Beyond Environmental Law

Policy Proposals for a Better Environmental Future

Nearly half a century after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped launch the modern environmental movement, the nation’s environmental statutes are showing signs of age. New challenges have arisen – climate change, most notably, but others that also threaten the safety of the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat and more. In their new book, Beyond Environmental Law: Policy Proposals for a Better Environmental Future, CPR Member Scholars David Driesen and Alyson Flournoy compile original chapter contributions by leading environmental scholars assessing how to craft effective environmental standards to combat the environmental challenges of the 21st Century.

Published in March 2010 by Cambridge University Press in both hardback and paperback, Beyond Environmental Law proposes two new statutes: an Environmental Legacy Act to preserve a defined environmental legacy for future generations, and an Environmental Competition Statute to spark movement to new clean technologies. The first proposal would require for the first time that the federal government define an environmental legacy that it must preserve for future generations. The second would establish a market competition to maximize environmental protection.

The authors note that the nation’s first generation of environmental laws – the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and others – sought broad protection of health and the environment, but in a fragmented way. The second generation sought to enhance environmental laws’ efficiency through cost-benefit analysis and market mechanisms – cap-and-trade programs, for example.  The “next generation” of laws they propose emody bold and ambitious reforms designed to make the law more environmentally protective, while reinforcing the concept of sustainability

• Buy the book at Cambridge University Press, Amazon (hardback and paperback), Barnes & Noble, or Busboys and Poets.
• Read about CPR's Next Generation Environmental Initiative.
• Read The Future of Environmental Protection: The Case for a National Environmental Legacy Act (1.5 meg download), CPR White Paper #1002, by CPR Member Scholar Alyson Flournoy, former CPR Policy Analyst Margaret Clune Giblin, and Ryan Feinberg, Heather Halter and Christina Storz, January 2010.

Table of Contents

Introduction, by David M. Driesen and Alyson C. Flournoy;

Part I. National Environmental Legacy Act

Chapter 1:       The case for a national environmental legacy act, by Alyson C. Flournoy;

Chapter 2:       The necessity of procedural reform, by Sidney Shapiro;

Chapter 3:       Shifting baselines and backsliding benchmarks: the need for a national environmental legacy act to address the ecologies of restoration, resilience, and reconciliation, by Thomas T. Ankersen and Kevin E. Regan;

Chapter 4:       Valuing nature: the challenge of a national environmental legacy act, by Mary Jane Angelo and Mark T. Brown;

Chapter 5:       Citizen science and the next generation of environmental law, by Christine Overdevest and Brian Mayer;

Chapter 6:       Creating NELA information: the double standard, by Walter A. Rosenbaum;

Chapter 7:       The Constitution and our debt to the future, by Rena Steinzor. 

Part II. Environmental Competition Statute

Chapter 8:        An environmental competition statute, by David M. Driesen;

Chapter 9:       Climate change, federalism, and promoting technological change, by David E. Adelman;

Chapter 10:     The iUtility, by Joseph P. Tomain;

Chapter 11:     Environmental patriotism, by Christine A. Klein.