Displays how throughout US history, law has consistently been foundational to the nation's environmental exploitation and protection, offering crucial lessons for addressing contemporary challenges

The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States has been a tale of countless contrasting, overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Cultivating both the planet’s biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health, US laws have been the key driver of 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 US Environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States: the Allocation Era, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era, the Modernization Era, the Environmental Era of the Sixties and Seventies, and the contemporary Contested Era. 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 legal change.

Camacho and Daniels ask what lessons can be drawn from this environmental legal history to help observers address today’s contemporary challenges, from climate change to AI and other emerging biotechnologies. In looking to the past, the book illustrates how others have deployed legal imagination to reckon with similar environmental challenges. Providing a deeply fascinating and insightful history of environmental law, Lessons for a Warming Planet beckons readers to consider: What lessons can be drawn from environmental legal history and its related social, political, and economic movements to address the critical problems of today?