Property in Gaza's sands

Dotan Halevy recently published "Sand and the City: On Colonial Development and its Evasive Enemies in Twentieth-Century Palestine" in Environment and History. The abstract:

This article traces the colonial origins of a crucial aspect of the environmentalist discourse since the mid-twentieth century - the idea that planetary substances should be stripped of ownership rights and become in and of themselves the subject of rights. The article looks closely at the Gaza region under British mandatory rule to explain how the rehabilitation of Gaza city, devastated during WWI, has failed. Gaza's reconstruction efforts, the article argues, collided with the British initiative to arrest the drift of dunes along the coast of southern Palestine. Throughout this project, the British administration extinguished Arab property and usufruct rights to expand state domains. They backed this policy with an elaborate ecological perception that saw sand and its inhabitants as agents of environmental ruin. The quarrel that has developed thus made the Gaza region an imperial test ground for probing what sand is? Does it have a history? And, therefore, can it be claimed as an object of rights? Divorcing nature from culture, the British administration in Palestine rejected the validity of sandy lands' economic past and constructed them as inhospitable 'wastelands' - a purely natural element. As such, sands could be subjected to governmental 'development' through afforestation and urbanisation while time-honoured agricultural practices and land rights of the local coastal population were neglected.

Map of Gaza dunes, Survey of Palestine (1931)

The Roman public trust doctrine

I've often expressed impatience with the throwaway references to Justinian (often misconstrued as an adjective!) that are so ubiquitous in discussions of the public trust doctrine. Now comes Bruce Frier's review of Domenico Dursi's Res Communes Omnium. Dalle necessità economiche alla disciplina giuridica (Jovene, 2017) to make some order for those of us for whom Roman law is something of an enigma. Frier writes, explaining his own view (I'm omitting most citations and footnotes):

By the Late [Roman] Republic, the general idea of res communes was already well known in Roman culture. Plautus’ comic play Rudens, thought to date from c.190 B.C., features a fisherman (his occupation is important!) proclaiming that “the sea is unquestionably common to all persons” (mare quidem commune certost omnibus) in a longer speech that emphasizes fish as belonging to their captor.... [T]he concept becomes much more familiar in Latin sources from the Late Republic and Early Empire. Forms of common property are most often the air and the sea, but Cicero adds in the seashore (litus) as well. Although the familiar idea of common property was further elaborated in Early Imperial poetic or Stoic theories on the origin and development of human culture, there is no sign that these theories had any pronounced influence on the law; certainly they lead to no demonstrable legal conclusions.

By the Late Republic, a second cultural element had emerged: a widespread and often expressed disquiet about the startling proliferation of villas along the coast of central Italy and the Bay of Naples.... The architects of these villas, capitalizing on recently-discovered hydraulic concrete, often put down substructures extending beyond the shore and out into the sea — a phenomenon quite commonly referred to in legal texts, and one of particular concern to poets such as Horace who perceived the structures as morally hubristic. More exciting, however, is the discovery that not a few of the maritime villas incorporate fishponds so large that they were plainly intended to produce fresh fish not just for the villa, but for local markets.... [T]hese fishponds may well have brought the villa-owners into direct confrontation with more humble local fishers. 

Free the beach

The Boston Review recently published Andrew Kahrl's "Free the Beach", an essay adapted from his Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP, 2018). Here's an excerpt that digs into the connection between land privatization and racism:

For millennia, beaches have been considered public property. The legal principle of the public trust doctrine, which dates to the ancient Mediterranean world, has long held the seashore as public land. In 1892 the U.S. Supreme Court validated the public trust doctrine with its decision in Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois, which ruled that land covered by tidal water belonged to the public, with the state acting as a trustee. States were obligated to maintain that trust and protect the public’s right to access the shore in perpetuity.

Each state, however, marked the line separating public land from private property along the shore at a different spot—some drew the line at high tide, others at low tide, still others at the vegetation line—and devised different definitions of what constituted legitimate use of the public’s shore. Some states conceived of the public’s right to the shore in broad terms. Other states hewed closely to the public trust doctrine’s original intent. Massachusetts and Maine, for instance, held that the public’s right to the foreshore applied only to fishing and navigation; that private ownership extended down to the low-water line; and that the recreational use of private property was tantamount to an unconstitutional taking of private property. Connecticut drew the line between public and private property at the mean high-water mark, and its courts recognized swimming and recreation as legitimate uses of public trust lands.

