“The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival”
THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Book Review, July/Aug 2019
“Are We Endangered Yet?: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Species”
THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM, March/April 2019
“Losing Earth: The Golden Moment for Climate Change”
THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM, Nov/Dec 2018
“The Wild Trees and The Man Who Planted Trees”
THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM, Jun/July 2018
“A Tale of Two Cities: Water and Grass in the American West”
THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM, Jan/Feb 2018
“Resurrection: De-extinction and the Future of Wild Things”
THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM, July/August 2017
“Eruption: The Mount St Helens Story”
The Environmental Forum, March/April 2017
“Underneath the adventure tale lies another question about how we treat situations like Mt St Helens, the possibility-without-certainty that something terrible is in the offing which haunts the field of both disaster and environmental law,. Humans are not very good at this trick either and it too remains in play.”
“Rattling the Cage: The Rights of Nature in the Third Millennium”
The Environmental Forum, January/February 2017
“What seems certain is, as the author predicts, the question of what rights we are to accord to the world around us will ‘gnaw at the heart of what we believe, what we stand for, and what we are’. Amen to that.”
“Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire”
The Environmental Forum, September/October 2016
“At book’s end, Astoria speculates on what might have happened if Astor’s Northwest venture had succeeded. Could it really have coexisted with the eastern civilization where he lived. Would he, in the author’s words, “have created another ‘beacon of democracy’, or ‘a sprawling and powerful trade empire controlled by a dictatorial fur and real estate baron based in Manhattan?’ The question seems uncannily contemporary.”
“The Beekeeper’s Lament”
The Environmental Forum, May/June 2016
“As he and the book both suggest, we would be better off dropping back to smaller operations, restoring meadows and wildflowers, building up wild broods, restocking from them, and getting on a different glide path. California’s central Valley won’t abide that, of course, nor may consumers looking for stuff on the cheap. Nor for that matter will Monsanto and Dow Chemical. “We are so last century’, Miller laments, “and folks have moved on.'”
“Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation”
The Environmental Forum, January/February 2016
“I grew up in northern New Jersey, on the fringe of an industrial belt that ran from Hoboken and Hackensack through a wasteland of dumps, dead marshes and burning tires called (without apparent irony) the Jersey Meadows. Driving over them to New York City we would run up the car windows and stare. Little did we know, little did anyone we knew know, that less than two hours south into the green heart of the state and the legendary, still-wild Pine Barrens was one of the largest toxic disasters on the eastern seaboard. Reading the book, I feel betrayed.”
“In the Kingdom of Ice”, Hampton Sides
The Environmental Forum, September/October 2015
“A more harrowing tale would be hard to imagine, with the unexpected appearance of another large-than-life product of the century, one of its boldest visionaries and adventurers, John Muir. Harvard’s iconic Louis Aggasiz pronounced late in life that Muir ‘was the first man who has any adequate conception of glacial action’. Apart from life as an impassioned tree-hugger (which he certainly was), Muir was also an astonishing polymath.”
“American Energy: Imperiled Coast”, Jason Theriot
The Environmental Forum, May/June 2015.
“What ensued is not terribly different from the course of virtually all natural resource development in America, eastern coal, western minerals, timber, cattle, fisheries – and now the frenetic plays for natural gas. We’re never ready for it, the exploitation goes wild, impacts are ignored, then denied, then grudgingly regulated, often weakly and often too late to remedy the harm, and things stumble on.”
“Fighting Westway”, William Buzbee
The Environmental Forum, January/February 2015
“A new model for urban living based on highways, beltways, massive corridors to the suburbs, rows of buildings towering over traffic flowing like water, all to be fueled by this new financial bonanza, the federal-aid highway program. The money was irresistible, and few cities even tried. Within less than a decade urban America was transformed.”
“The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America”, H. Bruce Franklin
The Environmental Forum, July/August 2014.
“Years ago Al Capp’s comic strip L’il Abner introduced an astonishing creature: the Shmoo. It was abundant everywhere, fed everyone else, and loved being killed by hunters. It was the perfect animal. In fact the Shmoo actually exists, only it is a fish and it does yet another amazing thing: aside from feeding practically everything else in the sea, it also eats colossal amounts of algae, the most virulent form of water pollution in America today and the cause of dead zones on every coast.”
The Snail Darter and the Dam, Zygmunt B. Plater
The Environmental Forum, March/April 2014
“There was yet more difficult dynamic here too, and it underlies all endangered species conflicts, a simple and terrible question: whether humans have the right to wipe a unique form of life from the face of the earth.”
