Law Commons^™

Anatomy Of Industry Resistance To Climate Change: A Familiar Litany, Robert L. Glicksman

Robert L. Glicksman

The industries that generate environmental risks in the United States have long been hostile to regulatory programs that increase their costs of operation and reduce their profits. While industry may have been unprepared for, and thus poorly organized to resist, the first wave of federal environmental legislation enacted during the “environmental decade” of the 1970s, it quickly marshaled its forces. Regulated or potentially regulated entities, their trade associations, and their lobbyists began a concerted effort to defeat, delay, and weaken environmental regulation.

This book chapter describes the process by which regulatory opponents successfully relied on free market ideology to couch …

Ecosystem Resilience To Disruptions Linked To Global Climate Change: An Adaptive Approach To Federal Land Management, Robert L. Glicksman

Robert L. Glicksman

Global climate change presents daunting challenges to the federal government’s ability to manage its lands and resources in ways that ensure that the priceless natural heritage that these land and resources comprise remains available in substantially unimpaired condition to both present and future generations of Americans. One of the challenges results from the fact that the laws governing the activities of federal land management agencies have outlasted the scientific assumptions on which those laws were based. In particular, Congress adopted many of those laws on the assumption that ecological systems tend toward a natural equilibrium. Subsequently, the science of ecology …