While Connecticut’s supreme court upheld the public status of the foreshore, the actions of shoreline developers, backed by the state legislature, made it increasingly difficult for members of the public to enjoy their beach access rights. Beginning in the 1880s, wealthy families began building summer cottages along remote sections of shore in the state’s eastern half. In 1885 the state legislature granted a charter to a group of families who owned cottages in Old Saybrook. The charter gave the Fenwick Association the power to levy its own taxes and enact zoning restrictions. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other small groups of families successfully petitioned the state legislature for charters to form what came to be known as private beach associations. Many of these early beach associations formed as an expeditious way of meeting the basic needs of summer homeowners in remote, undeveloped areas lacking in basic infrastructure and services. 

Public trust and public access

A while back we noted an H-Environment roundtable on Andrew Kahrl's The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. Now Kahrl has turned his attention to the North in Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP, 2018), and Law & History Review has a review by Deborah Dinner. Dinner writes:

On July 4, 1974, a daring, no-holds-barred activist named Ned Coll launched an amphibian assault on an exclusive Beach Club in Madison, Connecticut. Coll’s comrades included more than fifty children from nearby Hartford’s poor, majority African-American housing projects. The children, their mothers, and staff members of Revitalization Corps, an advocacy organization dedicated to racial equality and justice for the poor, were clothed in bathing suits and armed only with laughter, songs, and excitement. Yet the affluent white parents on the beach saw the newcomers’ entry as an ambush and quickly retreated, children in tow, to their private club. The episode constituted one highlight of Coll’s campaign to win public access to the beaches along the shoreline of a state plagued by extreme wealth inequality.

A somewhat obscure common law doctrine—newly and hotly contested in the 1970s—rested at the heart of Coll’s creative protest of the Madison Beach Club. The public trust doctrine...

The California ascendancy: Explaining world leadership in environmental law and policy

[A guest book review from Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith:]

In the newest addition to the Studies in American Politics series from Princeton University Press, David Vogel in California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader (Princeton UP, 2018) asks how it is that California has had such success in protecting its environment and has become a world leader in making and implementing environmental policy and law.

Vogel sketches boldly on a large canvas:

This book describes what is in many respects a remarkable success story. It demonstrates how a state government has been able to overcome substantial obstacles and enact a wide range of regulations that have made measurable - though admittedly uneven – progress in protecting its environment and improving the quality of life of its residents. Although California has often seemed on the verge of ecological (as well as economic) catastrophe, it has proven remarkably resilient. The state’s ability to remain the most important source of environmental policy innovation in the United States over so many decades and across such a diverse range of policy areas is a significant accomplishment.  It is worth understanding why and how this particular state came to play such an important leadership role in this area, as well as the broader policy implications of such leadership [p. 6]. 

One of those implications, Vogel writes, is that the story of California’s ascendancy holds lessons for the world:

What happens in California…has a global impact.  During the 1980s, the relative stringency of California’s vehicle emissions standards was an important reason why Germany chose to support the adoption of similar standards by the European Economic Community… More recently, according to…a Nobel Prize-winning scientist from Mexico, “the rest of the global economy is looking to California, as one of the world’s largest economies, to take the lead” in addressing the risks of global climate change.  The state has come to play an increasingly active international role [p. 8, citations omitted].

When it comes to explaining how and why California has become such a successful and resilient law and policy leader Vogel focuses on three factors he considers to be interconnected in varying ways at different times in the state’s history, depending on the issues being addressed.  

One is the political mobilization of California’s citizens, most especially in the late 1960s and 1970s.  A second is the support for environmental policy initiatives provided at critical moments by least some important segments of an often divided business community.  And a third is the growth over time of the state’s capacity to design and implement programs of resource management and environmental regulation, in some cases in state agencies recognized as world leaders in the work they do [1].

This is obviously a provocative thesis and it may well keep students of the history of California environmental law and policy busy for some time to come.  But it also and immediately raises the question of why, if the story of California’s ascendancy, which on Vogel’s telling has its roots in the late nineteenth century, is so remarkable and potentially so influential, the story hasn’t been told before now.  

The answer is that the story has been told, at least in part, twice before, although Vogel chooses not to engage seriously with either prior account [2]. 

