Environmental controls in the United States are often said to be “technology-based” because the pollution source's duties are determined by the available technology for controlling that pollution rather than by the social costs and benefits of doing so. Indeed, this is much of what...

This symposium essay explores the leverage that our National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) can provide to those aiming to change the direction we have been heading in our wildfire epidemic. The epidemic has resulted from decades of policy choices at the local, state and federal levels....

This essay grew out of a symposium on Catholic social thought. It makes the case for solidarity and subsidiarity as principles of applied (secular) ethics by injecting them into what must be their most challenging context: catastrophic global climate disruption. It argues that the principles of...

Wildfire is a growing threat to suburban and exurban communities, partly because fires have grown more severe and frequent as a result of land use and climatic influences and partly because more people are living in fire prone areas. The so-called Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA), the...

The fight to force climate change into environmental impact assessment pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to date has been long, bitter and mostly pointless. Even where agencies have relented in litigation or have proactively worked to integrate climate change...

Conservation's richest innovation in decades has been the conservation easement and, by most accounts, it is still growing in both prevalence and scale. Private actors have used this device to work around the gridlock of the public sphere, achieving broad scales with limited capital. But this...

There is wide agreement among conservation activists and scientists alike that loss and alteration of habitat are the leading threats to biodiversity in America. Suburbs and exurbs, though, are only beginning to acknowledge that they are the problem in the struggle to stem the tide of sprawl and...

Design for Regulation: Integrating Sustainable Production into Mainstream Regulation -- Mandating Sustainability: When Federal Legislation May Preempt the Best Green Building Code Intentions -- An Operational Look at Take-Back Legislation -- Subsidizing Sustainability: The Role of the State and...

Property is surely among the U.S. Constitution's principal objects of protection. As a right, though, property is jurisdictionally complex. The underlying law defining property can always change, making the constitutional protection of property inherently indexical, like the words "here" and...