CFP: Race and Resilience Otherwise (for ASEH 2020)

[I'm passing on this call for papers for a panel being organized for the next American Society for Environmental History meeting. Readers should feel free to send me any relevant announcement!]

Race and Resilience Otherwise

What does “resilience” mean for black, brown, and indigenous people living in systemic racism? This guiding question builds from the spirit of the conference theme, “Reparative Environmental History,” and celebrates the discipline’s ongoing engagements with structural racist, classist, and colonial environmental oppression. Though resilience is used to orient us to the future of our environments (i.e. gaining abilities now to respond effectively to future catastrophes), like reparations, the concept actually requires close examination of past processes, active decentering of white settler histories, and embracing narrative frameworks that work with critical race theory. In reality, folks of color have been resilient and forced into holding patterns of “resiliency” within an unequal, unjust system for generations. In this panel, we want to continue thinking resilience otherwise by articulating critical environmental histories of race.  

This panel calls for contributions that center — rather than “include” — black, brown, and indigenous environmental histories to help us unpack this problematic of resilience, and therein reconsider the content and meaning of contemporary environmental restorative justice. We welcome scholarship on, for instance, histories of environmental racism, struggles for environmental justice, food sovereignty, colonial land dispossession, histories of BIPOC* environmental community building and belonging, and ways of knowing nature outside of modern, white supremacist capitalism.

*Black and Indigenous People of Color

Please submit proposed paper title and brief abstract (250 words max), along with your name, institution, and preferred email address to Lisa Avron (lisa.avron@gmail.com) by July 3rd.

Morag-Levine on the history of precaution

Noga Morag-Levine, who participated in the roundtable at the recent ASEH conference on what environmental history and legal history can learn from each other, also recently posted her American Journal of Comparative Law review essay on the history of precaution (following on a condensed, blog, version in 2013.) The abstract:

The distinctiveness of European from American regulatory cultures or traditions is a matter of longstanding controversy. Two recent books — The Politics of Precaution by David Vogel — and The Reality of Precaution, edited by Jonathan Wiener with several others — have made notable contributions to this debate. Both books argue that regulatory cultures or traditions are incapable of explaining current differences between American and European approaches to precaution, which they define as regulatory stringency. For Wiener, this conclusion derives from the inconsistency of patterns of stringency between the United States and Europe. Vogel argues that while the stringency of current European environmental regulation indeed exceeds that of its U.S. counterpart, the split is unstable and opened relatively recently. In combination, the books aspire to put to rest an entire family of historical-institutional explanations for cross-national regulatory differences in the transatlantic context and beyond.

Edwin Chadwick, who brought the Continental
precautionary approach to Victorian England

This essay draws from legal history to argue for an alternative position: legal traditions and their associated administrative-law principles are highly relevant to current transatlantic conflicts over precaution. The paper’s starting point is the distinction between two separate meanings of the precautionary principle, the first prescriptive, and the second permissive. In its prescriptive sense the precautionary principle urges regulators to take stringent mitigation measures in the face of scientifically uncertain risks. In its permissive sense, the principle authorizes the state to regulate when the relevant harms are scientifically uncertain. Conflicts over permissive precaution thus inherently reflect divergent views of the scope of the state’s autonomy in the regulation of risk. These disparate views correspond closely, in turn, with relevant differences between the administrative law traditions respectively associated with Anglo-American common law and Continental civil law.

More on Joseph Sax

At the recent ASEH conference in Washington, DC I attended an interesting panel commemorating Joseph Sax and examining his influence in several fields. The organizers of the panel have created a website with the panel presentations, as well as other resources on this important figure in the history of environmental law.

