Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

Forgotten Paths to NEPA: A Historical Analysisof the Early Environmental Law
in the 1960s United States1( 忘れられた国家環境政策法への道程:
1960 年代アメリカ合衆国における初期環境法の歴史的考察)
Joseph DiMento* and Kazuto Oshio**

SUMMARY IN JAPANESE: 本論の目的は、アメリカ合衆国（以下「アメリカ」と略す）
における初期環境法について、1960 年
代という時代的文脈のなかにおいて考察するものである。一般
的にアメリカ環境法が生まれたのは 1970 年であり、1970 年代
が「環境の時代」である、という認識が定着している。また、1960
年代と環境問題を結びつける数少ない論考においても、レイチェル・カーソンの『沈黙の春』（1962）から一足飛びに 1970 年の国家環境政策法（NEPA）やアースデイに議論が飛躍する傾向が見られる。しかし、実情はより複雑である。そこで、第二次世界大戦後のアメリカにおいて、経済的豊かさや社会的運動や事件、さらには法制度など多様な要因が絡まるようにして、環境法が生まれてきたことを、本論では整理していく。

* Professor of Law, Director of Newkirk Center for Science and Society, University of California,
Irvine, U.S.A.
** 小塩 和人 Professor of History, Deputy Director of Institute of American and Canadian Studies,
Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan.

19Forgotten Paths to NEPA

“I now teach and write about ppb and manure management. We neverthought thirty seven years ago [in 1970] that we would be involved in anenvironmental law that has matured, become hybrid in strategy, be so technical—and perhaps for many less exciting. Perhaps the technical nature ofdomestic law explains in some part the growing interest in international
environmental law. . . . I am not an historian, but I am a relic of environmental law, or put more kindly, a source of oral history about this law.”2

I
The purpose of this paper is to locate the emergence of environmental law in
the United States within the historical context of the 1960s and beyond. It is
important to do so because many believe that federal regulation of environmental
quality did not exist prior to 1970. “U.S. environmental policy prior to 1970
included over seven decades of experience in managing the environment as anatural resource base, but almost none in the regulation of environmental quality,”leading environmental policy analyst Richard Andrews points out. “Federal
management of public lands and waters was well established, as was the federalrole in funding major public infrastructure. . . . In contrast, federal authority toprotect public health, safety, and environmental quality was limited.”3
This paper will first set the historical context of post-WWII American society, and secondly sort out the legal factors by examining how law professors havediscussed the historical emergence of environmental laws. After trying to relate
the legal factors with other broader socio-cultural factors, the paper will conclude
that various environment-related events, issues, and factors in the 1960s contributed to the birth of environmental law. Indeed, there is a long-standing journalistic
tendency to locate environmentalism’s beginning with the publication of Silent
Spring and with Earth Day but to see nothing between 1962 and 1970. Althougha limited number of works counter this tendency stressing its longer term roots,
they fail to examine the relationship between socio-cultural events in the 1960s
and the early emergence of environmental law.

20

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto OshioII
The year 1970 has been widely considered as a great watershed in the historyof the United States as well as of environmentalism. The year was marked by avariety of important events, including the National Environmental Policy Act(NEPA),4 the birth of academic programs focused on bringing interdisciplinary
knowledge to national needs (e.g. the Social Ecology Program at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine), and the first Earth Day,5 just to name a few. Indeed, many
consider the 1970s as the environmental decade and the year 1970 as the great
beginning.
However, many questions remain unanswered. For instance, while NEPA is
now considered to be the most sweeping environmental law ever passed by theUnited States Congress, as A. Clay Schoenfeld points out, nearly every major
U.S. newspaper at the time failed to report the passage of the act. Why was there
such media inattention?6
Another question is: what prompted the dramatic transformation from public inattention to hyper attention? In fact, then as well as now, many wondered
how and why such historical changes occurred. For example, as early as 1970,
Barry Commoner commented that the “swift” emergence of environmental problems “astonished” most of the American public:
The sudden public concern with the environment has taken many people bysurprise. After all, garbage, foul air, putrid water, and mindless noise arenothing new; the sights, smells, and sounds of pollution have become an
accustomed burden of life. To be sure, the mess has worsened and spread in
the last decade, but not at a rate to match the dramatic, nearly universal
reaction to it that has hit the country in the past year.7
While pollution clearly demanded action, Commoner argued, it was not so clear
how the environmental issues and movement came about.
Not only social commentators but also legal scholars noticed a sudden change
in historical currents. For instance, Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Georgetown
University, looks back to 1970 and comments that in “a relative blink of an eye
for the lawmaking process in most moments of history, the legal landscape transformed completely.” While a few isolated states were making some efforts andcommon law property and tort doctrines were invoked on behalf of environmen21