Beach access and American conservatism

Bixby Creek Bridge near Big Sur, California
(Bill Lane Center for the American West)

The issue of public beach access has played a major role in the history of environmental law (see, e.g., here, here, and here). It also may be responsible for some of the backlash against environmental regulation. Last year the Journal of Policy History published Jefferson Decker's "Pacific Views: Property Rights, the Regulatory State, and American Conservatism". The article opens:

In November 1976, a bookkeeper named Viktoria Consiglio used money from an inheritance to purchase a plot of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean just south of Carmel, California. Two years later, Consiglio and her husband prepared to build a one-bedroom house for use during their retirement. They submitted applications for a building permit only to have their request denied. The impediment was the California Coastal Commission, a statewide regulatory agency that Californians had recently established in order to protect the state’s coastline from environmental damage and overcrowding. The commission ruled that Consiglio’s house would block the view of the ocean from a nearby highway, disrupt a path to a rocky cliff above the sea, and reduce public access to the beach below the development site. Using powers that had been delegated to it by the state legislature, the commission denied Consiglio’s application for a building permit. Consiglio could continue to own this scenic property overlooking the Pacific Ocean, but she would not be permitted to build a home there.

Consiglio eventually sought help from the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, “public-interest” legal foundation established in 1973 by Ronald Zumbrun, a former aide to California governor Ronald Reagan, with help from several prominent California lawyers and businessmen. Zumbrun’s organization photographed the gray-haired woman, standing on a rocky cliff overlooking the Pacific surf, and put the image on the front page of its bimonthly newsletter. The accompanying article, titled “What Happened to the American Dream?” began: “Viktoria Consiglio, unhappy, confused, and angry, wonders what happened to her dream of owning a home by the sea. A dream that has turned into a nightmare of government red tape and legal costs that have taken a big chunk of her income from her job as a clerk-bookkeeper.” Lawyers at the foundation prepared to file suit, on the grounds that the Coastal Commission’s decision was inequitable, unjustified by law, and interfered with the woman’s property rights. The state of California may have certain powers to zone or plan for new development, the foundation argued, but it could not render this woman’s property nearly useless to her. 

The Israeli (and Ottoman and Islamic) public trust doctrine

Chapter heading from the Hebrew translation of the Mejelle by Frumkin

Zafrir Rinat, Haaretz's environment reporter, recently wrote about the story of Moshe Puterman's arrest for entering a municipal beach without paying the admission fee, and the court decision which might be thought of as a foundational document of an Israeli public trust doctrine:

One day in 1959, Puterman and a few friends went to the seashore in Herzliya. As was usual at that time, the municipal attendants demanded that they pay in order to enter. But Puterman was fed up with paying, and he snuck in – with the attendants hot on his heels.

“There was a scuffle and I escaped, but they caught me and I was taken into custody,” he recalled recently. “I told the attendants that this was a public area and that they were acting like thieves. It upset me to pay for something that should have come to me by right.”

Puterman was convicted in Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court for refusing to pay and for resisting the attendants with force. He was ordered to pay a fine. But he did not let the matter rest there.

“My lawyer was the late Avraham Socholovsky, who was also a personal friend,” Puterman told me. “As we left the courtroom, I asked him, ‘Do we keep going?’ ‘Of course,’ he replied.”

Socholovsky appealed, and Tel Aviv District Court Judge Jacob Gavison overturned the earlier conviction. [see excerpts of the decision below-DS]

*****

The ruling became a precedent that enshrined the public’s right to free access to the seashores. According to attorney Amit Bracha, executive director of Adam Teva V’Din: the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, the verdict led to legislation, in 1964, that prohibits charging an entry fee to beaches where only basic services – lifeguards, toilets, showers – are provided (though a fee can be charged for parking near a beach). It also led to the High Court of Justice decision in a petition filed by the IUED against the Interior Ministry more than 10 years ago. The court then instructed the ministry to order local governments to uphold the law concerning free entry to beaches. Nevertheless, there are a few beaches that still charge an entry fee.

I've translated below some excerpts from Judge Gavison's decision, which, it is worth noting, predates the well-known line of New Jersey beach access cases by a decade (see here, pp. 17-22). (I'd also like to note that Gavison taught law at the Tel Aviv extension of Hebrew University, the predecessor of the institution at which I teach.) Two points of contact with the American public trust doctrine seem interesting:

Battle for Paradise

Legal History Blog noted yesterday the New York Times review by Louis Bayard of David Randall's The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise (Norton, 2016). The publisher's website describes the book:

Frederick and May Rindge, the unlikely couple whose love story propelled Malibu’s transformation from an untamed ranch in the middle of nowhere to a paradise seeded with movie stars, are at the heart of this story of American grit and determinism....