The Power of Gold, Peter L. Bernstein
The Environmental Forum, November/December 2013
“The story of gold would thus make a highly entertaining fairy tale — the ultimate unicorn — if it were not plagued by an untrammeled line of conquest, war, slavery, fratricide, genocide, brutal inhumanity, and the despoliation of every medium on earth where it has been found. Few things in human history have been more constant, and appalling. And adored.”
Drinking Water: A History, James Salzman
The Environmental Forum, July/August 2013
“To confess, I am one of those mystics Salzman describes, mesmerized by the presence of water. I feel as if I am inside the most astonishing machine on the planet short of the human brain, intricate, self-renewing, coming around an upstream bend. There is nothing private about it. I recognize that this feeling is part of his problem.”
Charles Waterton 1782-1865: Traveller and Conservationist, Julia Blackburn
The Environmental Forum, March / April 2013, Pp 6-7
“At book’s end I found myself thinking what Waterton would think of us in our time. On a brief visit to America, witnessing rapacious lumbering eating its way through native forest, he implored, “Spare it, gentle inhabitants, for your country’s sake.” We did spare some, and we have set aside large refuges for wildlife and wilderness as well. But we consume the rest of the landscape and its creatures with abandon, now stripping even agricultural areas of all life in the name of food safety. In the name of highways. In the name of illuminated tall buildings, high-tension power lines, and oil-well canals. We kill wherever we go, the list is long and the slaughter is tremendous.”
Tears of the Cheetah and Other Tales From the Genetic Frontier, Stephen J. O’Brien
The Environmental Forum, November / December 2012
“When former Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho said some years ago that she couldn’t see why salmon were endangered “because I can buy them off the shelf at Albertson’s,” one had to be grateful for here candor. She really could not see why, and therein lay a problem.”
Conservation in the Anthropocene, Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marview, and Robert Lalasz
The Environmental Forum, July / August 2012
“What E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia” lies deep in our genes. It may seem crazy to super-bright folks, but people care about polar bears. They care enough about places they may never see to go out and fight for them, because they feel it is right. Because they think that nature does not belong to us, but we to it. It’s a moral thing. Whether these same people are willing to say, Hey, nature is whatever we want it to be, and then give their all to the anthropocentric “garden” is a major gamble. For the mixed-use garden may be a mirage. It remains a reasonable gambit for the conservancy to try. But to characterize others in the field as anti-human because they adhere to a world more directed by natural forces than by the gratification of our ever-increasing and ever-demanding species seems unnecessary. Even dangerous.”
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles Mann
The Environmental Forum, March / April 2012
“Thanks to its great genius, the human species has become the one living thing on the planet beyond checks and balances. Nothing could be more clear from his book. Nothing could be more clear from the daily news. For those willing to try to do something about it, with its biological dimensions crashing around us, we have three options: a new kind of awakening; or something too terrible to contemplate; or environmental law. I do not count on awakenings, nor spend time (beyond my own mortality) thinking about the awesomely terrible. Which leaves the field in which we are engaged.”
Ducktown Smoke: The Fight Over One of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters, Duncan Maysilles
The Environmental Forum, November / December 2011
“The U.S. Congress since overtook Georgia v. Tennessee with a number of complex pollution programs. The Supreme Court has, concomitantly, backed away from the nuisance approach articulated by Holmes a century ago. Yet the language remains. Here it is, winning Justice Kennedy’s vote in Massachusetts v. EPA, ostensibly about standing but more powerfully about a state’s constitutional right to defend its air and forests from outside influences. Analogies come to mind.”
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdome, 1879-1960, Douglas Brinkley
The Environmental Forum, July / August 2011
“One could guess that Brinkley’s next book will cover the great Alaska land battles from 1960 to the present, including the fate of this great range. In the sequel, one might hope for a more exacting editor, for few books need 600 pages these days, many of them rabbit trails from the main event. We can look forward to new personae, biological discoveries, and political maneuvers, but at bottom will be the same debate that has raged for over a century between two parallel universes, exploitation and preservation. All the money is on one side. That the other side occasionally wins speaks to something deep and remarkable. Winning something in conservation, of course, is always temporary. It is the losing you have to worry about. Some things you can never get back. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of them.”
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the First That Saved America, Timothy Egan
The Environmental Forum, March / April 2011
“They are standing in his office. The governor, build like a bull, eyes his visitor, a tall man with aquiline features and an athletic build. After a few moments of small talk the governor leans forward with a gleam in his eye and says, ‘Do you want to wrestle?'”