Forgotten Paths to NEPAtal concerns, he argues, “prior to 1970, environmental protection law in the
United States was essentially nonexistent . . . there was nothing even remotely
resembling a comprehensive legal regime for regulating pollution of the air, water,or land.” Lazarus sees no historical precedence in the 1960s:
There was no national clean air legislation, no federal clean water act program, no hazardous waste or toxic substance laws. There was not even afederal environmental protection agency prior to the 1970s (and virtuallyno state agency analogues). The federal pollution control authorities that
did exist were greatly fragmented amongst several agencies, and they possessed relatively weak statutory powers, much of which consisted of little
more than providing financial and technical assistance to state and local
governments.8
In theory, Lazarus continues, environmental law should never have happened,
partly because politicians gain little by enacting laws that ask people to pay forbenefits they may not experience. In addition, there was a high probability thatenvironmental law might contribute to economic decline.9
Meanwhile, a few historians of the 1960s have recently come to lament thefact that people have not thus far done enough to place this seemingly abrupt
emergence of environmentalism in the context of the times. While the historical
work on the 1960s generally trivializes the environmental movement, the literature on environmentalism ignores the political, social, and cultural history of thesixties. For instance, Adam Rome, a historian at Pennsylvania State University,
points out that some “histories of the decade fail even to mention Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring—a best seller in 1962.” He attributes the reason to the historians’
framework of analysis. The concerns of the New Left, Rome argues, have determined the basic framework of analysis for most historians of the sixties:
Although scholars have begun to incorporate the rise of the New Left into
the narrative of the period, the issues that preoccupied the decade’s radicals
still receive the most space. Because relatively few new leftists cared about
the environment until 1969 or 1970, the literature on the sixties overlooks
the growing concern about environmental issues before then.10
He concludes that “No history of the sixties considers in detail what the environ22

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

mental movement shared with the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement,or the feminist movement.” 11
However, there are a few exceptional attempts to integrate environmentalism into the story of the 1960s. Yet the works typify the above stated problem
because they emphasize that environmentalism “stood out as a legacy of thereform spirit of the 1960s” but devote only a handful, out of nearly 800 pages, toenvironmental issues. There is then a missing link between the 1960s andenvironmentalism, which is the subject of inquiry of this short article. 12 Ourattempt is to locate the emergence of environmental law as an academic fieldwithin the context of the 1960s and ultimately with broader historical currents.
While there have been a limited number of such inquiries, there is some
speculation on the question of how dramatic transformation came about. For
example, Lazarus looks into the judicial factors in explaining the emergence ofenvironmental law in the latter half of the 1960s.13 Another legal scholar, Joseph
L. Sax of the University of California at Berkeley, speculates with the following
three legal factors: inadequacy of the common law, lack of judicial oversight, andthe disparity of “standing.”14 When Sax began his legal career at the University ofColorado Law School in 1962 where he taught water, mining, oil and gas law, they
were all private law subjects. In other words, as the following pages will makeclear, they concerned the property rights and contractual relationships of those
involved with the relevant resource. And those who sought to protect natural
resources had little access to the courts. This so-called “standing disparity”
initiated his pursuit of public trust doctrine in the 1960s: placing limits on theprivate use of certain public natural resources.15

III
It was during the preceding decade, the 1950s, when the Cold War, the dawnof the nuclear era, and the Sputnik-initiated space age pushed science and technology to the forefront of public policy. But popular protests over fallout fromatomic-bomb tests combined with outrage over the destruction of wildlife bypesticide poisoning, and a growing awareness of an exploding worldwide population, sparked a major environmental movement in the 1960s. These historical
trends ultimately helped give birth to the new academic field of environmentallaw.
23

Forgotten Paths to NEPA

Environmental historians have argued that the post-war era marked a major
shift from “conservation” to “environmentalism.”16 For example, after 1960,
Roderick Nash points out, old-style utilitarian or resource-oriented conservation
decreased in importance relative to environmental quality. In the United States
the focus expanded to include not only scenic and recreational amenities but also
the health of the habitat. As an indicator of this change, the term conservation lostfavor to environmentalism. Along with environmentalism, “ecology” became ahousehold word. Few could define it correctly as the study of the interrelationships between organisms and their environment, but many associated it with“sacred” connotations.17
Why the elevation of environment and/or ecology to sacred status in American thought? According to Nash, one dynamic was the broad questioning oftraditional ideals and priorities known as the “counterculture.” If traditional
Americanism stressed growth, competition, and affluence, the new one emphasized stability, community, and simplicity. 18
Another force was fear. It was not the pre-WWII fear of running out of
useful resources that had inspired the utilitarian conservationists of the Progressive and New Deal eras of the early twentieth century. Neither was it the fear of
making the world ugly that played a major role in aesthetic conservation, preservation, and the early calls for environmental quality. The new fear developed
from an understanding of ecology.19
Critical understanding was initiated by one revolutionary work. Rachel
Carson published Silent Spring and the contemporary environmental movement
exploded. Carson eloquently narrated a warning:
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they
gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feedingstations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were
moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorusof robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there
was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.20
Carson graphically described the transformation of life after the introduction ofradioactive fallout from atomic-bomb testing and as a result of the widespread useof pesticides such as DDT, totally new to biologic experience:24

