Environmental Law Goes Global: Taking Back Eden: Eight Environmental Cases That Changed the World, by Oliver A. Houck

• Date: 01 March 2011

41 ELR 10194 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER 3-2011

C O M M E N T S

Environmental Law Goes

Global: Taking Back Eden: Eight

Environmental Cases That Changed

the World, by Oliver A. Houck

by Robert V. Percival

Robert V. Percival is the Robert F. Stanton Professor of Law and director of the

Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Environmentalists in the United States have ample

reason to be disheartened by the events of the past

year, including the Gulf oil spill, record tempera-

tures, and elections that swept scores of climate change

deniers into Congress. But they can take some solace from

the continuing vitality of global concern for the environ-

ment as illustrated by Oliver Houck’s inspirational book,

Taking Back Eden: Eight Environmental Cases at Changed

the World.1 In this book, Houck tells the stories of coura-

geous citizens in eight countries who took legal action to

defend the environment.

Beginning with the landmark Storm King case in the

United States during the late 1960s, Houck examines how

citizen enforcement of environmental law has become a

global phenomenon even in countries with very dierent

legal and political traditions. e book focuses on environ-

mental lawsuits brought in Canada, Chile, Greece, India,

Japan, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States.

Houck uses these cases to trace the importance of citizen

suits as catalysts for environmental reform throughout

the world. He tells fascinating stories about citizens deter-

mined to use the legal system to force change, in places and

at times when environmental law was either nonexistent or

rarely enforced.

Houck, a law professor at Tulane University, is a truly

gifted writer, a rarity among legal academics. What Stan-

ford’s Lawrence Friedman did for American legal history,

Houck accomplishes for environmental law: captivating

the reader with stories about legal change. In less talented

hands, even eorts to stop mindless destruction of ecosys-

tems can get buried in dry legalese, but in Houck’s hands,

they are compelling tales about charismatic people and

the extraordinary places they seek to defend—New York’s

Hudson Highlands, giant cedar trees at a sacred shrine in

1. O H, T B E: E E C T

C  W (Island Press 2009).

Japan, the Taj Mahal, ancient forests in Chile, the Philip-

pines, and Russia, and great rivers in Canada and Greece.

Houck makes the cases come alive by taking the reader

outside of the courtroom and exploring the larger forces

that shape the outcomes of the battles he chronicles.

To be sure, Houck has not authored a romantic paean

to citizen suits that suggests they are easy to win or the

sole answer to the globe’s burgeoning environmental prob-

lems. He emphasizes that environmental plaintis do not

always win in court and, even when they do, a favorable

judicial decision rarely is the last word. Legal battles can go

on for decades, and citizen plaintis lack the resources that

companies can spend on lawyers. Many legal victories are

procedural and short-lived, as determined industrial inter-

ests nd ways around legal roadblocks. Houck concludes:

“When Kermit the Frog observed that it was not easy being

green, he surely had environmental litigation in mind.”

Houck explains how the lawsuits spawned by the dis-

putes he examines helped shape the development of envi-

ronmental law. e Storm King battle helped launch the

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the

Hudson Riverkeeper, which have played major roles in the

development of public interest environmental law. Indig-

enous tribes suing to stop dam projects in Canada estab-

lished an important legal building block for assertion of

federal authority to protect Canada’s environment. Anto-

nio Oposa’s crusade to protect Philippine rainforests won

a rare, and now oft-cited, judicial endorsement of standing

on behalf of future generations. Some legal victories have

more long-lasting eects than others. To protect ancient

trees at the Nikko Toshogu shrine, the Tokyo High Court

invented a seemingly powerful new legal vehicle enabling

the shrine to challenge a highway project, but Japanese

courts routinely spurned subsequent environmental plain-

tis who sought to use it. A lthough the Chilean Supreme

Court’s Trillium decision opened the door for citizens to

Copyright © 2011 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.