Nuisance law and forced labor

I recently participated in the great Legal Histories of Empire conference that met in Maynooth, Ireland. There were a number of papers on environment-related topics (especially about the oceans), but one that really stood out for me was that of Erin Braatz on nuisance law in colonial Gold Coast (Ghana). 

Braatz showed that the largest category of criminal prosecutions in the Gold Coast was for nuisance, and especially sanitary offenses, and suggested a surprising (for me, at least) explanation: the colonial government's desire for forced labor. After the abolition of slavery, colonial rulers and settlers cried out for (cheap) working hands, and sentencing locals to terms of labor for nuisance violations was one way of providing them.

I've often noted before connections labor issues and environmental regulation, but Braatz's research suggests a new (and unsettling) angle.

The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981

The latest  issue of the English Historical Review has an article by Matthew Kelly, "Habitat Protection, Ideology and the British Nature State: The Politics of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981". The abstract:

The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was the most important piece of environmental legislation passed by a British government since the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. It sought to enhance the protection of listed flora and fauna, prevent further damage to existing habitat and resolve issues that had arisen with respect to rights of public access to the countryside. Although the bill was long and complex, many of its provisions sought to rationalise existing statutes or extend existing provision rather than create new powers. Provisions seeking to protect habitat proved highly contentious. The proprietary interest resented what it saw as an unjustified interference in private property rights; statutory bodies were alarmed that the centralising aspects of the Act would empower ministers at the expense of their ‘scientific’ independence; and the emergent environmental lobby, increasingly frustrated by the cautious approach of the statutory bodies, was determined that the bill’s habitat protection provisions be strengthened. This article examines the lengthy and disputatious consultation and parliamentary process in terms of longer-term frustration with the apparent weakness of statutory protections and how it brought the environmental effect of agricultural intensification into mainstream political debate. This article contextualises the growing insistence that there was a public interest in the health of the natural environment and situates the argument with respect to what environmental historians have started to analyse as the history of the ‘nature state’, a distinct realm of state activity comparable to the welfare state, warfare state or security state.

Negotiating regulatory science

More on the law-science nexus: The latest issue of Comtemporanea has an article by David Stradling, "Negotiating Regulatory Science. Dredging the Great Lakes in the Age of Ecology". The abstract:

In the mid-1960s residents around North America’s lower Great Lakes expressed growing concern about the dumping of dredge spoils in open waters, which they suspected of harming water quality. The act of dumping spoils, particularly from industrial harbors, became a target for government regulators eager to show progress in solving the environmental crisis. Scientific studies of dredging’s ecological impact and the regulation of dredging increased in Canada and the United States. The multiplicity of bureaucracies involved ensured that the International Joint Commission (IJC), established to resolve policy conflicts along the international border, would address the issue of dredging. The IJC response to the dredging conundrum provides a case study of how bureaucracies negotiated scientific knowledge in the age of ecology. Scientists turned data into knowledge and knowledge into policy guidance inside bureaucracies with conflicting missions that reflected divisions in the broader public. The public’s vague but powerful fear about sediment tainted by the industrial cities in which it accumulated forced the creation of a remarkable body of scientific knowledge related to how pollutants move through and accumulate in lake ecosystems. Activists forced governments to define pollution, to determine which of the many effluents of industrial cities affected human and ecological health, and at what concentrations they became a threat. In the age of ecology, regulation often outpaced science, and scientific research raced to meet public demands.