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are createdfollow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberatepace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation ofrocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that haveexisted before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural
creation of man’s tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life isasked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica andcopper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried inrivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind,
brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.21
In the following year, President John F. Kennedy helped to alert Americans to theenvironmental crisis through his persuasive introduction to Stewart Udall’s important book The Quiet Crisis:
The history of America is, more than that of most nations, the history of
man confronted by nature. Our story has been peculiarly the story of man
and the land, man and the forests, man and the plains, man and water, man
and resources. It has been the story of rich and varied natural heritage
shaping American institutions and American values; and it has been equally
the story of Americans seizing, using, squandering and, belatedly, protecting and developing that heritage. In telling this story and giving this central
theme of American history its proper emphasis and dignity, Secretary [ofthe Interior Stewart] Udall puts us all in his debt.22
Kennedy’s assessment pointed to declining environmental standards and stressed
the need for an expansion of the concept of conservation to meet the crisis:
The modern American record in conservation has been brilliant and distinguished. It has inspired comparable efforts all around the earth. But it came
just in time in our own land. And, as Mr. Udall’s vivid narrative makes clear,
the race between education and erosion, between wisdom and waste, has
not run its course. . . . The crisis may be quiet, but it is urgent. We must do
in our own day what Theodore Roosevelt did sixty years ago and Franklin
Roosevelt thirty years ago: we must expand the concept of conservation tomeet the imperious problems of the new age. We must develop new instru25

Forgotten Paths to NEPA

ments of foresight and protection and nurture in order to recover the relationship between man and nature and to make sure that the national estate wepass on to our multiplying descendants is green and flourishing.23
Furthermore, examining the way a series of news media events, capturing theattention of the American public in the 1960s, played out can partially explain thedramatic transformation which led to the birth of environmental law. They
ultimately culminated in the enactment of NEPA in January 1970 as well as thefirst Earth Day three months later. Certainly to be included in those triggering
events are, Lazarus argues, the above mentioned publication of Carson’s Silent
Spring, the “burning” of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, and the 1969 Santa Barbara
oil spill off the California coast, all subjects of considerable news coverage.24
The heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire on June
22, 1969. While this river had historically caught fire many times since at least
1868, few had paid any attention partly because rivers, canals, and harbors invarious places in the United States, including Buffalo, Baltimore, Houston, andDetroit, also regularly caught fire. Furthermore, when the fires were covered in
the newspapers, as media historian Mark Neuzil points out, “the news frame was
not one of a dirty river, but inadequate fire protection services.” The lunch time
blaze in 1969 was treated as routine by the authorities and local media. The
Cleveland fire chief was not called, and the regular crew had the fire under control
in less than half an hour. Photographers from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and theCleveland Press arrived after the fire was out. After all, there was no loss of life
or injuries. That might as well have been the end of the news coverage.25
A month later, however, Time magazine ran a story on the fire. With a photofrom a 1952 fire, it declared “Some river! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with
subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.”26 Another national publication,
National Geographic, matched the story from Time in a news frame with earlier
reporting about pollution in Lake Erie, into which the Cuyahoga River fed, as wellas other national environmental news of the day, particularly the January oil spillnear Santa Barbara, California.27 Only weeks before the fire, as Neuzil points out,
Congress had debated the National Environmental Policy Act and politicians
were in the middle of a debate over what would become the Clean Water Act. “Insum, a coalescence of interests created media attention where little had existed
before. In this instance, the media played a critical role in setting the tempo atwhich policy formation took place.”28
26

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

Many credit the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill with igniting the environmental
movement. Over eleven days, 200,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the channel
from a disabled oil rig. In the aftermath, 3,600 birds were dead along with ten seals
and dolphins and countless fish and marine invertebrates. Critics pointed to theinadequacy of federal regulations and focused on a government unresponsive tothe needs of nature. A local activist environmental law organization quickly
formed: Get Oil Out (GOO). The founder called for the public to reduce its
driving, to destroy credit cards from oil companies, and to boycott gas stations
associated with offshore drilling companies. Some 100,000 signatures were gathered for a petition to ban offshore oil drilling.
In response to these warnings, during the 1960s and 1970s, numerous environmental laws were passed. They regulated pesticides, set standards for clean
air and water, preserved wilderness, marine mammals, and endangered species,and established procedures for waste disposal. One of the most sweeping of the
new laws, NEPA, was signed into law on New Year’s Day 1970 by President
Richard Nixon.
Although the preamble sets out goals designed to ensure a safe, healthfulenvironment, NEPA’s most significant requirement is the mandating of an environmental impact statement (EIS) for every proposed major federal action thatwould significantly affect the quality of the human environment. Duplicated bystate legislatures throughout the country, these procedures and reports havealtered or mitigated many proposed local and federal development projects. Witha new recognition of a threatening population bomb, urbanization, industrial
expansion, resource exploitation, and technological advances, the environmental
movement was born and ultimately the field of environmental law was given
birth.

