We are going to be looking at and wire mental legal doctrine, more broadly its social philosophical, kind of issues to grapple with. We also talked at the beginning of the semester, about how society deals with times of aggregate. The big pitchers the effects of large numbers of individual personal disputes on the big picture. And we will be dealing in talking about aggregates a little bit today. The class will lead to a couple of Big Questions big question number one, how much can we regulate in the interest of protecting the environment, big question number two who actually gets to advocate on behalf of the environment, or governmental issues. Those are the two things we are going to be focusing on all right, im going to begin today on talk about environmental change in u. S. History, including what was and what was not instinctive about the consciousness we refer to as environmentalism. When it came onto the scene in the mid 20th century. And let me introduce you to problems. And here we go, a prologue about the environment or a, house has how they had previously refer to it as changes in the land, in any way environmental change has been a constant in our life, early european settlers who settle the part of north america known as new england were amazed by the plant life and the abundance found there. One observer compared to austrian spawning grounds, pressing up the Shallow Waters, so you could swim. Another columnist speculated they could maybe walk across streams on the backs of the fish. The same went for water fowl, if i should tell you one man wrote the killed 100 geese in a week and it might be counted as impossible but europeans visiting the new world said there was villages teaming with fresh vegetables and Indigenous People who are healthy and will fade. They were the product of when nature was possible in the early depiction of what we now know is native americans roasting the abundant fish spewed with their kind of muscular bodies and frames exposed. Now in recent years historians and others have questions questioned if some of these reports this kind of image that the american, filled with bountiful plant and animal life for themselves kind of products of history we now another early american column colonists and native american populations have been america cases decimated by disease they had been introduced to the americas the caribbean or metric or mexico may years before european colonists had come to north america. The theory is this is a vast abundance and kind of a product of rapid natural restocking. And the indigenous didnt just people had been decimated by other causes. So the whats going on now is the vast changes that you beans human beings have caused going back to the beginning of the species. But the thing is you have to start somewhere. One of the things about starting a new contacts, if you can start telling a story about the hand how the land had changed, how the environment changed in each region, and as you start Going Forward right. We know quite a bit about the very environments, and the future of the United States of america, more generally. And run through a few of the major changes right now. First off imagine its abstract as you go long so force was cleared for farms, stumps pulled out, rock plowed out, wildlife native wildlife got replaced with domestic animals. Mostly imported from europe. European pigs and cows. Replacing native deer, for elk. You begin to see changes at the land that way in much of the northern United States. Beaver were hunted, nearly to local extinction. During the u. S. Colonial period. Not only took one element of native wildlife out of the picture, but it meant that beavers stop building beaver dams. And stopped flooding the landscape, with water as they periodically set up to hunt for fish. You have a drying out of the land. As well as its being turned from forced into agriculture. You have water, they had once flowed very slowly, down to the atlantic ocean, increasingly rushing through rapid moving streams and rivers, toward the final destination. Its a land around it has now dried out. Many of the fish i mentioned a few minutes ago gradually die out, the habitat destruction, manmade dams, walking past or through overfishing, destroying the ability of fish to reproduce. You start seeing, among different areas, broad changes to the local environment. Again these changes to the land, were not without their contributions to humanity, it is also a newlynew england along some of these same moving fastmoving rivers and streams that they started the Industrial Revolution. By figuring out how to turn cotton into fabric at high speed. This was one step towards the United States emerging as a Global Economic power. As well as how we come to buy and enjoy various different things. And of course the Industrial Revolution caused many more changes to the land. As we search for coal and oil eventually, to fire up factories and power trucks, which to crisscross the landscape, with highways. Now at various points in our history, at very points from perhaps the semi mythical, time to a more present time, so americans came to question the ecological habitants, from all vince put all this production. In the late 19th and early eight early 20th century, many citizens supported president roosevelt, because he worried that United States was using up all its non Renewable Resources to quickly, conservationists, people as they became known, work to set aside forests, mountains full of minerals for use by future generations as well as to prefer preserve some beautiful locations and parks during the new deal response to the Great Depression in the 1930s president franklin roosevelt, people working for him they tried to restore the planet by hiring the unemployed for various conservation programs. Planting trees trying to mitigate the horrible dust balls the cover the great plains at that time. A crucial moment came in the 1960s, which saw the rise of modern environmentalism. Over the course of that decade, americans found themselves galvanized, with ecological issues. On a number of