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.
The Journal for the History of Knowledge recently published an article by Sebastian Felten, "Sustainable Gains: Dutch Investment and Bureaucratic Rationality in Eighteenth-Century Saxon Mines". The abstract:
A late-eighteenth-century encounter between Dutch merchants and cameralist Saxon officials is used to argue two related points. First, the history of knowledge can help us rethink hierarchical power structures like the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Mine owners had a right to information and could not be forced to pay contributions, which meant that mining officials were solicitous in sharing knowledge, fretted about investors’ favor, and took their desire for revenue into consideration. These observations directly challenge the traditional absolutist image of the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Second, the history of knowledge can help explain how certain rationalities (that is, combinations of means, ends, and values) came into being. Saxon officials sought to situate short-term income and expense in a success story that spanned decades and centuries. Informed by the concept of Nachhalt (sustainability), Saxon officials saw profit even in mines that lost money. This kind of sustainability thinking is best explained via the archival practices of the mining bureaucracy: officials collected information from yield sheets and local lore in order to calculate long-term outputs, to speculate about untapped deposits, and to disburse as little profit as possible. When the Dutch eventually understood this rationality, they withdrew. Saxony’s early modern mining bureaucracy was dismantled by liberal reforms in 1850s, but its peculiar brand of sustainability, aiming to extract resources at almost all costs, likely survived the dawn of industrial capitalism as young engineers and administrators became versed in it at the Freiberg Mining Academy.
For a different take on the origins of German sustainability thought, see Peter Sand's post here.
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| Star vaulting on the ground floor of the Saxon Mining Office, Freiberg (photo: Norbert Kaiser) |
Soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell wrote this memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 as conservatives grew concerned about the growing influence of liberals and an expanding regulatory state. It offered conservatives a roadmap for exerting their political power in the defense of individualism and free enterprise.
As every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of "lobbyist" for the business point of view before Congressional Committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the "forgotten man".
Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near contempt with which businessmen's views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to "consumerism" or to the "environment".For more on the memo, see here.
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| (Fortnightly Magazine) |
This article analyzes more than four decades of environmental law, regulation, and governance in various Anglo-Saxon and global jurisdictions. It shows how, after the heydays of law and command and control and the swing to economic instruments, voluntarism, and light-handed initiatives, new phases evolved — their most important manifestations being pluralistic regulation, new technologies, compliance, and new governance. It shows how each of the frameworks examined proposes its own solutions and has something valuable to offer, as well as its own limitations. The article concludes by discussing a fundamental challenge confronting the field, namely, how to orchestrate the many possible approaches and relationships available on the legal, regulatory, and governance spectrum.The authors' evaluation of the attack on traditional regulation in recent decades (citations omitted):
Broadly speaking, these state-centered approaches to law were relatively effective, achieving several gains in halting and reducing environmental degradation. Indeed, a range of findings suggest that state law approaches are the single most important driver of improved environmental performance, particularly of large industries.
Nevertheless, by the 1980s direct law was widely criticized for being inflexible and excessively costly. At the international level, treaty congestion and fragmentation led to claims that international environmental law was unwieldy, incoherent, and ineffective in confronting increasingly serious global environmental challenges. Similar claims were raised at the domestic level, where the centralized and uniform nature of command and control was increasingly maligned as costly, cumbersome, inefficient, and insensitive to local contextualities.
A major source of these command-and-control critiques were business groups, who called for a reduction in the economic burdens that compliance with environmental law placed upon them. Adversarial enforcement by deterrence-oriented agencies, primarily in the United States, did little to allay these concerns and produced counterproductive resistance from regulated businesses and individuals.
The book begins with an in-depth investigation of the mining laws that emerged in the Colorado territory following the 1859 discovery of gold. Here Schorr sets an impressive tone for the following chapters, as he seamlessly interweaves his legal and historical training in research and analysis. Drawing on ninety-one mining codes from seventy-eight districts, Schorr demonstrates how the principle of equality, modified by the rule of sufficiency, limited mining claims in both size and ownership. And as he shows, this Lockean principle of equal access soon spread from land to water. From Colorado's territorial laws and constitution to the 1882 Coffin decision that etched the young state into legal history, the water monopoly bestowed in common law to riparian lands was consistently undercut and, ultimately, abolished in favor of the broader distribution achieved through the system of prior appropriation (first in time, first in right). In the final two chapters, Schorr charts how the principle of distributive justice continued to influence Colorado's water laws in the decades that followed; in the process, he squarely challenges the varying interpretations of corporate greed and market efficiency often ascribed to the law of appropriation. Contrary to Gilded Age stereotypes of corporations running amok in the West, Colorado courts consistently ruled in favor of small farmers and placed heavy restrictions on the size, access, and contracts of irrigation companies. Such efforts of fair distribution, however, did not make for efficient markets—a fact that Schorr details in his chapter on the beneficial use clause and the diminishing productivity inherent in its restriction on water right transfers.
A couple of the earlier reviews were covered here and here; Google Scholar has links to a lot more.
The vast majority of the book offers a blow-by-blow account of the various attempts to manage a unique and highly desirable landscape that straddles two states and encompasses a complex bag of economic, legal, and environmental interests. The narrative focuses primarily on the 1969 creation of the first bistate regional agency—the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TARPA)—and the “innumerable problems” it has faced in attempting to manage this complex ecological resource (pp. 1, 3).
*****
The task at hand—balancing private property rights against environmental health of both common and shared resources—was exceedingly complex. And, as the author argues, the structure of TARPA has seldom been up to the challenge. Those in favor of economic development, including powerful casino interests, often controlled TARPA and pushed a pro-business agenda. This often pleased many, but not all, of the locals. Many concerned with the environmental health of the lake, including leadership of the Sierra Club and many elected officials from the state of California, were often at odds with further development around the lake and in favor of more stringent environmental protections. The difficulties in getting these interests to coordinate their efforts has led to a seemingly endless string of disputes, some of which have found their way to the Supreme Court.