IV
How do law professors examine the historical emergence of environmental
laws? “Law schools’ professional presentism . . . impedes historical analysis,”argues a former U.S. Supreme Court Fellow, Karl Brooks, now associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. He adds, “Employed to teach (usually) the law as it is or (occasionally) might be, but rarely the law as it came to be,legal academics privileged the contemporary at the expense of the historic.” Brooks
27

Forgotten Paths to NEPA

cites John-Mark Stensvaag’s law textbook which reads “In 1969, scarcely anyone
perceived that a separate body of law even existed” and thus “a law school coursein the subject of environmental law would have been most unusual.”29
It was this type of “unusual” course that was first taught in 1969 by then
University of Michigan Law School professor Joseph Sax. Looking back at theyear when environmental law was in its infancy, Sax recalls, “there was at least
one thing that everyone understood.” That was the fact that “the traditionalcommon law remedies were utterly inadequate to deal with contemporary environmental problems, and a whole new body of law—indeed a new conception of
law—was needed.”30
Here he lists the three legal factors which led to the emergence of environmental law. The first problem was the inadequacy of tort, one of the common law
principles. While environmental threats had to be addressed prior to their doing
harm, tort law dealt with after-the-fact remediation of harm. Sax argues that suchhazards as pesticides threatened public resources like wildlife populations, while
actions such as private nuisance and trespass protected private property rights.
Also, while pollution was caused by many actors over many decades, tort remedies demanded proof of causation. This prevailing attitude toward private
property rights was indeed a substantial obstacle to environmental progress.
That was why he sought ways to solve the problems by initiating environmental
law teaching at Michigan.31
The second problem was the inadequacy of judicial oversight to ensure bothlegislative and executive branches compiled with environmental demands. For
example, the United States Army Corps of Engineers or the Bureau of Reclamation had caused many of the environmental problems that needed to be addressed.
They included over-building of massive dams and water-conveyance systems
without considering the ecologically negative effects. Meanwhile, existing regulatory laws lacked substance. For instance, as Sax lists, “pesticides were regulated
only for the accuracy of their labels. Automobile emissions were uncontrolled.
Public lands were dominantly given over to industrial activities such as mining,
cattle grazing, and timber harvesting.” He also points to the problem of urban
transportation cutting through parks and residences as the cheapest way to meetincreased demand.32
Last but not least, Sax saw the most significant problem in a legal system
which further victimized an already victimized public who were threatened “withlong-term health risks from hazardous air emissions, polluted rivers, and leaking
28Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

waste dumps, and with the diminution of biological diversity, and destruction ofrecreational opportunities.” They were blocked from taking any legal actions
themselves because “(unlike the polluters) they had no conventional legal interests such as a property or contract right that the law was accustomed to protecting.” Sax provides a couple of examples:
To assert a legal interest in protecting the survival of the peregrine falcon or
the grizzly bear was to be seen as a busybody. To complain about contamination was to be dismissed as a scientific naïf. And if by some near miracle
one did get a foothold in a court or an administrative proceeding, the response was a tidal wave of motions, objections, depositions, and all otherlegal techniques of the war-of-attrition.33
The urgent need to take a preventive stance as to environmental hazards, theneed to equip the public agencies to do the work, and the difficulties and costs ofobtaining information were the three major obstacles that helped to initiate “farreaching and fundamental legal reform,” concludes Sax, which “led to the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act.” “The notion that ordinary
citizens could go to court,” he continues, “even though they did not have ownership of the resources they were trying to protect, was embodied in a variety of socalled citizen suit provisions.”34
Indeed, Sax had a huge influence on the law. His writing has been cited by theSupreme Court nine times, by federal appellate courts seven times, and by thirty
state supreme courts. His scholarship not only identified the obstacles to environmental protection law but also historical common law traditions to be used toaddress these concerns. Furthermore, he participated in the meetings that led tothe creation of the Environmental Law Institute, the launch of the Environmental
Law Reporter, and the legislative proposal that would eventually become NEPAin 1969. Thus, in short, Sax was said to have helped launch the “environmental
decade.” The task of environmental law scholars today, Lazarus of the Georgetown
Law Center urged, is to safeguard the legal architecture that legal scholar Sax’s
work helped inspire.
In response to the above stated problems, the judicial branch played a criticalrole in solving them. The courts had indeed a crucial function and acted incollaboration with or sometimes independent of Congress. According to Lazarus,
many judges viewed environmental lawsuits as akin to the civil rights suits:29Forgotten Paths to NEPA

