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The Making of Environmental Law (review)

286 U.S.ENVIRONMENTAL LAW as presently understood is only about 35 years old. It arrived after a relatively short gestation period, compared to most far-reaching public policy.American lawyers who came of age in the 1970s witnessed with its birth an unprecedented change in the legal relationships between humankind and the natural environment.Things moved so far and so fast in the United States that in only a decade, previously unremarkable and routine behavior came to be recognized as antisocial, morally wrong, and even criminal when interpreted in the light of the new laws and rapidly evolving public awareness. And so it was that after a paroxysm of lawsuits interpreting the National Environmental Policy Act (signed into law on January 1, 1970), it quickly became unthinkable for a federal official to place the environment at risk without first completing an environmental impact assessment. Rules to protect human health from smokestack emissions, and the health of water bodies from discharges of industrial wastewater, imposed under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of 1970 and 1972, respectively, impacted traditional common law property rights by radically constraining previously lawful land uses. Federal laws circumscribing the use of certain kinds of poisons, restricting noise, prescribing rules for the