
Technical innovation is ubiquitous in contemporary society and contributes to its extraordinarily dynamic character. Sometimes these innovations have significant effects on the environment or on human health. They may also stimulate efforts to develop second-order technologies to ameliorate those effects.
The history of the U.S. environmental justice movement reveals that successful campaigns are seldom waged solely through litigation. Instead, communities have employed litigation and administrative actions as part of a broader grassroots struggle to achieve short- and long-term change.
It is our pleasure to introduce Ecology Law Quarterly’s 2016–17 Annual Review of Environmental and Natural Resource Law. This is the Annual Review’s eighteenth year and is a product of collaboration among the ELQ editors and student authors, Berkeley Law’s environmental law faculty, and the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.
Today in California, urban infill development proliferates. A welcome alternative to decades of greenfield expansion, this infill boom is the culmination of regulatory incentives like SB 375, economic growth in urban areas, as well as increasing awareness of the climate evils of vehicle emissions (quantified in vehicle miles traveled, or VMT). The social, spatial, environmental, and economic effects of this infill boom are far-flung and implicate many areas of study.