The indefatigable Patrick O'Donnell recently posted "Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity: A Basic Bibliography". This bibliography is one of many on topics of interest to readers of this blog, such as his bibliography on "Red and Green".
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| Title page of Girolamo Previdelli, De Peste et ejus privilegiis (Bologna, 1528) (courtesy of Bayerische StaatsBibliothek) |
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| William Ruckelshaus, the first time around |
On behalf of a new group of scholars, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, I'd like to invite the participation of environmental historians in a a project we're undertaking. As part of a report we are preparing on the first 100 days of the Trump Administration, we're hoping to offer some historical and comparative perspective on what will have transpired. I'd welcome your help, first of all, with a review of the relevant historical literature. Either as "reply" to this post or through email, could you please send citations of insightful articles, book chapters or book--with a summary of contents and argument--on the following topics?
1. Accounts and analysis of the environmental dimensions of the U.S. presidential transition to Ronald Reagan
2. Accounts and analysis of the environmental dimensions of the Canadian transition to Stephen Harper
3. Nominations, with a citation, of any other environmental transitions of a federal government that you think pertinent
All replies and a summary are going to be posted in the new H-Commons list H-Envirohealth. If you prefer emailing, please send to chrissellersedgi@gmail.com and/or trinberg@gmail.com.
If you'd also like to get further involved with our group, please let us know. Plenty of good work to do, and we welcome new energy and ideas.
Chris Sellers for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative https://envirodatagov.org/
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| "Salmon Fishing at Chenook", James G. Swan, in The Northwest Coast; Or, Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory, 1857 |
In 1970, twenty-one tribes in the Pacific Northwest, along with their federal trustee, sued the state of Washington, claiming that numerous state actions violated their treaty rights, which assured them “the right of taking fish in common with” white settlers. The tribes and their federal trustee maintained that the treaties of the 1850s guaranteed the tribes 1) a share of fish harvests for both cultural and commercial purposes, 2) inclusion of hatchery fish in that harvest share, and 3) protection of the habitat necessary to provide the fish that were the basis of the bargain which led to peaceful white settlement of the Pacific Northwest. By 1985, the tribes and the trustee convinced the courts of the merits of the first two propositions, but the Ninth Circuit deferred on the third, requiring a specific factual dispute.
Some two decades later, in 2007, the tribes and the federal government convinced district judge Ricardo Martinez that the state’s construction and maintenance of road culverts blocking salmon access to their spawning grounds violated the 1850s treaties. In 2013, after settlement talks failed, the district court issued an injunction that required most of the offending barrier culverts to be remedied within seventeen years, or by 2030. Claiming exaggerated costs of compliance, the state appealed, and in 2016 a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed, rejecting wholesale the state’s allegations. This article discusses the reasoning of both the district court and the Ninth Circuit and makes some assessment of the road ahead, which may implicate road culverts owned by other governments and other habitat-damaging activities like dams, water diversions, and land management actions affecting water quality and quantity.
I think it’s also interesting to examine “conflicts on the ground” as it were between the Left and Green movement parties to the extent the latter finds little or nothing of value in the Marxist tradition (e.g., the early conflicts between the ‘Realos’ and ‘Fundis’ in West Germany and the ‘deep ecologists’ and largely Bookchin-led and inspired ‘social ecologists’ in the US).
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| (Bibliography Society of UVA) |
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| A Reading Room in Leeds Castle (David Iliff) |
