regulate cutting practices on privately owned land. Redwood preservation during this period most often involved elite groups, such as San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, purchasing groves from timber companies. The next four chapters, which jump to the late twentieth century and the “Redwood Wars” themselves, follow local activists and their two-pronged strategy—involving lawsuits and direct action campaigns—that all but halted old-growth logging on the North Coast and, in doing so, weakened the corporatist reign...

The latest Environmental History has an article by Ian Matthew Miller, "Forestry and the Politics of Sustainability in Early China" , with some fascinating discussion of arguments for and against regulation in Chinese philosophy. The abstract: Between the sixth and second centuries BCE, Chinese states developed offices to oversee the sustainable use of forest resources. This era, often cited as a period of rampant environmental degradation, also saw the emergence of a discourse of sustainability. The early philosopher texts criticized the environmental and moral degradation of their era in order to promote specific policy interventions. In response to the deforestation they depicted, moralist and pragmatist philosophers alike argued for regulations on land use as the basis of a sustainable political order. Early states used these ideas to justify state forestry, culminating in extensive forest bureaucracies under the Qin and Han empires in the second and third centuries. Thes...

The connections between working-class environmentalism and environmental law is an understudied theme that I've had occasion to highlight before (e.g. here and here  and in my forthcoming article on historical analysis in environmental law ). Last year I noted that Erik Loomis won an award for his article, "When Loggers Were Green: Lumber, Labor, and Conservation, 1937-1948". Now Robert Walls has a review  of Loomis's book,  Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (Cambridge UP, 2015), for Environmental History . From the review: Focusing on everyday labor and the designs of union activists, Loomis provides a complex portrait of how the industry’s base attempted to advance its goals of securing both sustainable forest resources and health and safety protections for men and women in an often dangerous workplace. The result is an informed analysis of labor’s successes and failures, one that broadly encompasses the radicalism of the Industrial Wo...

Rata forest on on Enderby Island Earlier this year André Brett published "A Sudden Fancy for Tree-Planting? Forest Conservation and the Demise of New Zealand's Provinces" in Environment and History.  The abstract: New Zealand provides a valuable case study of the relationship between colonial statecraft and forest conservation. This article explores the connections between Premier Julius Vogel’s Forests Act of 1874 and the abolition of New Zealand’s provinces in 1876, locating conservation within the broader context of popular discontent with provincialism. It argues that previous perspectives have either downplayed or exaggerated the significance of conservation to provincial abolition, and that the relationship between the two was complex and uneven. Abolition profoundly affected conservation, but the stimulus for abolition had been gathering elsewhere even as conservation shaped its timing.