Volume 44 (2017)

I am honored to introduce Ecology Law Quarterly’s special issue on environmental governance and technology. This dedicated volume focuses on the tension between rapidly advancing data technology and slower-moving law and policy adaptation. This issue could not come at a more important time, as we are in the midst of ...

Environmental regulation invariably requires making decisions in the face of scientific uncertainty. However, making decisions in the near-absence of evidence—essentially, the most extreme uncertainty—is a special case because it most plainly exposes the defaults and preferences of those making the decisions, and because it may inspire creative ways of reducing ...

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 ...

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 ...

Hydraulic fracturing, an oil and gas drilling technique commonly referred to as “fracking,” has experienced a profound expansion in the United States since the dawn of the twenty-first century. Providing an influx of cheap oil and gas and new job opportunities, the boom has worked wonders for the American economy. ...

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is one of our nation’s oldest environmental statutes. It was passed decades before the major environmental law renaissance of the 1970s, and is lesser known than the more contemporary wildlife protection statutes that dominate headlines and political debate, such as the Endangered Species Act.

In 2016, the United States Supreme Court decided Sturgeon v. Frost, which posed the question of whether the federal government may regulate activities on nonfederal lands within the hundred million acres of land designated for preservation under a 1980 federal statute, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). The ...

When honey bee populations began to drastically decline in 2006 from what came to be known as Colony Collapse Disorder, the response from the United States Department of Agriculture was swift. As research emerged on the causes, pesticides—specifically a new and widely used class of pesticides called neonicotinoids—quickly emerged as ...

In North Dakota v. Heydinger, two Eighth Circuit judges disagreed about the constitutionality of a Minnesota statute regulating the electricity imported into the state. Their disagreement stemmed from the judges’ conflicting understandings of the behavior of electrons.

The U.S. electrical grid is a modern marvel, consisting of nearly 3500 utility organizations, 450,000 miles of transmission lines, and six million miles of distribution cable that span across and crisscross the country to serve over 334 million people (and growing) whose total electricity demand exceeds 830 gigawatts. But the ...

Energy information and technology has reached a point where the operator of a twenty-first-century grid can balance supply and demand based on value, not cost. Better data, more distributed and dynamic resources, and improvements in supporting infrastructure represent an opportunity for an electric system to operate more reliably with less ...

In 2016, the Third Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a nonprofit group’s environmental citizen suit because it found that a government agency was already diligently prosecuting the defendant. The decision provided an important procedural precedent because it changed the standard by which agency prosecution is reviewed during a motion to ...

Under the Clean Water Act, a troubling regulatory gap exists wherein the federal government is unable to directly regulate diffuse sources of water pollution in interstate waters. This gap has left many of the nation’s most important watersheds flooded with nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff, contrary to the purpose of ...

The idea of nature as a stable and predictable counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies is at the heart of one of the most enduring environmental writing traditions, the pastoral. Moreover, a related rhetorical convention, the pastoral elegy, distinguishes the nature writing and environmental philosophy of ...

Patrick Michaels, a former professor at the University of Virginia, has built a second career at the libertarian Cato Institute issuing data-laden reports against mainstream climate change science. In his latest book, Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything, Michaels joins Paul Knappenberger, the assistant director for the Cato ...

The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (“AB 32”) set statewide goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. On November 30, 2015, the Supreme Court of California held in Center for Biological Diversity v. California Department of Fish and Wildlife that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) ...

In August 2016, the D.C. Circuit held that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) met its obligations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) but failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it issued an Incidental Take Permit (ITP) for the endangered Indiana bat. On the ...

Under the administrative law principle of Chevron deference, if the language of a statute is ambiguous, a court must defer to the agency’s interpretation of that language if the agency’s interpretation is reasonable. In Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court evaluated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision ...