Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figure and Tables
- About the Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I National Environmental Legacy Act
- 1 The Case for the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 2 The Necessity of Procedural Reform
- 3 Shifting Baselines and Backsliding Benchmarks: The Need for the National Environmental Legacy Act to Address the Ecologies of Restoration, Resilience, and Reconciliation
- 4 Valuing Nature: The Challenge of the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 5 Citizen Science and the Next Generation of Environmental Law
- 6 Creating National Environmental Legacy Act Information: The Double Standard
- 7 The Constitution and Our Debt to the Future
- Part II Environmental Competition Statute
- Index
- References
1 - The Case for the National Environmental Legacy Act
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figure and Tables
- About the Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I National Environmental Legacy Act
- 1 The Case for the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 2 The Necessity of Procedural Reform
- 3 Shifting Baselines and Backsliding Benchmarks: The Need for the National Environmental Legacy Act to Address the Ecologies of Restoration, Resilience, and Reconciliation
- 4 Valuing Nature: The Challenge of the National Environmental Legacy Act
- 5 Citizen Science and the Next Generation of Environmental Law
- 6 Creating National Environmental Legacy Act Information: The Double Standard
- 7 The Constitution and Our Debt to the Future
- Part II Environmental Competition Statute
- Index
- References
Summary
THERE IS VIRTUALLY UNIVERSAL AGREEMENT ACROSS THE political spectrum that we should protect the interests of our children and grandchildren in setting environmental, health, and safety policy. The concepts of sustainability and intergenerational equity, which advance this same objective, have become increasingly important in environmental law and policy debates in the past thirty years, both in the United States and internationally. In a large number of statutes, Congress and many state legislatures have embraced the goals of protecting a resource legacy for future generations and of promoting sustainable use of the nation's stock of natural resources. In addition, in polls, the American public consistently expresses concern for how well we steward resources and has shown a strong recognition of a responsibility to future generations.
Yet by any measure, it is clear that the United States is neither using its natural resources in a sustainable fashion nor systematically considering how today's patterns of resource use will affect the next generation. Report after report document the decline in supplies of fresh water, fish species and biodiversity, energy resources, and many of the values and services associated with those. Many public natural resources are managed under statutes with notoriously open-ended standards that require federal agencies to “balance” a variety of often-incompatible uses, many of which degrade or deplete relevant resources. Many of these statutes contain no enforceable standard mandating protection of any particular quality or quantity of a resource.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beyond Environmental LawPolicy Proposals for a Better Environmental Future, pp. 3 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
References
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