The Joseph Biden Administration has signaled an interest in ensuring that regulations appropriately benefit vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Prior presidential administrations have focused on ensuring that regulations are efficient, maximizing the net benefits to society, without considering who benefits or who loses from these policies. Supporters of the current process are concerned that pursuing equity will come at significant cost to efficiency and ultimately leave everyone worse off. This framework—efficiency versus equity—is misguided and counterproductive in many cases.

This Comment touches on some of the key concerns that Dave Owen's The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law raised about equity and transparency in environmental law, and shares a couple of examples that have emerged in the last few months that people are inventing to try to address this.

Black letter law is implemented in countless shades of gray, with interpretation and negotiation at virtually every step of the way. Prof. Dave Owen’s The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law digs deep, beyond the obvious, to underscore that negotiation is not a dark art but a necessary skill that deserves more attention and training.

Dave Owen's The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law did a nice job of highlighting some of the major statutes that are the backbone of our practice and the launching point for effective negotiation. One of the implications of the article that highlights the axiom “wake up . . . people are negotiating” is to understand that promulgation of the law by regulations is not the end point.

In theoretical accounts of environmental law, traditional environmental-law education, and much of the discourse of environmental-law implementation, negotiation is absent, except in a few celebrated and seemingly exceptional settings. When scholars and policy advocates do address the roles of negotiation, they tend to default to two competing conceptions. In one—the “command-and-control” view—environmental law is problematically centralized and rigid, and negotiation exists only in exceptional circumstances.

What this Comment found so compelling in Deals in the Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, and How Law Can Help was the human factor—the authors could have written the same article about what is going on in solar, biodigesters, hydro projects, or trash-to-energy projects. There is a good amount of research that could be done as to why this has cropped up recently. The human stories in the article are heartbreaking—this issue is dividing families, and people are being effectively excommunicated from their churches because of what side they are on.

Deals in the Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, and How Law Can Help is really important and timely in that it asks some key questions and makes some key points. One of the important observations in the article, and the authors’ rationale for tackling these siting issues, is that if we continue to do things as we have, there will be more renewable energy projects that fail than need to fail. Part of what that means is tackling the conflicts around renewable siting.

Prof. Christiana Ochoa et al.’s Deals in the Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, and How Law Can Help is a thought-provoking piece that coincides with significant growth in the wind industry, as well as broad-based expansion of county-level ordinances regulating wind power. It is a useful contribution to the literature and to the conversation around this topic.

Deals in the Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, and How Law Can Help disproportionately focuses on the negative and the opposition’s talking points with respect to wind energy projects. While it is important to highlight the challenges we are facing, it is also important to highlight the actual data. For example, the article reiterates a lot of the negative impacts around wildlife, sound, health, aesthetics, shadow flickering, and property values.

This Article offers proposals for better engagements, relationships, and deals with local communities contemplating wind farms. Because the rapid expansion of wind energy to date has exhausted the first-mover rural communities, the promise of wind energy depends on reluctant rural communities that may require the legal, relational, and policy innovations proposed herein if they are to grant their consent to future wind farms and participate in the renewable energy transformation.