There is much in Saving Lake Tahoe of value. It is certainly the most detailed look at the complex efforts to share this fragile and valuable resource. That said, there are deficiencies. Books that focus on policy issues must balance the details required to understand the fine points of the policy against providing a compelling narrative. In this instance, the complex history of TARPA combined with the author’s close personal connection to the material often makes it difficult for him to step away from the weeds and offer broader analysis of the proceedings. Had he used a stronger analytical frame he would likely have had more success in this regard. Arthur F. McEvoy’s The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries (1986) comes immediately to mind. Lake Tahoe, which is both a private and common resource, presents a history of failed regulation. At the heart of that failure was the inability of a myriad of governing bodies to cooperate in such a way that management of the resource reflected the dynamic nature of the resource itself. Had the author engaged in a more rigorous way the deeper meaning and import of Tahoe’s history by engaging more of the historiography of resource regulation, Saving Lake Tahoe could have had a greater impact. Still, for those interested in the decades-long battles to save this incredible resource, Saving Lake Tahoe will be of value.
At the end of the 19th c, within the context of capitalist firm competition and the dynamics generated by technological advance, the creation of global markets for minerals and metals promoted intensive extractive and industrial large scale operations which had a major impact not only on the quality of the water from springs, rivers and seas, but also on air and soils. New industrial landscapes were created in the process under the enthusiasm fostered by the ideologies of progress, nationalism and militarism. While environmental conflicts are today one of the dominant forms of social contention, they remained almost silenced in the past. This scientific meeting addresses the role of those conflicts in the shaping of strategies in Mining and Metallurgical Industries (MMI) and in the emergent knowledge of environmental management and governance that has become embedded in the European legal and institutional framework. From this standpoint, other issues should be also addressed, such as:
• How MMI responded to emergent environmental issues raised by institutions and the civil society?
• How risk and other environmental related concepts became under consideration in business strategies and, especially, what were the scientific and technological initiatives adopted?
• How environmental conflicts varied across time and cultures (organization, components, social influence, etc)?The full call and more details are here.
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| Pratt Street Power Plant today (G. Edward Johnson) |
In many ways, the long road to administrative smoke regulation in Baltimore followed the path laid out by anti-smoke reformers elsewhere, albeit in fits and starts. In cities across the United States, amateur activists initially relied on the existing common-law approach to regulating nuisances, a strategy that, at best, only allowed them to shut down isolated polluters. However, when various judges and health boards proved reluctant to declare smoke to be an actionable nuisance, smoke opponents organized campaigns during the 1890s to secure smoke abatement ordinances that declared smoke a nuisance by definition. After the courts nullified several such ordinances on the grounds that only states could define nuisances, anti-smoke activists turned their attention to state legislatures, which increasingly empowered municipalities to regulate smoke after 1900. With this enabling legislation in hand, cities typically went beyond the nuisance approach. Municipal officials no longer merely responded to complaints, but became proactive. For example, they often required businesses to secure building permits for all new construction and repairs to boilers and furnaces. They also created more sophisticated solutions to the smoke problem. Whereas the common-law approach provided three basic responses to any regulatory conflict (injunctions, abatement and the payment of damages), the new anti-smoke regime proposed a variety of technical solutions, including the installation of smoke-control equipment. Of course, this reliance on technical solutions empowered those who were presumably best able to design them, namely, engineers.Some scholars have been critical of the triumph of experts in early environmental regulation. Indeed, as the Baltimore case confirms, engineers who served as smoke inspectors often sought accommodation, cooperation, and gradual smoke reduction. David Stradling, for one, argues that such a conciliatory approach blunted the movement's impact on urban pollution; likewise, he holds that women's “arguments concerning health, beauty, cleanliness, and morality gradually lost ground to engineering concerns” and the narrower quest for efficiency. Frank Uekoetter disagrees with these conclusions, noting that even after engineers became leaders in the movement, some public officials continued to prosecute those who violated anti-smoke ordinances and ignored the inspectors' technical advice. Moreover, he finds that both women and engineers emphasized technological as well as aesthetic and moral aspects of the smoke problem, suggesting that there was no rigidly gender-specific approach to the smoke issue.This study suggests that some female anti-smoke activists were deferential to experts without ceding the entire sphere of action to them.
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| from Alex Hetherington Sustainability Blog |
We invite papers that consider in specific historical contexts the extent to which the business enterprises that are central to capitalism operated in an environmentally sound or detrimental manner by the way they dealt with their refuse, by managing their use of resources, and mitigating or ignoring any harmful impact on those who handled their products or are affected by their waste. Though business activities have had many deleterious environmental consequences, businesses sometimes have acted to protect the environment, reduce their direct and indirect environmental impact, and promote environmental reform in society. That is true now, but it also was sometimes the case long before the rise of modern environmentalism.Proposals are due May 14, 2014. More here.
While other studies have explored national organisations and politics, Elkind focuses on how power was also flowing outward from local business elites to influence both local and national policy. In five case studies centred on a booming Los Angeles from 1920 through the early 1950s, she explores how business associations dominated local politics on environmental issues and influenced federal policy. Because they possessed superior means to frame local discourse, draft legislation, and conduct studies on contentious issues to provide the appearance of an objective basis for the actions of local politicians, business groups successfully insinuated themselves as the voice of the people. Opposition groups simply could not match their resources, public appeal (business provided jobs), or access to officials.
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