Environmental Protection That Works

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Pages: 136-139

136 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Environment al Protect ion

That Works

By G. Tracy Mehan III

Breaking t he Logjam: E nvironmental Protection That Will Work,

by David Schoenbrod, Richard B. Stewart, and Katrina M. Wy man. Yale

University Press. 198 pages.

From the January/ February 2011 issue of The Environmental Forum .

American environmental law is the polit-

ical embodiment of Static Monism, the

philosophy of the Greek Parmenides,

xed in amber, as it were, resistant to change

or inuence, preserved by a polarized political

climate which renders impossible a ny useful

changes or upgrading in the relevant statutes.

David Schoenbrod, Richard B. Stewar t,

and Katrina M. Wyman, all leading academics

and practitioners, want to restore dynamism

and hope for cha nge. From their perspective,

“the momentum Congress achieved in the

1970s through bipartisan environmental stat-

utes has succumbed to three decades of trench

warfare fueled by wedge politics.”

“e upshot is the logjam,” argue Schoenbrod, Stewa rt and Wyman.

SS&W want to  x this gridlock, not with dy namite, but better ideas, com-

mon sense, and political prudence. ey have written Breaking the Logjam:

Environmental Protection at Will Work, the culmination of a n ambitious

intellectual project with practica l policy implications.

eir proposals for environmental statutory reform are guided by four

principles. First, “adopt better tools whenever they can reliably achieve envi-

ronmental goals.” Second, rea lign responsibilities of the federal government

and the states “so that each level has more eective power over the environ-

mental problems it is best placed to address.” ird, “face tradeos openly

and based on reliable information.” Fourth, “use crosscutting regulatory