Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-1970 Book

Most Americans—even environmentalists—date the emergence of laws protecting nature to the early 1970s. But Karl Boyd Brooks shows that, far from being a product of that activist decade, American environmental law emerged well before the first Earth Day, often in unexpected places far from Capitol Hill.

Surveying the landscape from the end of World War II to Earth Day 1970, Brooks traces a dramatic shift in Americans' relationship to the environment and the emergence of new environmental statutes. He takes readers into legislative hearing rooms, lawyers' conferences, and administrators' offices to describe how Americans forged a new body of law that reflected their hopes for rescuing the land from air pollution, deforestation, and other potential threats. For while previous law had treated nature as a commodity, more and more Americans had come to see it as a national treasure worth preserving.

Brooks explores the way key features of the New Deal's legal legacy influenced environmental law. This path-breaking environmental history examines how cultural, intellectual, and economic changes in postwar America brought about new solutions to environmental problems that threatened public health and degraded natural aesthetics. Visiting riverbanks and freeways, duck blinds and airsheds, Before Earth Day reveals the new strategies and efforts by which the unceasing process of legal change created environmental law. And through real-world examples—how Los Angelenos pressed cases about water and air quality, how an Idaho lawyer helped clients pursue new environmental regulations, how citizens challenged government and corporate plans to dam rivers—Brooks demonstrates that key changes in property, procedure, contract, and other legal rules in those early years stimulated the national environmental laws to come.

Gracefully written and meticulously researched, Brooks's work dramatically updates our understanding of the origins of environmental law. By taking the postwar years more seriously, he shows that earlier actions across the country played a central role in shaping the structure and goals of well-known federal laws passed during the "environmental decade" of the seventies. Before Earth Day describes nothing less than an entirely new way of thinking, as environmental law emerged from local jurisdictions to reshape national agendas, firing the popular imagination and only then remodeling law school curricula.

"Brooks's treatment is thoughtful and poetic as he dives deep into the political, social, economic, and legal constructs of the environment and identifies events and decisions that influenced our contemporary regulatory scheme. . . . Convincingly illustrates the debt that environmental law owes to the persistence of early conservationist pioneers."—Reviews in American History

"An important and insightful work. Not only is Brooks's main thesis undeniable, but so is his notion that law is made in an iterative fashion by a multitude of different actors—including activists, property owners, their lawyers, elected representatives, and administrative agencies on both the state and federal levels—in reaction to the felt necessities imposed by events. That surely is a better depiction of how law is actually made."—Oregon Historical Quarterly

"A persuasive book."—Western Historical Quarterly

"A fresh, bright, and engaging look at environmental law—a book that all environmental historians should read."—Journal of American History

"An enthusiastic, generous, inclusive, daring, and insightful exploration of that long-rumored beast described as "environmental law." Beautifully written, carefully and lovingly researched, and wonderfully revealing."—William H. Rodgers, Jr., author of Treatise on Environmental Law

"Should be required reading in every environmental law class as an antidote to the belief that the subject began in 1969. It deftly demonstrates that all of the elements of environmental law evolved during the quarter century after the end of World War II."—Dale Goble, author of Wildlife Law: A Primer

"A fresh and valuable study of the origins of environmental law in the postwar United States."—Mark Harvey, author of Wilderness Forever

Karl Boyd Brooks, an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas between 2000 and 2010, also served as Region 7 Administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama Administration.