by I promise that not all of my posts will be this self serving, but I am pleased to report that I just received the first copy of my new book, “Law’s Environment: How the Law Shapes the Places We Live.” Yale describes it as follows:
John Copeland Nagle shows how our reliance on environmental law affects the natural environment through an examination of five diverse places in the American landscape: Alaska’s Adak Island; the Susquehanna River; Colton in California’s Inland Empire; Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the badlands of North Dakota; and Alamogordo in New Mexico. Nagle asks why some places are preserved by the law while others are not, and he finds that environmental laws often have unexpected results while other laws have surprising effects on the environment. Nagle argues that sound environmental policy requires better coordination among the many laws, regulations, and social norms that determine the values and uses of our scarce lands and waters.
You can learn more about it here: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300126297.
And as especially relevant to this blog, one of the most surprising lessons of my study of these five places is that environmental law played such a modest role in shaping the natural environment. Other laws that are not described as “environmental” often play a greater role, as do social norms and land ethics. I’m cautious about extrapolating too much from these five case studies, but I suspect that they are not the only instances in which debates about the law do not always yield the kinds of changes that the supporters of the law promise or that the opponents of the law fear.
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