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University of Denver

Laws of nature

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Why Environmental Policies Fail, Jan G. Laitos, Juliana Okulski Jan 2017

Why Environmental Policies Fail, Jan G. Laitos, Juliana Okulski

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Proposing environmental policy which is consistent with the laws of nature, this book is for those who are not just interested in the ways humans have harmfully altered their environment, but instead wish to learn why the many governmental policies in place to curb such behaviour have been unsuccessful. Since humans began to exploit natural resources for their own economic ends, we have ignored a central principle - nature and humans are not separate but are a unified interconnected system, where neither is superior to the other. Policy must reflect this reality. We failed to follow this principle in exploiting …


The Gardener And The Sick Garden: How Not To Address The Planet's Environmental Issues, Jan G. Laitos, Juliana E. Okulski Jan 2015

The Gardener And The Sick Garden: How Not To Address The Planet's Environmental Issues, Jan G. Laitos, Juliana E. Okulski

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

A truly workable environmental strategy would start by being grounded in better, more realistic and empirically accurate models of how nature works, how humans behave, and humankind's relationship to nature. Such an environmental policy would realize that the gardener and the garden are not separate, but one. And this environmental policy would embrace two correlative legal norms: (1) we should recognize a positive right, held by both humans and their natural surroundings, to environmental conditions that may sustain human survivability'; and (2) we should impose an affirmative duty on humans to promote and support natural systems.