The newly married couple reached Los Angeles in 1887 when it was still a frontier, and within a few years Frederick, the only heir to an immense Boston fortune, became one of the wealthiest men in the state. After his sudden death in 1905, May spent the next thirty years fighting off some of the most powerful men in the country—as well as fissures within her own family—to preserve Malibu as her private kingdom. Her struggle, one of the longest over land in California history, would culminate in a landmark Supreme Court decision and lead to the creation of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Bayard writes:

Stubborn, isolated and innately distrustful, May couldn’t grasp that her prerogatives as property owner were being challenged by a new birthright, coaxed into being by the rise of the automobile: the right to beauty. Or, to quote the 1923 Supreme Court decision [Rindge Co. v. Los Angeles] that killed off May Rindge’s last hopes (and fortune): “Public uses are not limited, in the modern view, to matters of mere business necessity and ordinary convenience, but may extend to matters of public health, recreation and enjoyment.”

In other words, the government had a right to Malibu because the place was too wonderful to sit on. It took only six years for an actual road to materialize, and with it came the movie stars and the surfers and the billionaires and all the other fauna we associate with this pristine stretch of sand where, thanks to a south-facing shoreline, you need never squint into the sun.

But May Rindge’s legacy of cussedness and exclusion lives on. Her unfinished mansion has been reborn as a gated community, and in an atavistic echo of old battles, Malibu’s newest homeowners are once again working to seal off public access to their coastline. 

Early environmental law treatises

Ads from the first edition of Charles James Tarring's Chapters on the Law Relating to the Colonies (London: Stevens and Haynes, 1882, courtesy of The Making of Modern Law):

My favorite blurb: On Moore's work on the rights of the crown in the seashore: "The book should certainly find a place in the library of the lord of every riparian manor." (Morning Post)

Art and the history of environmental law - part VI: Art and hidden environmental law

The last part of a series based on my article on art and history of environmental law. After looking at what art can teach us about environmental law's historical effects, we turn now to how works of art document historical environmental law itself, exposing historical law we might otherwise not know about.

Smoke over Des Moines (right), discussed in Parts IV and V of this series, does more than document the contemporary concern over air pollution that served as the background for the mid-twentieth century’s wave of environmental legislation or the failure of early legislation to solve the problem; it also alerts us to the very existence of air pollution regulation in mid-twentieth-century America, penetrating even to a relatively small Midwestern city. The poster is useful on yet another level, disclosing the legal and institutional form—local ordinances and smoke commissions—that the regulation often took in this period, thereby helping the modern historian bridge the conceptual and semantic gap between today’s legal forms and those of the past.

The WPA poster also opens further avenues of inquiry about environmental law circa 1940. We know from other sources that smoke commissioners and inspectors were appointed under a local Des Moines ordinance. Yet it was the St. Louis Smoke Commissioner, not a local official, who was the featured speaker of the advertised event. Historians have noted that the St. Louis Commissioner, Raymond Tucker, was a particularly effective and influential figure in the American anti-smoke movement, and the 1940 St. Louis ordinance that he pushed through and zealously enforced attracted attention outside the city.  The poster’s recording of Tucker’s visit to Des Moines, probably in early 1941,  might indicate the arteries of legal influence through which environmental norms flowed between jurisdictions during this period, raising questions about whether law traveled as a disembodied printed text or as a companion to flesh-and-blood travelers, and about the possibly limited geographic scope of legal diffusion during this time.

Turning to land use law, Monet’s work is once again suggestive. His 1870 paintings of the beach and boardwalk at Trouville (e.g. The Beach at Trouville, 1870, Wadsworth Atheneum, right, and La Plage à Trouville, 1870, private collection) display an interesting feature—the apparently flush building line and open beach.  Beach setbacks are a hot environmental issue today, but a supposedly recent one, as evidenced by historic building right up to the shoreline in many places. Assuming Monet’s depiction of the beach setback is historically accurate—its repetition in at least two paintings suggests it is—why did the owners of the expensive real estate in the trendy Norman resort not take advantage of the full extent of the beach to increase the built areas of their casinos and hotels? Why did they leave the beach open to the public?

The straight building line indicates a measure of coordination, and the owners’ withstanding of the temptation to “defect” and extend their buildings further out toward the sea suggests a degree of legal coercion. What kind of legal norm operated here is a mystery. Was it a French version of the “public trust doctrine”? A local initiative to preserve the tourist-attracting beach, anchored in local ordinance, contract, or servitude? An early law aimed at beach preservation, or perhaps one that sought to prevent storm damage to built structures? In any case, that Monet’s eye was drawn to this feature seems to attest to both its salience and its aesthetic value in the eyes of contemporaries.

