Editors' Summary: Last year, the Library of Congress released the papers of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. In so doing, it provided scholars with access to a remarkable record of the Court's inner workings. Among the Blackmun papers is an extensive collection of letters, memoranda, and draft opinions that the Justices exchanged during the most formative period of environmental law.
Editor's Summary: Individuals are the largest source of dioxin emissions, contribute almost one-third of all ozone precursor emissions, and are a far larger source of several other air toxics than all large industrial sources combined. Thus, after more than 30 years of regulation largely directed at industry, individual behavior has emerged as a leading source of pollution. Prof. Michael P.
Editor's Summary: Because many of the factors that make it difficult to control pollution by individuals also apply to small businesses and farms, Prof. Daniel Farber argues that individuals and owner-operated businesses should be considered as part of the same universe of dispersed sources. Effectively dealing with such dispersed sources will involve many techniques, some of which avoid the need to rely on motivational mechanisms. Nevertheless, the motivations of such "mini-polluters" must be explored, and lessons from the corporate world are quite instructive in this regard.
Editors' Summary: This Article looks at the issue of individuals and their impact on the environment from an economist's perspective. Prof. Mark Cohen reviews the underlying economic theory of individual behavior as it relates to environmental issues and examines two categories of consumer environmental behavior: individual and household behavior in response to government activities, and consumer purchase behavior in response to product marketing and advertising campaigns.
Editors' Summary: In this Article, Prof. Ann Carlson argues that although appealing to environmental values as a means to instill behavioral change will, in most instances, work less well than reliance on other regulatory tools, voluntary behavioral change may nevertheless be necessary either to achieve marginal environmentally friendly behavior or because no good regulatory alternative exists. She therefore evaluates those circumstances in which there may be no alternative but to rely on voluntary behavioral change and suggests ways to increase such change.
Editor's Summary: Despite its need for a constant supply of altruistic behavior, recycling has grown steadily in the United States over the past few decades, making it the most successful--and most puzzling--of the environmental norms. In this Article, Prof. Steven Hetcher uses the recycling norm as a means for teaching us about motivational assumptions regarding human behavior. In the past, scholars have taken an all-or-nothing approach toward the methodological assumption regarding human motivation; either people are basically narrowly self-interested or people are basically moral.
Editor's Summary: Individual behavior impacts the environment, but what impacts individual behavior? Effective laws and regulations, strong financial incentives and penalties, social pressure, and the like leave little room for personal values to influence behavior. It is only when these contextual influences are weak that personal factors are likely to play a larger role.
Editors' Summary: Transportation and land development patterns are a primary cause of many pressing environmental problems, including air and water pollution, loss of wildlife habitat and wetlands, and global climate change. These patterns result in large part from individual decisions such as whether to drive, what to drive, how much to drive, and where to live. Yet changing environmentally harmful individual behavior is particularly difficult when the government subsidizes such behavior and when public policies present barriers to less environmentally damaging alternatives.
Editors' Summary: Improvements in environmental quality depend in large measure on changes in private-sector management. In recognition of this fact, government and industry have begun in recent years to focus directly on shaping the internal management practices of private firms. New managementbased strategies can take many forms, but unlike conventional regulatory approaches they are linked by their distinctive focus on management practices rather than on environmental technologies or emissions targets.
Editors' Summary: The U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation and Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife effectively restricted the liberalized standing that environmental plaintiffs previously enjoyed. Recent appointments of conservative Justices to the Court indicate that environmental standing will continue to narrow in the future. However, modern doctrines like informational standing may offer plaintiffs assistance in asserting environmental claims.