Regulating From Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity, Douglas A. Kysar
The Environmental Forum, November / December 2010
“We also know this, however. Doug Kysar is one of the brightest scholars in environmental law today and in this book he has taken on the tiger. It will not be his last foray. Like other books I have reviewed in this series, it worries at the Gordian Knot, loosens it, relaxes its grip. Eventually, history tells us, a Greek finally came along and cut it with a sword.”
Cleaning Up: The Story Behind the Biggest Legal Bonanza of Our Time, David Lebedoff
The Environmental Forum, July / August 2010
“Finally, Congress might look at the idiosyncrasies of admiralty law, which begins with flags of convenience and gets more bizarre from there, a sample of which is a limitation of liability dating back to the 1800s measured by the “value of the vessel,” which in this case of the Deepwater Horizon is a heap of junk on the ocean floor. Congress might find that result questionable too. Stay tuned. Bad events just might make better law.”
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein
The Environmental Forum, March / April 2010
“The featured nudge of this section is the Ambient Orb, a light that is green in its natural state but turns red when a homeowner uses lots of energy. They also propose a stick pin with a little light we can put in our lapels, proudly (or embarrassingly) revealing our energy use of the day. Can anyone seriously link the use of either device to half the population of this country? Feedback has its limits, and one of them is human beings. None of this is hypothetical. At last report a proposed executive order now sits at the White House for signature. It requires a least-intrusive system for all agency rules, starting with our old friends “information” and “voluntary.” It will be up to the agency to disprove their effectiveness in order to move to the next level, market incentives. Pure Sunstein. We may imagine what comes in last: technology standards. One may even imagine the name of this new order: Nudge.”
The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country, Layton McCartney
The Environmental Forum, November / December 2009
“Of the ten most profitable corporations in the world, six are in the oil business and their leader, Exxon-Mobil, has a larger budget than 90 percent of the nations on earth. Crop production, GDP, all of the commonly used—if deceptive—measures of national well being correlate to oil production, jot for jot. As do widespread environmental damage and political corruption. These are the two faces of Janus wherever oil is found.”
Roadless Rules: The Struggle for the Last Wild Forests, Tom Turner
The Environmental Forum, July / August 2009
“In the end, this war, like the one about opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, like the Wilderness Act itself, which took nearly a decade to enact, is more about psyche and symbols than dollars and jobs. To some, the idea of a tree that cannot be cut down, a place a SUV cannot go, like a wolf that cannot be shot, subordinates the human being to lower forms of life. For these people, too, this is the last stand. At least, I hope so.”
The Si’lailo Way: Indians, Salmon and Law on the Columbia River, Joseph C. Dupris, Kathleen S. Hill, & William H. Rodgers Jr.
The Environmental Forum, March / April 2009
“Among the last items is a series of photographs, then and now. On a lake that buries the Si’lailo Falls there is a shot of windsurfers, trim and sporty. It reminds me of a photo I once saw of the lake created by the infamous Tellico Dam, inundating the homeland of Chief Seneca and the Cherokee Nation. The tops of farm silos stick out from the lake like plastic bubbles. Underneath the Tellico waters, their claims to religious rights silenced by the courts as unrecognizable, lies another Si’lailo Falls. We are no longer, one hopes, at the point of building more of these things. It is time to think the unthinkable and begin taking them down.”
The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, James Gustave Speth
The Environmental Forum, November / December 2008
“At one point in The Bridge at the End of the World, Speth likens promoting environmental policy to the task of Sisyphus, doomed to roll his rock uphill each day only to have it roll back again. He quotes Camus as observing that, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I cannot imagine it. I cannot imagine Speth imagining it. One has to have the feeling that, even though the rock rolls back, it went a millimeter farther this time and that some day, you or another, are going to reach the summit. His book advances that hope. It identifies the beast. It identifies the objective. It gets us closer.”
Mother Earth and Uncle Sam: How Pollution and Hollow Government Hurt Our Kids, Rena I. Steinzor
The Environmental Forum, July / August 2008
“This much is certain, she has faith in the administrative environmental state. In a democracy, that state is going to be as healthy as the support it receives from the White House and the other two branches of government. All of which puts the American environmental state on a political roller-coaster, rising and falling at predictable intervals and with little overall coherence. Steinzor’s remedy is to give EPA more tools and more insulation. Perhaps these solutions would work, but if the agency is determined not to protect the public health greater deference to its decisions may turn out to be an unwelcome shield. Some have suggested, oppositely, that we should abandon EPA altogether and require Congress to make the hard call on contaminants that it has delegated to the agency. Unfortunately, Congress’s inability to make such a call even on automobile fuel efficiency standards provides little encouragement here. For the short term, the best we may be able to hope for is a new administrative day.”