. . . proper occasions for heightened judicial attention on behalf of societal
concerns likely to be given short shrift in the democratic process. Thosejudges, accordingly, sought to relax “standing” barriers that might otherwise
restrict judicial access for environmental citizen suits. They sought toapply more exacting standards of judicial review to ensure that environmental concerns were not ignored by executive and legislative branchpolicymakers. In addition, they frequently read more into the meaning of
the statutes than many lawmakers likely had specifically contemplated
when voting in favor of their passage.35
The courts issued many sweeping pro environment opinions. In so doing,
they resurrected the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, transforming it into amodern tool for pollution control. For example, the Standard Oil Company was
indicted for discharging 100-octane aviation gasoline into navigable waters, St.
Johns River, in violation of the proscription in Section 13 of the Rivers andHarbors Act against discharge therein of “any refuse matter of any kind or description.” The District Court dismissed the indictment on the ground that“refuse matter” does not include commercially valuable material. In United States
v. Standard Oil Co., the Supreme Court concluded that the discharge of commercially valuable gasoline into navigable waters is encompassed by Section 13 of the
Act:36(a) Petroleum products, whether useable or not, when discharged into
navigable waters constitute a menace to navigation and pollute rivers
and harbors.37(b) The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 was a consolidation of prior acts
which enumerated various pollutants and impediments to navigation,
drawing no distinction between valuable and valueless substances; theterm “refuse matter” in the present Act is a shorthand substitute forthe exhaustive list of substances found in the earlier Acts.38(c) The word “refuse” includes all foreign substances and pollutants except, as provided in 13, those “flowing from streets and sewers andpassing therefrom in a liquid state” into the watercourse.39
The courts also created out of a single sentence of NEPA a judicially enforceablestrict procedural requirement that has transformed governmental decision making
30Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

affecting the natural environment. They also seized upon incidental statutory
preamble language of the Clean Air Act to justify a comprehensive program forthe prevention of significant deterioration of air quality. The courts likewise readlong overlooked statutory terms in the Forest Service Organic Act of 1897 toconclude that most clearcutting of national forests was unlawful, thereby prodding Congress to enact comprehensive and far more environmentally favorable
national forest management legislation. These judicial rulings also had the practical effect of providing the environmental community with political leverage,
argues Lazarus.40
However, many environmentally minded groups were frustrated because
they were “unable to move the system, to make it respond, to force environmental protection,” as co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Charles
Wurster pointed out.41 A groundswell was building in response to Rachel Carson’s
writing, augmented by public revulsion at the calamities of the 1960s. Thus, it
was natural that, in 1967, three scientists living on Long Island and a fourth inMichigan, who were as alarmed as Carson had been by the effects of DDT on
wildlife, conceived of a new way to put these concerns into motion. They formed
EDF, joined with an attorney, and became the first group to take scientific evidence into the courts to achieve environmental goals. With support from the Ford
Foundation through National Audubon’s Rachel Carson Memorial Fund, EDF’s
founders brought case after case seeking to replace DDT with pest control methods less dangerous to wildlife. Before they were through, their efforts would leadto the nationwide banning of DDT and to the first established precedents ofenvironmental law.42
In addition, there were early inroads for the federal framework. They included laws governing transportation and historical preservation. Section 4(f) of
the 1966 Department of Transportation Act declared a national policy that special effort should be made to preserve the environment. Section 4(f) covered landconsisting in part, of publicly owned parks, recreational areas, wildlife and waterfowl refuges, and all historic sites:
It is hereby declared to be the national policy that special effort should bemade to preserve the natural beauty of the countryside and public parks andrecreation lands, wildlife and waterfowl refuges, and historic sites. The
Secretary of Transportation shall cooperate and consult with the Secretar-31

Forgotten Paths to NEPA

ies of the Interior, Housing and Urban Development, and Agriculture, andwith the states in developing transportation plans and programs that include measures to maintain or enhance the natural beauty of the lands traversed.43
It continues, “After August 1968, the secretary (of transportation) could not
approve any program or project that required the use of affected publicly owned
lands ‘unless (1) there is no feasible and prudent alternative to the use of suchland, and (2) such program includes all possible planning to minimize harm.’”
Two years later, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1968 declared again a national
policy of preservation of natural beauty of the countryside and public park andrecreation lands, wildlife and waterfowl refuges, and historic sites.44
Examining these legal precedents, one may conclude that the term “environmental law” was recent but that very little new law existed in this new field.
Between 10 and 11 September 1969, for instance, over seventy-five practicing
lawyers, law professors, conservation-groups, and law-makers gathered in
Warrenton, Virginia, for a two-day conference on law and environment. This
“Airlie House” conference did not assume environmental law as a newcomer andmost of its participants presumed the field already existed, Brooks argues. “Noneof the law faculty defined an environmental law problem that needed their solution as the absence of law to be taught and analyzed,” Brooks concludes, “By thedawn of the ‘environmental decade,’ citizen litigants and their attorneys had
already realized courts’ potential to halt both public and private projects thatthreatened environmental quality.”45
That law is for lawyers, however, is a popular misconception. Admitting theimportant historical role the judicial branch and legal professionals played, as
legal historian William Hurst argues, law was a product of society not simply oflawyers. Explaining how and why American environmental law emerged in the
postwar years, as Brooks argues, encourages J. Willard Hurst’s fundamental
explanatory principle: “a genuine history of law must interpret the civic, commercial, and cultural life of the people who made the law to be used.” Thus, thefollowing pages will sort out the process of law entering a period of rapid change,as the beneficiary of growing public interest.46