Similarly, while Victorian environmental law may not have brought about clean skies, some paintings hint at other effects. Though mandating minimum chimney heights in order to lift pollution away from populated areas (transferring the fallout somewhere downwind) was apparently a product of the twentieth century, earlier paintings suggest that minimum chimney heights were being established already in the nineteenth. The multiple smokestacks in Caillebotte’s Factories at Argenteuil and Pissarro’s Bords de l’Oise à Pontoise (both in Part III of this series), among others,  appear to be of uniform height, towering above the squat chimneys in earlier paintings, such as De Loutherbourg’s early nineteenth-century depictions of the iron works at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire (below).

Phillipe Jacques de Loutherbourg, Iron Works, Colebrook Dale
(engraving William Pickett), 1805,
Science Museum at Wroughton

The standardization of heights evident in Caillebotte’s and Pissarro’s paintings from the latter part of the century suggests a legal moment behind the smokestacks’ specifications. Whether the elongated stacks were a uniform response to legislation requiring consumption of smoke, to more specific technical requirements imposed by legislation or licensing procedures such as the enquête de commodo et incommodo, or an attempt to head off nuisance suits by adopting industry-wide best practices needs to be investigated, but their artistic rendering at least opens this avenue of historical inquiry.

These examples suggest that while it may be difficult to discern the precise content of environmental law from artistic sources, these sources can at least alert us to the presence, and sometimes the form, of environmental legal norms, in historical contexts in which we might not have suspected their presence. Art can thus be a tool for understanding not only the preconditions and effects of environmental law, but the law itself.

*****

To sum up this series, I would say that art can provide a valuable set of historical sources for understanding the cultural attitudes toward the environment against which environmental law did or did not develop. It can also help evaluate the effects of environmental law, particularly as these were perceived in history. While its utility for uncovering environmental law itself is probably more limited, we have seen that it can at least suggest lines of historical inquiry into the presence of environmental law and the form it took.

If you haven't seen the rest of this series or the original article, please take a look. I would appreciate your thoughts, as well as further research in this field!

Coming into the Anthropocene

A few months ago we noted Jonathan Cannon's Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court (Harvard UP, 2014).

Jed Purdy's forthcoming (Harvard Law Review) "Coming into the Anthropocene" is a thoughtful review essay of the book, recently posted. The abstract:

This essay reviews Professor Jonathan Cannon’s Environment in the Balance. Cannon’s book admirably analyzes the Supreme Court’s uptake of, or refusal of, the key commitments of the environmental-law revolution of the early 1970s. In some areas the Court has adapted old doctrines, such as Standing and Commerce, to accommodate ecological insights; in other areas, such as Property, it has used older doctrines to restrain the transformative effects of environmental law. After surveying Cannon’s argument, this review diagnoses the historical moment that has made the ideological division that Cannon surveys especially salient: a time of stalled legislation, political deadlock, and highly contested regulatory and judicial interpretation. This analysis, however, does not limit the interest of Cannon’s analysis to this political moment. Rather, Cannon’s integration of legal and cultural analysis has great promise for the Anthropocene, the dawning era when human decisions and values will be among the most important forces shaping the planet. In the future, it will be necessary to think of environmental law as both reflecting and producing ideas of the value and meaning of the natural world. Cannon’s analysis is an excellent starting point for an Anthropocene approach. 

The beach lots at issue in Lucas v SC Coastal Council, the salient case in
which the Supreme Court used Property to limit environmental regulation
(courtesy of William Fischel)

More on the book here.

The public trust doctrine in the UK Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom recently decided a case, R (on the application of Newhaven Port and Properties Limited) v East Sussex County Council, that includes quite a bit of discussion of the public trust doctrine and its history. The doctrine, which, in its basic form, recognizes certain rights of public property in certain waters and beaches, has become a staple of environmental law teaching and scholarship in recent decades, thanks in large part to its revival and adaptation by Joseph Sax.

A bathing machine, of the sort at issue in Blundell v Catterall

While many courts and writers are fond of tracing the doctrine's origins to ancient Roman law and English common law, close followers of the topic will know that the leading English precedent on the topic is the 1821 ruling of the King's Bench in Blundell v Catterall, in which the majority actually ruled against recognition of public rights of access to a private beach (though Justice Best's dissent is probably more often quoted). Now comes the Supreme Court of the UK and examines the history of the doctrine in English law and elsewhere in detail--see, in particular, paragraphs 32-51 and 106-136.