different fronts. Some of those were intellectual, Rachel Carson her book silent spring, on the account of how chemical pesticides had worked their way up the food chain. And could potentially be fatal to birds and fish, and then it was an inspiration that made americans question, the type of pesticides, that theyre pumping into their environment. Certain public events, Massive Oil Spill in california, santa barbara, and then it washing up on the california coast our previous pristine beaches, the keyhole the river in cleveland, decades of accumulative pollution, got peoples attention. We generally tend to think of water is something that is used to put out fires, but not something that seems to can bust. It raised these questions, about what exactly have people been putting there and whatever damage are they potentially doing. And the evidence that americans are just spoiling nature or the natural world, was becoming kind of an overflowing sewer, was not limited to oil events and river fires, other americans in the suburbs allow their own kind of personal waste to come bubbling back into their lives. Septic systems overtaxed septic systems. You these type of tanks that many suburban houses put in the backyard, which when flushed, where everything that came down the toilet right, set and percolated for a moment, before percolating and we were going in the groundwater, and sometimes it started preparing percolating back up through the grass, and communities, were too many septic tanks were placed together, without adequate place for water to dissipate. Suburban homeowners started turning on the tap of their sink, and stop losses of something that look like white beer, which you see over here, that is tap water that has been sufficiently polluted with detergents. And released back into wells and water supply. You get this kind of frothy detergent when on a glass of water all right. These combined experience sometime of them they were public sometime personal sometimes its electoral arguments coming out of everyday life help to begin to develop a different moment of consciousness and that was once placed on the earth and for more than the conservation its had a future generations earlier environmentals began asking people to think about and the effects of their actions on the health of the planet in general. What one dog goes through a could not be completely forgotten. The earth no longer had an limitless capacity to swallow up and take care of whatever we no longer needed. Environmentalists began asking americans to see the world in ecological terms. That is to see, how many different plants and animals, sustain one another. Produce this sort of complicated web of life. They asked people to say the earth ecologically and see their own actions to be something that could be impacting the ecosystem, and ultimately disrupt a habitat. Environmentalists also began to argue that National Community and while things are protecting further our is worth protecting for their own sake. Not only simply for their future harvest on behalf of humanity. While contravention is trying to scientifically manage for us, in order to make sure that we could spend the timber harvest over several generations. To keep old forest wild, to keep them safe from any future developments. To keep them safe from future degeneration. Not save them for them. By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, you have a bipartisan era where this new consciousness begins to show itself, in major legislation. Legislation passed by Democratic Congress is, and often in mostly signed by president s. You have the National Environmental policy act of 1969, the first day which is the first celebration of the environment in 1970. This endangered species act of 1973, other bills to clean up rivers, reduce air pollution, designed to Environmental Protection agency comes twice in this period. I can environmentalism gets embraced congressman people like john sailor, and senator john hice from the republican side. Just a lot of production action, yet, for all of its early bipartisan appeal, environmental consciousness could be in some ways was an uneasy fit for certain elements of the u. S. Political system. Especially for certain elements of the legal system. Again, the legal system as we talked about previously in this class is based on an Angle American tradition, in which the basic units of society tend to be right spearing individuals. That is most of what we do, in our everyday life, is supposed to be in little interest to the state, so long as what we are doing is not harming anyone. Sorry i jumped ahead, right back. All right, one of the most fundamental realizations that the Environmental Movement was the idea that so many of the things we do in our everyday life how many we run the dishwasher, how many we walked to the Grocery Store took the car. Has potential to harm the world around us. That harm and each particular case could be microscopic, but in aggregate to cumulative effects of millions of dishwasher runs, or day today car trips. Conducted day after day by millions of different people, ultimately night might not. And so environmentalists became paul massive moment in the later 20th century. Course enters start to think how they can square it with the u. S. Legal traditions, and inherited legal doctrines. I want to talk for much of the rest of the class today, but two of the big conflicts, from my perspective, that ensued as a result of this. Okay. One place where environmental is mom was placed an immediate challenge, was with property rights. Especially in the context of real estate. Again the notion the government was trying to release in part to protect private property, went deep into the philosophical tradition that helped and spire americas founding fathers. Its an idea associated with john lock english philosopher, the government exists to protect life liberty and property. Thomas jefferson might have replaced the word property with the pursuit of happiness, in our own declaration of independence. He didnt necessarily mean to change the entire