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New Orleans, The Chesapeake, And The Future Of Environmental Assessment: Overcoming The Natural Resources Law Of Unintended Consequences, Eric Ryan

University of Richmond Law Review

This article tells the stories of the disappearing wetlands ringing the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and the Chesapeake Bay of Virginia and Maryland, which are vanishing under different circumstances but bear the same message for environmental policy makers: more sophisticated natural resource planning is required to avoid the unanticipated consequences that can cause even wellintended policies to backfire. The stories suggest that a model of environmental assessment that better tracks the complex network characteristics of regional ecosystems would yield better long-term results, and this article proposes a network-based model that expands the lateral, temporal, and causal analysis of conventional environmental …