Eight Lessons in Search of the Future: Observations on the Occasion of the Silver Anniversary of the Virginia Environmental Law Journal
By Karin P. Sheldon
INTRODUCTION
Anniversaries are useful occasions for reflection. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Virginia Environmental Law Journal provides an appropriate point to look both back and ahead, to consider the past and the future of environmental law. The past will inform our steps into what is yet to be, the future will offer us the opportunity to adapt and apply what we have learned in response to new challenges.
The Journal 's anniversary comes at a particularly significant point in the development of environmental law, the confluence of two seemingly contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, environmental issues have all but disappeared from the front pages of newspapers all over the United States, pushed aside by stories about terrorism and corporate misconduct. Public concern for the environment appears to have waned, and environmental matters are at the bottom of the issues list of most political candidates. In 2005, two brash young men pronounced environmentalism dead, characterizing it as a failed movement of navel-gazing techno-geeks with no political savvy or understanding of public sentiments.
At the same time that the environment as an issue of gripping public concern seems to have faded, two overarching environmental threats--global climate change and energy consumption--loom on the horizon. These two problems (which are inter-connected, if not one and the same) include and eclipse all other environmental issues and may represent the tipping point past which no amount of protection effort will suffice to save affected ecosystems and species.
For environmental lawyers and students of environmental law, the contradiction between the lack of public attention and the enormity of environmental problems is baffling, yet its existence is one of the key challenges for the future of environmental law. Two questions arise from the conundrum. The first is why the public has disengaged at this critical moment, when it was public concern that created the environmental movement and compelled the enactment of environmental law. The second, and perhaps more critical question, is whether the policies and legal institutions of the past will be sufficient to equip us to address the future.
This essay is one environmental lawyer's thoughts about where we have come from and the lessons we have learned along the way. It is my hope these lessons will be useful in answering the questions before us and creating the environmental law of the next quarter century. Of necessity in a short piece, deep and complex issues will be addressed in a superficial way. Fortunately, there is wealth of experience and scholarship to fully illuminate each of the lessons in detail.
Anniversaries are useful occasions for reflection. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Virginia Environmental Law Journal provides an appropriate point to look both back and ahead, to consider the past and the future of environmental law. The past will inform our steps into what is yet to be, the future will offer us the opportunity to adapt and apply what we have learned in response to new challenges.
The Journal 's anniversary comes at a particularly significant point in the development of environmental law, the confluence of two seemingly contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, environmental issues have all but disappeared from the front pages of newspapers all over the United States, pushed aside by stories about terrorism and corporate misconduct. Public concern for the environment appears to have waned, and environmental matters are at the bottom of the issues list of most political candidates. In 2005, two brash young men pronounced environmentalism dead, characterizing it as a failed movement of navel-gazing techno-geeks with no political savvy or understanding of public sentiments.
At the same time that the environment as an issue of gripping public concern seems to have faded, two overarching environmental threats--global climate change and energy consumption--loom on the horizon. These two problems (which are inter-connected, if not one and the same) include and eclipse all other environmental issues and may represent the tipping point past which no amount of protection effort will suffice to save affected ecosystems and species.
For environmental lawyers and students of environmental law, the contradiction between the lack of public attention and the enormity of environmental problems is baffling, yet its existence is one of the key challenges for the future of environmental law. Two questions arise from the conundrum. The first is why the public has disengaged at this critical moment, when it was public concern that created the environmental movement and compelled the enactment of environmental law. The second, and perhaps more critical question, is whether the policies and legal institutions of the past will be sufficient to equip us to address the future.
This essay is one environmental lawyer's thoughts about where we have come from and the lessons we have learned along the way. It is my hope these lessons will be useful in answering the questions before us and creating the environmental law of the next quarter century. Of necessity in a short piece, deep and complex issues will be addressed in a superficial way. Fortunately, there is wealth of experience and scholarship to fully illuminate each of the lessons in detail.