underlying theory, behind their. That is its one of the things that are supposed to separate a society, with purposely limited government with a society from an authoritarian or totalitarian government, is that the government can take your staff. It willynilly is a very serious academic term for the stuff. And this idea was included explicitly in our bill of rights. Including in the end of the fifth amendment. Which concludes nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. The government may someday need to not cameraman to build a highway, a flood your farm to build a reservoir. But if in when that happens, they have to pay for the property took and or destroyed. And that payment itself is hot to be at least one significant check on the end of misuse of that power, known as Eminent Domain, since the government have to convince other taxpayers to foot the bill for any sort of acquisition. Now, controversies over proprietary property in the mid 20th century. One of the changes in the chant in the land i did not mention in the lecture, was some of the havoc by pigs, european pigs, on colonial north america. I told you how to get back to the pick obsession. According to english tradition, you can own a pig, and you can let it loose in the woods for john acorns, or other kinds of food it can come up with. But when you introduced european pigs, into north america, especially when you said pays loose to forage and the lines, controlled bayern native american neighbors, all sorts of conflicts tended to ensue. The pace trampled, or devoured gardens of native americans, we did not have the tradition of fencing off property, to keep neighboring swine out. They attacked and devoured Shallow Water oyster beds which provided a source of forage protein for many indigenous tribes. In essence, these disputes rate, led to war. Over actual fighting between neighbors. There could also be imagine in some way as a property crisis. And who was the right to let us let this pick go where. How do you enforce or declare something that is yours and not part of a common trust. There for the taking. How do you claim and try to enforce a Certain Property right . Okay. So these are not by no means particularly new, or original kind of issues. There are issues that go back to the very beginning. Here issues that continue with questions over what schools would say, divert are river for irrigation. The rise of environmentalism creates some of these issues, back on the agenda. And puts them on the agenda in different ways. Again one of the things that happens, what happens when you start thinking like an environmentalist, which is thinking ecologically about the potential were seemingly small actions to disrupt the wider web of relationships, the hold a habitat and hold nature together. One of the things you might start thinking about is how clearing land for construction, might remove the cover and camouflage of small animals need in order to stay safe from predators. Or how flattening the land could make suburban sub developments, could this erupt the runoff patterns that divert that bring rain water into the water table, or to streams or to creeks, and make neighboring properties, that profited messes that isnt profiting at all to flooding. How some large birds of prey, need uninterrupted forced to comfortably hunt for food. And how eliminating in a small part of that area, might turn out to be disastrous for them. Feeling in a swamp, good rob untie region of its most natural needs of restoring water an air quality. That is an all these examples, you might wonder much more than people have done a generation before, about how the things you do have affects that go far beyond the property line. Or the thing that other people do, may have if they have their own private property might have profound effects on you, and you are world where the natural world. Youre hoping to sustain. You might think much more carefully about what people should be able to do, with their stuff. And to what degree you might want to have a say in it. Now its not as if there was already an existing tradition in american law, for people and communities of having an opinion about what other people do with their private property. Back in 1926, there was a case called you click versus ambler. The Supreme Court oked what we now know as zoning. That is telling people, they could construct private housing, or commercial buildings, that they could only be a certain size, what i have to have a certain mix or lack of a mix of commercial and residential kind of use. That you cant put commercial too close to people where people live. For the most part environmentalists began to hope to expand on that principle. To justify more intervention, into private developments. In the interest of better protecting habitats whether the concept of private property that america has inherited, and developed over so many years, was ultimately flexible for that task. As early as 1971, professor sacks, one of the leading minds of the environmentalists movements, as well as the kind of theorist of the law and politics, more generally. Suggested in a article of the american understanding and become so tilted for the rights of property owners, that it would ultimately inhibit any real change to save the planet. American said that we need a new language of public rights, tech could justify the more extensive regulation of private property, needed to protect the environment, but the same power that had protected the prerogatives of individual property owners, and individual people. One of the battlegrounds, for these concepts, battlegrounds over the concept of environmentalism and rates, became the state of california. In the 1970s, the state passed a landmark coastal act, which was designed to protect one of the states best known and most loved assets. Beautiful stringer beaches and cliffs, up and down the pacific coast. From the top of the state, down to the mexican border. From over development, environmental damage, and public exclusion. The coastal act created a new agency, the California Coastal commission, whic