Constructing Environmental Compliance: Law, Science, and Endangered Species Conservation in California’s Delta

The Environmental State: Nature and the Politics of Environmental Protection

“…Also like the EPA and Army Corps, the Forest Service and FWS implement laws and manage lands in ways that have direct implications for the political economy. The Forest Service oversees highly contentious extractive processes, especially logging, across the United States (Hays 2009;Widick 2009), and FWS's enforcement of the ESA puts it in direct conflict with land and industrial development and resource use in ways that routinely evoke anti-environmental backlash (Plater 2013;Scoville 2019Scoville , 2022. But the quality of the legal pressure experienced by the Forest Service and FWS is markedly different than that experienced by the EPA and Army Corps.…”

“…As Mann (1993) points out, where particular forms of (environmental) welfare and (environmental) rights are promised, they often come to be expected, and formal regulations as well as widely embraced environmental ideals, even when far from realized in practice, can provide legal and political footholds for nongovernmental organizations and publics to press for meaningful state-led environmental change. 6 Environmental advocacy groups, for instance, have successfully used the courts to expand environmental welfare provision in the United States over the past several decades, pushing for more expansive interpretations of waters governed by the Clean Water Act (Rea 2019), marshaling the politics of expertise to force the regulation of greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act (Freeman and Vermeule 2007), and using the ESA to inject environmental considerations into infrastructure projects in ways never anticipated by the statute's authors (Petersen 1999;Scoville 2022). Even comparatively marginalized and distinctively "outsider" environmental justice organizations have made inroads into the U.S. environmental state, albeit with marginal effects (Harrison 2019;Perkins 2022).…”

“…First, science is a central source of environmental knowledge and environmental policymaking (Jasanoff 1990) as well as a principal source of agency reputation, authority, and autonomy (Carpenter 2001(Carpenter , 2010. Second, it is a focal point of political contention that offers entrepreneurial bureaucrats, movement organizations, industry groups, and scientists themselves a foothold for expanding or challenging state regulatory authority and control over society-environment relations-including by challenging expertise itself (Jasanoff 2006;Moore et al 2011;Scoville 2022).…”

“…Jerolmack (2021), for example, details how historically peculiar codifications of mineral rights intersect with libertarian currents in U.S. politics to make rural landowners supportive of hydraulic fracturing—even when the practice harms them, their neighbors, and the land they hold dear. Scoville (2022) traces how different understandings of nature in conservation science and in law co-evolve over time, shaping environmental politics and conflicts over endangered species in particular. Fourcade (2011) shows how old socio-legal conceptions of nature in France, where many natural resources are legally held in common but overseen by no one in particular (the doctrine of res nullius ), can lead to low pecuniary valuations of nature in cases of liability for environmental harm.…”

“…. And states provide the institutional infrastructure that organizes the field of environmental politics, shaping how all organizations and individuals comply with but also contest and remake the rules and practices that govern human relationships with nature (Dryzek et al 2003;Mildenberger 2020;Scoville 2022).…”