Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Abstract
What, is truly "environmental" about environmental law? This Article is the first attempt to answer this question by integrating Law & Literature scholarship with the study of environmental law. I argue that competing narratives of nature and culture common to the American environmental imagination play a more significant role in environmental law and litigation than previously acknowledged. These competing narratives, communicated through a known set of environmental stories and tropes, are used by attorneys to establish, frame, narrate and argue their cases, and they are absorbed, reimagined, reframed and retold by judges in their written opinions, making environmental law a kind of expressive, literary event. To illustrate this process, the Article examines two important and highly visible case studies: the reintroduction of gray wolves into the Northern Rocky Mountains and the public nuisance climate change lawsuit that culminated in the Supreme Court's decision in Connecticut v. American Electric Power. A close reading of the pleadings, legal briefs and judicial opinions in these case studies demonstrates that courts respond to and reinforce traditional environmental stories, such as wilderness tales and the environmental apocalyptic, but evince a strong preference for a less well-known story, which I call the Progressive Management Machine. The Progressive Management Machine promises reconciliation of competing environmental narratives through administrative process and science-driven decision making, but, in so doing, masks its own contravention of those same narratives. The approach developed here launchesa larger project exploring the dynamic relationship between environmental law, literature and narrative. This Article, like the larger project, seeks to elucidate not only various litigators' and judges' rhetorical strategies but also the purposes, content and significance of environmental law.
Disciplines
Environmental Law | Law
Recommended Citation
Michael Burger,
Environmental Law/Environmental Literature,
40
Ecology L.Q.
1
(2013).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/sabin_climate_change/8
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