32

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

V
Public concern, during the 1940s, about the techno-military effects fusedwith those of organized nature-preservation groups and with more general publicdemand for outdoor recreation to form a mass movement of great strength andpolitical diversity. The simultaneous revolutions in atomic energy and organic
chemical technologies were first welcomed as “modern” benefits, but then theyignited an unparalleled backlash of public outrage against their risks to ecologicalprocesses, living species, and human health. Therefore, by the end of the 1960s,
a diverse range of constituencies representing previously separate aspects ofenvironmental protection—such as pollution abatement, radiation and pesticide
control, nature preservation, and protection of national parks and other areas ofnatural beauty—coalesced into a broad movement demanding changes in both thesubstance and the process of environmental policy.
The postwar years were a time of unprecedented expansion of industrial
production, mass consumption, and suburbanization, and the rise of general affluence. In turn, these forces produced powerful and conflicting political pressures,as demand rose both for material goods and for environmental amenities threatened by their production. On the one hand, both military and consumer demand
reinforced the economic power and political influence of the resource extraction,
manufacturing, and construction industries. On the other hand, their expansionary success galvanized opposition from a public that now sought to enjoy environmental amenities as well as consumer products.47
This conflict intensified with the concurrent rise of several separate sets ofpolitical forces which ultimately converged into the broader alliance of the modern environmental movement. One force was the revitalization and politicalmobilization of the landscape preservation groups, most notably the Sierra Clubbut also the National Audubon Society, the Izaak Walton League, and others. A
second force was the emergence of a far broader mass demand for outdoor recreation and tourism, and of specific economic interest groups. They were theAmerican Automobile Association, recreational vehicle equipment manufacturers
and outfitters, and park concessionaires, among others. A third force was theincreasing influence of booming suburban governments, which sought federal
financial assistance to pay the rapidly rising costs of infrastructure to serve urban
revitalization and suburban growth, including roads, schools, housing, water andsewer services, public transportation, and other needs. To these forces were soon
33

Forgotten Paths to NEPA

added others, particularly a new public outrage at industrial pollution and toxic
and radioactive contamination. All of these forces would ultimately come together, when an unprecedented nationwide mass movement coalesced and demanded federal leadership to protect the environment.48
The “environmental era” started within the context of a broader and deeper
unrest in American society. The values and attitudes that lay behind environmental problems also produced social discontent and international disorder. Environmentalism of the 1960s, as Nash argues, must be seen as drawing part of its force
from a more general cultural questioning. Indeed, it was a time for conversion anddiversion in public values.49
For example, Commoner draws the connections between the environmental
movement and other troubling issues of the 1960s such as war, racial inequality,and poverty. At the University of Michigan, the largest environmental teach-in
took place from the 11th to the 14th of March, 1970 attended by 15,000 students; it attracted divergent elements of American society. Michigan Governor
William Milliken and a number of municipal, state, and federal officials were
present. Speakers included scientists from the fields of biology, ecology, engineering, sociology, urban analysis, and public health. Industry was represented
by officials from Detroit Edison, Ford, and Dow Chemical; and labor was represented by the United Automobile Workers. Commoner observes that the teachin epitomized the convergence around the environmental issue of a number of
earlier, separate concerns. Environmental quality touched all the following separate facets of the crisis of American society:. . . conservation, scientists’ responsibility for the social consequences ofscience and technology, the consumer movement, the young generation’s
concern for a more humane life-style, businessman’s worries about the
impact on industrial profits, the problem of the ghetto and urban decay, theantiwar movement, and student activism against the nation’s social andeconomic system.50
Why did students on American campuses support environmental action?
One very popular view was that student interest in the environment was “apolitical” and that, as P. R. Janssen summarizes, “the new eco-activists cut across old
traditional social and political lines, bringing together such strange barricadefellows as short-haired athletes and long-maned hippies, the reactionary right and34

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

the revolutionary left.”51 This comforting view implies that ecology was truly an
issue which could unite the nation, bringing together those who had been bitterly
divided on the issues of civil rights and Vietnam.
However, some did not share this view. For example, those on the righttended to view the environmental movement as dominated by “radicals” who had
simply taken up a new cause. April 22, Earth Day, was also Lenin’s birthday andthis prompted some to argue that leading environmentalists were attempting to
make the Green Revolution part of the Red Revolution. At the other end of thepolitical spectrum, the Left viewed the government-endorsed Earth Day withsuspicion, seeing it as an attempt to draw attention away from Indochina, racism,
poverty and other social problems. In short, there were a number of conflicting
images of the basis of the campus environmental movement.52
The 1960s has often been portrayed as a time of social protest and upheaval,
a time when things fell apart. This was a time of questioning and confrontation.
New issues and movements crowded the national agenda: the demand for civilrights, the youth rebellion, and resurgent feminism, among many. Why did thesedemands for political and social change occur when they did? Historians haveargued that demographic and cultural shifts were partly responsible. In the late1960s, Christopher Sellers argues, “environmentalist’s suddenly became a political shibboleth.” He continues, “By the first Earth Day in 1970, it included all
those concerned with the preservation of the environment (from pollution, etc.),from those manning new or expanding regulatory agencies, to those driving theproliferation of local and national ‘environmental’ groups, to those voicing worry
about threats from ‘pollution, etc.’ in their own backyards.”53
Examining the convergence of divergent forces crystallizing in environmentalism, many ask why the ambitious agendas for social change proposed in thisperiod were never fully realized. Explanations are complex but one is clear; evenat the height of the protest movements, the people demanding changes in American society were always outnumbered by those who preferred the status quo. It
can be argued that all the protest movements shared their roots in structural anddemographic changes and shifting cultural values. And these protest movements
followed a similar pattern of progression. At first, efforts centered on the political and judicial front. Early successes led to heightened expectations, but the nextstage—changing people’s attitudes and winning social and economic justice—proved more difficult. They ultimately produced a backlash from those who
thought change had gone far enough, though not before lasting alterations had been
35

