Curriculum Guide · Courses

Professor Purdy

J.D. Seminar 1120 | 2 credit hours

The course will examine the cultural, political, and social-movement developments that helped bring about major episodes of U.S. environmental lawmaking. We will also draw on this history in reflecting on the prospects for lawmaking around emerging issues today. We will cover the sources, political contexts, and legal results of the four major outlooks that have shaped U.S. lawmaking toward the natural world: development-oriented settlement (integral to the public philosophy of the early republic); utilitarian management (the theory behind creation of the national forests and much other public land); romantic inspiration (the outlook of the early Sierra Club and its fellow travelers, deeply influential on the development of national parks and wilderness areas); and ecological interdependence (the post-1960s view that informed the major pollution and biodiversity statutes passed from 1969 forward). Coming into the present, we will examine the diverse approaches of statutes governing nature, and major divisions in environmental politics, in light of this historically informed taxonomy of environmental worldviews. We will also ask how the historical perspective developed in the first two-thirds of the course can inform our sense of emerging issues such as food and agriculture, climate change, and animal rights. There will be special attention to the role of social movements and cultural innovators in developing new public lexicons of environmental value.