Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees: New Foundations for Environmental Law

Abstract

Remember these things lost; and under the vaulting roof of the cathedral burn a candle to the memory.' 9. Id. at 451. 10. Id. at 451, 453. Thus, when Roland Barthes saw in plastic "the stuff of alchemy" and in its ubiquity the message that "the whole world can be plasticized," he foretold more than he could have known. R. BARTHES, MYTHOLOGIES 97-99 (A. Layers transl. 1972). 11. The virtues of AstroTurf are amply extolled in Monsanto's advertising: At last, the work-free poolsidel Simply install 'Round-the-Home AstroTurf. .. it gives your poolside the look of lush grass, right up to the water's edge. Besides being bright, beautiful, durable and fade resistant, 'Round-the-Home AstroTurf is also easy to maintain-simply wash it with a hose .... Monsanto Co. advertisement (on file with the Yale Law Journal). 12. Press release from Hyatt Regency San Francisco, May 8, 1973 ("Along the south side of the lobby runs a 130-foot long rock-lined 'babbling brook,' backed by a huge planter of shrubbery and live trees. Also located in this section of the lobby is a unique 'sound sculpture'. .. . Stereophonic speakers concealed in the foliage simulate the sound of songbirds flitting through the atrium.") (on file with the

Law, Environment, and the “Nondismal” Social Sciences

“…To be sure, the general critique of technocratic forms of decision making has been a recurring (if recessive) theme in environmental law scholarship for more than 30 years and, of course, draws upon much older philosophical and sociological critiques of instrumental reason (Horkheimer & Adorno 1969, Weber 1978. Writing in the early 1970s, Tribe pointed to the reductionist tendencies of the then emerging policy sciences and the resulting pathologies for fields such as environmental law (Tribe 1972(Tribe , 1973(Tribe , 1974. In seeking to uncover the ways in which "particular modes of analysis in a number of different fields-particular approaches to formulating questions, organizing information, and developing answers-entail fundamental (if often unwitting) commitments to substantive conclusions shaped in characteristic and often unfortunate ways" (Tribe 1972, p. 76), Tribe showed how then-emerging welfarist approaches to environmental law and policy could be understood and engaged with only if situated within the larger framework of instrumental reason and an overarching value system of liberal individualism (Tribe 1974(Tribe , pp.…”

“…The concept of ecosystem services, for example, rests on a simple stock-flow model of ecological systems (comprised of an identified stock of "natural capital" and the flows of environmental services that it produces) that translates almost seamlessly into market-based approaches (Gómez-Baggethun et al 2010, Norgaard 2010. The improved policy fit that comes with such an approach thus needs to be considered against an impaired ability to see and understand the complexity and interconnectedness of ecological systems and, more ambitiously, to cultivate less anthropocentric approaches to the value of nature (Norgaard 2010, Tribe 1974. Similarly, the concept of risk, which has become so central to environmental law, is obviously made possible by and deeply committed to an actuarial view of the world oriented to populations, distributions, and averages-a world that has no place for lives in their uniqueness or for anything but the roughest sense of corrective justice (Hacking 1990, Gigerenzer et al 1989, Simon 1988.…”

Virtual Nature

“…In the early 1970s, there was a proposal to plant plastic trees along the freeways in Los Angeles because the real trees were dying from air pollution (Krieger, 1973;Tribe, 1974). In the early 1970s, there was a proposal to plant plastic trees along the freeways in Los Angeles because the real trees were dying from air pollution (Krieger, 1973;Tribe, 1974).…”

Marketing, Morality and the Natural Environment

“…Tribe (1986) Smith (1990) regards as the "purchase votes" of social confrol. According to Sagoff (1986) it is inappropriate to freat environmental problems as economic distributive problems in this way: not only is there a very real problem in assigning a price to environmental attributes, but also environmental solutions are consequently predicated on consumers' willingness to pay.…”