Forgotten Paths to NEPA

made in American society.
Thus, the 1960s was not only a confrontational and divisive decade but also
conservatism and the sense of status quo. In other words, some see the sixties asa radical time but others counter it as fairly middle-of-the-road. Indeed, thehistoriography of the decade follows this framework of reference. For example,
Rome argues, instead of characterizing the decade as a radical era, scholars havebegun to write about the period as a polarized decade when the nation divided
along ideological lines. Yet, he continues, the history of the environmental movement suggests that America in the 1960s did not just divide into Left and Right.
“Though some grass-roots activists were liberal Democrats or fiery young radicals, others were Republicans. . . . In many respects the environmental movement
was part of the Left—in others, however, it had more in common with conservatism.”54
It is understandable that environmentalists were often attacked as a privileged class seeking to defend their privilege while the environmental movement
challenged the rights of property owners and the prerogatives of corporate management. Though liberal Democrats argued for environmental protection throughout
the 1960s, the cause attracted Republicans, including Nelson Rockefeller, too.
Environmentalist and antiwar activists often shared a sense of what was wrong
with the nation, yet the environmental movement had a more ambiguous relationship to the other major reform efforts of the period. Though environmentalists
sometimes argued for the “right” to a beautiful and healthy environment, themovement was scorned by many civil rights leaders. Few environmentalists in
the 1960s spoke with passion about the problem a later generation would call“environmental justice.”55
This essay has argued that the year 1970, when not only NEPA and the first
Earth Day but also other environmentally important events occurred, needs to beunderstood in relation to the foregoing decade. These events stemmed not fromthe sudden concerns about pollution and other environmental problems as many
made us believe, but from broader historical trends of the 1960s. This essay, then,looks beyond 1970 to consider the wider assemblage of events that emerged
during the preceding period. When situated within the broader context of environmental history and politics, the once seemingly fragmented events of the
1960s can be conceived as indeed related to each other.

36

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio

Chronology
Food and Drug Act, 1960 (Color Additive Amendment), 21 U.S.C. S376(b)(5)(B)
Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960
World Wildlife Fund, 1961
Water Pollution Control Act Amendments, 87th Cong., 1st Sess., 1961
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
Clean Air Act of 1963
Lynton Caldwell, “Environment,” Public Administration Review 22 (1963): 132-39.
Wilderness Act of 1964
In re Pacific Northwest Power Company/Washington Public Power Supply System, 31 FPC. 247,
rehearing denied, 31 FPC. 1951 (1964), affirmed as Washington Public Power Supply System v.
Federal Power Commission, 358 F.2d 840 (D.C. Cir. 1966), affirmed in part and revised in part as
Udall v. Federal Power Commission, 387 U.S. 428 (1967)
Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965
Water Quality Control Act of 1965
Noise Control Act of 1965
Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965
Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. Federal Power Commission, 354 F.2d 608 (2d Cir. 1965),
cert. Denied, 384 U.S. 941 (1966)
Department of Transportation Act of 1966
Land and Water Conservation Act of 1966
National Historic Preservation Act of 1966
U.S. Supreme Court, United States v. Standard Oil Co., 384 U.S. 224 (1966)
Office of Communication of United Church of Christ v. Federal Communications Commission, 359
F.2d 994 (D.C. Cir. 1966)
Environmental Defense Fund, 1967
Lynn White, “Historical roots of our ecological crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203-07.
National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, 1968
Federal Aid Highway Act of 1968
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
National Trails System Act of 1968
Santa Barbara Oil Spill, 1969
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 42 U.S.C., Chapter 55
Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969
Citizens Committee for the Hudson Valley v. Volpe, 302 F. Supp. 1083 (S.D.N.Y. 1969), affirmed, 425 F.2d
97 (2d Cir. 1970)
Friends of the Earth, 1969
Environmental Protection Agency, 197037

Forgotten Paths to NEPA
Earth Day, 1970
Clean Air Act of 1970
Natural Resources Defense Council, 1970

