Before Yellowstone

Dan Farber recently posted at Legal Planet on "The Arkansas Origin of National Parks". Farber writes:

The origins of the national park system is usually traced back Lincoln’s 1864 signature of the Yosemite Grant Act.  But Congress had actually had the idea of protecting extraordinary places over thirty years earlier, in Arkansas of all places. Hot Springs isn’t high on the list of American places to see, which may be one reason this episode had been forgotten. But it deserves to be remembered as a milestone in federal policy.

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On April 20, 1832, Andrew Jackson signed legislation to set the springs and surrounding mountains from development.  The legislation provides that the township surrounding the springs “shall be reserved for the future disposal of the United States, and shall not be liable to be entered, located, or appropriated, for any other purpose whatever.” The law also authorizes the governing to use the revenue from short-term leases of the spring to fund “the opening and improving such lands in said territory, as said legislature may direct, and to no other purpose whatever.”

Unfortunately, Congress didn’t appropriate any money to supervise the area, and the result was helter-skelter private developments. The private owners later sued to establish title to the land they were using, under a law that Congress passed specifically to authorize federal litigation on the issue. The Supreme Court ruled against them in In re Hot Springs cases, 92 U.S. 698 (1875). That ruling cleared the way for active federal management of the land by the Interior Department. The land is now a National Park.

Yellowstone is in some ways a clearer story about preserving nature. Hot Springs began with the different but related goal of ensuring that valuable public resource was used for the benefit of the public.  That may be one reason why the Hot Springs story hasn’t gotten as much attention.  Hot Springs did set an important precedent, however, about keeping land of public value out of the hands of developers. That’s a story worth telling.

The elimination of leaded gasoline in Japan

In Custodia Legis recently carried an interesting post by Sayuri Umeda on the history of the elimination of leaded gas in Japan. Among other things, it demonstrates that environmental regulation is often driven politically by pressure from businesses that stand to profit from the regulation, a phenomenon we have also seen, for instance, in the history of the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances. This is an important lesson for those trying to drum up political support for regulation. (It is also a shocking story of greed and regulatory failure in the US and elsewhere.)

Umeda writes (some links removed):

When I saw news headlines online on March 7, 2022, saying that a study found Americans born before 1996 might have a lower IQ from exposure to leaded gasoline, I seriously thought that my own IQ could be lower for the same reason, having grown up in Japan.

I checked when Japan banned leaded gasoline and found that actually, I was safer in Japan. Japan was the first country to ban leaded gasoline.

When Democrats and Republicans united to repair the Earth

H-FedHist recently published a review by Bart Elmore (recent recipient of the Dan David Prize) of Gregg Coodley and David Sarasohn's The Green Years, 1964-1976: When Democrats and Republicans United to Repair the Earth (U. Press of Kansas, 2021). Elmore writes:

Building on the work of numerous environmental historians—including Robert Gottlieb, Martin V. Melosi, Carolyn Merchant, Roderick Nash, Adam Rome, and Paul Sutter, among many others—Coodley and Sarasohn offer here an exhaustive play-by-play account of the legislative battles between 1964 and 1976 that led to the passage of some of the most important environmental laws in the United States. The central takeaway of this book is that though Democrats controlled Congress throughout these years, “all environmental laws passed from 1964 to 1976 commanded huge bipartisan support” (p. 257). Coodley and Sarasohn explore how political compromises formed to yield environmental laws, like the Clean Water Act of 1972 or the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, but also save room for concluding chapters that discuss the factors that led Republican Party members away from supporting environmental legislation in the 1980s and beyond.

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An important point of emphasis in the section on the late 1960s and early 1970s is that though Nixon was never personally passionate about environmental issues—he once “walked on the beach in wingtips,” quip Coodley and Sarasohn— key members of Nixon’s staff, especially Pacific Northwesterner John Ehrlichman and Council of Environmental Quality adviser Russell Train, were major proponents of big legislation designed to preserve and protect America’s wildlands, waters, and natural resources (p. 4). The central message here is that Nixon’s impressive environmental legacy—which included the signing of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, creating the EPA the same year, and supporting the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act of 1973—was largely a product of Nixon’s calculating desire to maximize political capital by supporting signature legislation that had widening popular support from constituencies on both sides of the political aisle.

But Coodley and Sarasohn are careful to point out that Nixon’s willingness to push for environmental laws did not last forever. The turning point in the book is the winter of 1971 and 1972 where Nixon began to express serious concern that he would soon face major backlash from pro-industry voters if he continued to support stiff environmental regulations. “I have an uneasy feeling that perhaps we are doing too much,” he wrote his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, in February 1971. “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues,” he told Ehrlichman around the same time (p. 142). Nevertheless, despite Nixon’s waning interest in environmental issues, Republican members of Congress continued to find common ground with Democratic colleagues even as the toxic political bitterness of the Watergate scandal embroiled the nation. 

The review goes on to discuss the book's treatment of the post-Nixon years, as well.