Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law - Softcover

Alejandro E. Camacho; Brigham Daniels

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1479846996 ISBN 13: 9781479846993

Publisher: New York University, 2026

Synopsis

Shows the foundational role law has played throughout U.S. history in both environmental exploitation and protection and offers crucial lessons for addressing contemporary challenges The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States reflects tales of countless contrasting and overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Law has cultivated both the planet's biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health. U.S. laws have driven both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation. Lessons for a Warming Planet showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of U.S. environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States, reaching as far back as North America's colonization and ending with the present. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced environmental change. Camacho and Daniels provide a fascinating and insightful history of environmental law. They ask readers to consider: What lessons can we draw from environmental legal history for contemporary challenges like climate change, AI, and emerging biotechnologies? In looking to the past, Lessons for a Warming Planet illustrates how prior generations each used legal imagination to navigate seemingly insurmountable environmental threats.

About this title

About the Authors

Alejandro E. Camacho (Author) Alejandro E. Camacho is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author, with Robert Glicksman, of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework.

Brigham Daniels (Author) Brigham Daniels is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Edition details

• Publisher: New York University
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1479846996
• ISBN 13: 9781479846993
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328