Ends and Means in Environmental Law, or the Unlikely Marriage of Law and Letters
By Eric T. Freyfogle
INTRODUCTION
To sponsor a conference on environmental law and letters is to raise the possibility that adherents of two different approaches to nature and culture might have more reason to talk than they presume. Do humanistic scholars, particularly those who focus on people and land, have significant things to learn from the law? More pressing and pertinent, would our environmental laws and policies improve if the legal writers who engaged with them took greater account of humanistic insights?
My answer, in brief, is this: humanistic perspectives could aid the law, but it is unlikely at present that they will do so. Significant influence will not occur unless humanists put their observations in a more useable form. This means directing their comments to the environmental movement as a whole, and through that movement, to the legal community itself. This need for redirection arises from several causes having to do with the characteristics of the legal mind, and with influential strands of American culture. The causes are lamentable; in the long run perhaps they can change. But in the here and now, they constrain the possible, and they explain even if they do not justify, why environmental lawyers today have little use for humanistic writings.
To sponsor a conference on environmental law and letters is to raise the possibility that adherents of two different approaches to nature and culture might have more reason to talk than they presume. Do humanistic scholars, particularly those who focus on people and land, have significant things to learn from the law? More pressing and pertinent, would our environmental laws and policies improve if the legal writers who engaged with them took greater account of humanistic insights?
My answer, in brief, is this: humanistic perspectives could aid the law, but it is unlikely at present that they will do so. Significant influence will not occur unless humanists put their observations in a more useable form. This means directing their comments to the environmental movement as a whole, and through that movement, to the legal community itself. This need for redirection arises from several causes having to do with the characteristics of the legal mind, and with influential strands of American culture. The causes are lamentable; in the long run perhaps they can change. But in the here and now, they constrain the possible, and they explain even if they do not justify, why environmental lawyers today have little use for humanistic writings.