Some of my favorite parts of Lord Carnwath's concurrence:

106. At least since Brinckman v Matley [1904] 2 Ch 313, the decision of the Court of King’s Bench in Blundell v Catterall (1821) 5 B & Ald 268 has been taken as establishing at Court of Appeal level that under English law the public has no general right to go onto the foreshore for the purpose of bathing or other recreation.... Not even the strong dissenting judgment of Best J in the earlier case, the advocacy of a future Lord Chancellor (Buckmaster KC), nor the criticism of three textbook writers cited by him (p 320), were sufficient to persuade the court to revisit the issue, or even to call on opposing counsel. The members of the court were unanimous in their praise for the model judgment of Holroyd J, regarded it seems as “one of the finest examples” of how a judgment should be expressed (p 323)....

107. No doubt because judicial fashions have changed, I confess that I do not find the enthusiasm of the Court of Appeal for the judgment of Holroyd J altogether easy to share. Its erudite analysis of extracts from Justinian, Bracton, and Hale, and of obscure exchanges between the court and counsel in some early English cases, makes rather heavy reading to modern eyes.

The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever

That's the title of a piece by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times Magazine. Rich writes:

As the Mississippi shifted its course over the millenniums, spraying like a loose garden hose, it deposited sand and silt in a wide arc. This sediment first settled into marsh and later thickened into solid land. But what took 7,000 years to create has been nearly destroyed in the last 85. Dams built on the tributaries of the Mississippi, as far north as Montana, have reduced the sediment load by half. Levees penned the river in place, preventing the floods that are necessary to disperse sediment across the delta. The dredging of two major shipping routes, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, invited saltwater into the wetlands’ atrophied heart.

Beneath the surface, the oil and gas industry has carved more than 50,000 wells since the 1920s, creating pockets of air in the marsh that accelerate the land’s subsidence. The industry has also incised 10,000 linear miles of pipelines, which connect the wells to processing facilities; and canals, which allow ships to enter the marsh from the sea. Over time, as seawater eats away at the roots of the adjacent marsh, the canals expand. By its own estimate, the oil and gas industry concedes that it has caused 36 percent of all wetlands loss in southeastern Louisiana. (The Interior Department has placed the industry’s liability as low as 15 percent and as high as 59 percent....)

The oil and gas industry has extracted about $470 billion in natural resources from the state in the last two decades, with the tacit blessing of the federal and state governments and without significant opposition from environmental groups. Oil and gas is, after all, Louisiana’s leading industry, responsible for around a billion dollars in annual tax revenue. Last year, industry executives had reason to be surprised, then, when they were asked to pay damages. The request came in the form of the most ambitious, wide-ranging environmental lawsuit in the history of the United States. And it was served by the most unlikely of antagonists, a former college-football coach, competitive weight lifter and author of dense, intellectually robust 500-page books of American history: John M. Barry.

The article goes on to detail the dramatic background to the lawsuit, constitutionally questionable political efforts to kill it in the Louisiana legislature, and Barry's place in all this. Worth a read.

African American beaches

H-Environment recently re-posted its roundtable reviews of Andrew Kahrl, "The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South" (Harvard UP, 2012). (See the HUP blog for an interesting historical piece on the Trayvon Martin case by Kahrl.) Jacob Hamblin describes the book:

In The Land Was Ours, Andrew W. Kahrl sees the coastal American South as an ideal way to explore the interconnections between race, space, and environmental change. It was there that, during the Jim Crow era, African Americans had an enormous yet under--‐studied connection to land and sea, largely because privileged whites tended to avoid such land. And yet over time African Americans lost control to resort developers, for complex reasons that involve whites and blacks seeking political and economic opportunities in a natural environment that itself was changing. For Kahrl, it is a tale that compels us not only to see injustice, but also to related African American experiences to other processes in such as the commodification of beaches, the creation of unsustainable environmental practices, and the interaction between culture and place. 

Some tastes of the reviews. Sarah Elkind notes:

In spite of the importance of public ownership in creating and preserving recreational space in the long term, private ownership provided better recreational opportunities for minorities for much of the twentieth century than public lands did. Public Jim Crow beaches were dangerous, polluted and inaccessible. Even national parks were racially segregated during the first half of the twentieth century.

Business influence on legislation

Thomas Jundt reviews Sarah Elkind's How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (UNC Press, 2011) in the latest issue of Environment and History. Jundt writes:

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.