Environmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature
A Constructivist Approach

This book examines how nature is constructed through law, building on the constructivist concept that 'nature' is a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social creation.

Keith H. Hirokawa (Edited by)

9781107033474, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 July 2014

362 pages, 1 map
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.65 kg

'By exploring how we construct and change nature by our laws, the contributors to this book demonstrate the importance of new policy debates and the need for changing our constructs, especially in a climate altered world. To have a new way of looking at the world, we have to understand how we got where we are. This book does this beautifully.' Victor B. Flatt, Director, Center for Law, Environment, Adaptation, and Resource, University of North Carolina

Law's ideas of nature appear in different doctrinal and institutional settings, historical periods, and political dialogues. Nature underlies every behavior, contract, or form of wealth, and in this broad sense influences every instance of market transaction or governmental intervention. Recognizing that law has embedded discrete constructions of nature helps in understanding how humans value their relationship with nature. This book offers a scholarly examination of the manner in which nature is constructed through law, both in the 'hard' sense of directly regulating human activities that impact nature, and in the 'soft' manner in which law's ideas of nature influence and are influenced by behaviors, values, and priorities. Traditional accounts of the intersection between law and nature generally focus on environmental laws that protect wilderness. This book will build on the constructivist observation that when considered as a culturally contingent concept, 'nature' is a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing social creation.

1. Nature in a constructed world: grounding the constructivist method Rik Scarce and Keith H. Hirokawa
2. An unnatural divide: how law obscures individual environmental harms Katrina Fischer Kuh
3. Defining nature as a common pool resource Jonathan D. Rosenbloom
4. Property constructs and nature's challenge to property perpetuity Jessica Owley
5. Perceiving change and knowing nature: shifting baselines and nature's resiliency Robin Kundis Craig
6. Animals and law in the American city Irus Braverman
7. Boundaries of nature and the American city Stephen R. Miller
8. Constructing nature the radical way: extreme environmentalism and law Rik Scarce
9. Wilderness imperatives and untrammeled nature Sandra B. Zellmer
10. Native American values and laws of exclusion Catherine Iorns-Magallanes
11. Challenging what appears 'natural': the environmental justice movement's impact on the environmental agenda Shannon M. Roesler
12. The transformation of water Dan A. Tarlock
13. Framing watersheds Craig Anthony Arnold
14. The last, last frontier Michael Burger.

Subject Areas: Environment law [LNKJ], Law [L], Environmental economics [KCN]