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
38 Environmental Law 627, Spring 2008
“At the end of the day, however, whoever is in the White House will have to wrestle with the American lifestyle and Diamond’s consumption factor of thirty-two to one. To say that the environmental movement needs positive messages is a useful reminder, but does not advance the ball. If a more pollution free, diverse, and sustainable world is not enough for positive, then our ears are open for something better. In the meantime, a little more respect for those who have made hard gains against long odds and are working towards the same ends with a highly imaginative and widely diverse array of tools would seem to be in order. Telling their funders, or now the American public, that environmentalists are off the mark and only you are on it is not. The next book needs fewer sling shots and more answers.”
Collapse, Jared Diamond
The Environmental Forum, January / February 2008
“Civilizations would rather die than switch because dying turns out to be a whole lot easier. You just have to keep on truckin’. The terrible irony of the world today is that so much of its hope lies in following American examples set two hundred years ago, and so much of its risk lies in following the America of today. The greatest challenge of Collapse is right here, in this country, in this time.”
The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, John Vaillant
The Environmental Forum, September / October 2007
“Shortly thereafter, in the dead of winter, Grant Hadwin got into a small kayak with a few rations and scant gear and paddled away from Queen Charlotte’s Island up the Hecate Strait where storm waves can top 100 feet, the tides rise and fall by 24 feet, twice a day, and cross currents collide with such violence they can break, and have broken, a small boat in two. That is all I will say.”
The Swamp, Michael Grunwald, and Bayou Farewell, Michael Tidwell
The Environmental Forum, January/February 2007
“The control of nature is what humans do. It and the thumb and the number of wrinkles on the brain are what separate us from other creatures, and over time we have graduated from merely exploiting natural forces to subduing them with walls and machines, the technology of transcontinental railroads, cities below sea level, and deserts that bloom. These are heroic stories and they have produced a stream of celebratory literature, larger than life figures battling intemperate climates, fickle politics, and personal animosities to achieve yet another benchmark. We may make mistakes, but in the end we always seem to win.”
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dustbowl, Timothy Egan
The Environmental Forum, May / June 2007
“In the end, the government bought up over 11 million acres of wasted farms and tried to return them to grass. Some of it worked, but in other places the soils remain “sterile and drifting.” The best chances for recovery are found in a handful of national grasslands run by the National Forest Service, small museums of the land that was. For the rest, America has on its body this great wound that is not going to heal in the lifetimes of anyone imaginable. Limits in nature exist and we, too, can go beyond them, and never get back.”
Cities In The Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America, Bruce Babbitt
The Environmental Forum, March / April 2006
“We are as divided as ever as to just what an ecosystem is and as yet have not even found words or useful metaphors to carry on the much needed discussion of the correct human role in the ecosystem.” Amen. So what do we do about that? Maybe we need fewer lawyers, and more social workers. But that is for another book. This one is a good, instructive, and heartening read. By one of the great conservationists of our time. That, too, is worth the price.”
Is That All? A Review of the National Environment Policy Act, An Agenda For the Future, Lynton Keith Caldwell
Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum, Fall 2000
“To the extent he can legitimately claim credit for it–and the evidence is that he can–Lynton Caldwell should sit back and enjoy a good stiff millennial drink. Well done! Following which, like the rest of us who labor in this vineyard, he should come back out swinging, because we will never save the environment with the one big blow he longs for. But we have to keep on swinging.”
Breaking The Vicious Circle, Stephen Breyer
The Environmental Forum, March / April 1994
“In an increasing number of statutes, the Congress—the same body maligned in this book for creating and not solving the risk management problem—is solving it in a very different way. For much of the field of environmental and public health, it is banning the worst risks, adopting best available technology for the rest, and passing risk management by.”
The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carré Riverfront-Expressway Controversy, Richard O. Baumbach, Jr. & William E. Borah
Tulane Law Review, December 1982
“There is perhaps a final reason for recognizing this book in academia. It is found in a single character who appears doggedly from time to time in the narrative, speaking his mind, daring to present evidence contrary to the great weight of studies favoring the expressway. He was at the time the Dean of the Tulane School of Architecture. Whatever heat and agony he brought upon himself for this unpopular stand can only be speculated upon; it is not described. But his students always came to the hearings. They saw a faculty member, a dean no less, willing to go out and give his best in a politically unpopular cause, willing to risk embarrassment in his profession and financial support for his school, perhaps his job, perhaps his health, for what he simply thought was right, and wrong. They saw him perform in this crucible and, if his quoted statements are at all representative, perform admirably. For these students the example of this man may have been the best education they have ever received.”