Also on the same topic, I recently came across Mark Van Putten's "Making Ideas Matter: Remembering Joe Sax", recently published in the Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law. The abstract:

Joe Sax made his ideas matter. He had consequential ideas that shaped an entire field—in his case, environmental law—both in theory and in practice. His scholarship was first rate and has enduring significance in academia, as evidenced by the fact that two of his law review articles are among the 100 most frequently cited articles of all time. Others are more competent to review the importance of his scholarship; my experience in environmental advocacy is more pertinent to evaluating his impact on environmental policymaking. Here, his ideas have had a greater impact than any other legal academic. As the New York Times observed in the opening sentence of its obituary for Professor Sax, he “helped shape environmental law in the United States and fueled the environmental movement.” As environmental law historian Richard Lazarus put it, Sax “provided much of the strategic blueprint followed by the environmental public interest groups,” which is still followed more than fifty years after he began his career at the University of Colorado Law School in 1962. How did a self-effacing, erudite, bookish professor come to have such an impact?

If you know of other remembrances or other resources having to do with  Prof. Sax, please send them my way, or offer to write something on him for this blog!

The Versailles Conference: upcoming deadlines

The deadline for the American Society for Environmental History 2015 conference in Washington DC (March 2015) has been extended till July 31. The theme, "Turning Protest Into Policy: Environmental Values and Governance in Changing Societies", seems particularly appropriate for legal-themed papers and panels.

The British Legal History Conference 2015 (Reading, July 2015) has a call for papers out; the themes is "Law: Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights". Paper proposals are due September 30.

The European Society for Environmental History's biennial conference will be held in Versailles in June-July 2015. This conference, too, seems particularly welcoming for law-related work, as the call for proposals says, "Through an emphasis on disciplines, methods, and questions, we hope to encourage dialogue with all types of history, other humanities and social sciences, and the natural sciences." Submissions are due by October 1.

Feel free to use the Environment, Law, and History listserve to find potential panelists with similar interests!

Attendees at an earlier conference at Versailles

CFP: ASEH 2015

The American Society for Environmental History will be having its next annual conference in Washington, DC, on March 18-22, 2015. The conference theme is "Turning Protest Into Policy: Environmental Values and Governance in Changing Societies". The Call for Papers indicates that law-related papers and panels will fit nicely in this theme. Proposals are due July 20.

You may want to use the Environment, Law, and History list to reach potential panel partners whom you might not reach through lists focused on environmental history, legal history, or environmental law alone. If you're not a member, please see "Sign up for the listserve" on the right side of this page.

Hopefully we can also use the conference to have a meeting of the Environment, Law, and History "special interest group" and make some progress on other activities that some of you have proposed over the last year or so.

ASEH 2014

The American Society for Environmental History's 2014 meeting begins tonight in San Francisco.

There will be a lot of papers and panels with legal themes - if you're attending, please consider sending me some reports for posting on the blog.

American Society for Environmental History 2013 meeting - report

The recent annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Toronto was chock full of  papers with legal themes, covering a wide range of time periods, geographic areas, and environmental issues.

A panel on Lawscapes: Environmental Histories of Law was full of such papers. Matthew Axtell (upcoming Golieb Fellow at NYU) presented Customs of the River: Legal Change and Shifting Hydrology in the 19th-­‐Century Steamboat Economy, in which he explored the ways in which the Ohio River environment influenced the course of tort law. Adam Wolkoff spoke on Waste, Conservation, and the Question of Improvements in Nineteenth-­‐Century American Tenancy Law, a country-wide study of court decisions on the property-law doctrine of waste and how they related to land use questions. Jamie Benidickson's paper, One Watershed Under Law: An Enviro-­Legal History of the Lake of the Woods, examined legal responses to environmental changes in a trans-boundary water system. Peter Alagona, who has a forthcoming book on the history of the Endangered Species Act, presented Species Complex: Science, Law, and the Indeterminacy of Nature—Or, What Exactly is a Steelhead Trout?, in which he demonstrated a reversal of the oft-observed phenomenon of scientific experts shaping the course of the law; regarding the steelhead trout, he convincingly argued, the law has actually shaped the course of science, by pushing scientists to distinguish between species in ways that conform with the requirements of environmental law. Comments by Douglas Harris emphasized, among other things, the utility of the commons concept for understanding the various issues explored in the session's papers.