Notes
1 This paper is a revised and combined version of two papers: Joseph DiMento, “Environmental
Law: Its Roots, the 1960s, in the USA and . . . ” Sophia University (November, 2007) and Kazuto
Oshio, “Environmental Law Schools: A Japan/US Comparison” American Society of Environmental History, Annual Conference (13 March 2010), and financially supported by both the Grants-inAid for Scientific Research Basic Research (A) Project, “Comprehensive Studies on the Cultural
Transformation and Border-transgression of the 1960s United States,” (Daizaburo Yui, 2007-2010)
and a grant from the Institute of American and Canadian Studies, Sophia University.
2 DiMento, “Environmental Law.”
3 Richard Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 227.
4 The Congress, recognizing the profound impact of man’s activity on the interrelations of all components of the natural environment, particularly the profound influences of population growth,high-density urbanization, industrial expansion, resource exploitation, and new and expanding
technological advances and recognizing further the critical importance of restoring and maintaining environmental quality to the overall welfare and development of man, declares that it is thecontinuing policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with State and local governments,and other concerned public and private organizations, to use all practicable means and measures,
including financial and technical assistance, in a manner calculated to foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive
harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generationsof Americans. Pub. Law No. 91-190, 83 Stat. 852 (1970) codified at 42 U.S.C. Section 4331 (1982).
See also Linda Luther, The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA): Background and Implementation (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2008).
5 The first Earth Day was attended by approximately twenty million Americans. Described as thelargest protest in the United States, Finis Dunaway argues it “signaled the emergence of a new formof environmentalism, one that emphasized the dynamic connections between human society and thenatural world.” While scholars have frequently noted the importance of Earth Day in popularizing
the environmental message and establishing a legislative agenda for the new decade, he goes on tostate, “they have tended to ignore the larger symbolic meaning of the event.” Finis Dunaway “Gas
Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of American Environmentalism,” American Quarterly, 60 (1980): 67.
6 A. Clay Schoenfeld “The Press and NEPA: The Case of the Missing Agenda,” Journalism Quarterly, 56 (1979): 577-87. “NEPA set a national policy of protection of environmental resources.
Not fully understood at the time of its enactment, it was to cause an unparalleled change in decision-

38

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio
making in the federal government. It required that agencies use a systematic interdisciplinary
approach to environmental planning and evaluation in decision-making that might have an impact
on the environment. For major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the humanenvironment an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was mandated. State versions of NEPA
followed and both sets of laws covered many actions by the government, including of energy andhighway agencies.” DiMento, “Environmental Law.”
7 Barry Commoner, “Beyond the Teach-In,” Saturday Review, 53 (1970): 50.
8 Richard Lazarus, “The Greening of America and the Graying of Environmental Law,” Virginia
Environmental Law, 20 (2001): 76-77.
9 Richard Lazarus, “The Making of Environmental Law,” paper presented at Woodrow Wilson Center, 28 September 2004.
1 0 Rome lists the following works on the decade as those giving little or no attention to environmental issues: Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thoughts and Culture in the 1960s(New York: Twayne of Macmillan, 1998); David Burner, Making Peace with the 60s (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996); Dominick Cavallo, A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American Hi story (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); David Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made
Straight: The Struggle for Social Change in the 1960s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill andWang, 1994); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books,
1987); Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2000); and David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern
America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).
1 1 Adam Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance’,” Journal of American History 90 (2003): 525-26.
1 2 Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance’,” 526. According to Rome, they include: Terry H. Anderson, The
Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Edward P. Morgan, The 60s
Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991);
and James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
1 3 Lazarus, “The Greening of America and the Graying of Environmental Law,” 79-82.
1 4 Joseph L. Sax, “Preface” Creative Common Law Strategies for Protecting the Environment, ed.
Clifford Rechtschaffen and Denise Antolini (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Law Institute, 2007),xvii-xviii.
1 5 Citizens’ right to be heard before government agencies transformed the natural world was secured
by a landmark 1965 federal court ruling, Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference v. FPC. Brooks,
Karl B., Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-1970 (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 2009), 149.
1 6 Samuel P. Hays and Robert Gottlieb tell us much about environmentalism’s origins in earlier
movements for conservation and urban and factory reform of the late 19th century and early 20th
century. These works, Sellers argues, “as well as Thomas Dunlap’s more focused history of DDT,
seek the roots of ‘environmentalism’ by tracing back into the past those concerns about particular39

Forgotten Paths to NEPA
issues that we accept today as environmentalist.” Their search for continuities tends to skim overthe more recent and rapid process by which “environmentalist” acquired its modern meaning, as acluster of long-simmering but disparate issues suddenly coalesced into an “environmental” framework and political agenda. Christopher Sellers “Body, Place and the State: The Making of an‘Environmentalist’ Imaginary in the Post-World War II U.S.,” Radical History Review, 74 (1999):
32; Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States,
1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring:
The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington D.C.: Island Press,
1993); and Thomas Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982).
1 7 Nash, American Environmentalism, 187.
1 8 Ibid.
1 9 Ibid., 188.
2 0 Rachel L. Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 2.
2 1 Ibid, 7.
2 2 John Kennedy, “Introduction,” in Steward Udall, The Quiet Crisis (Avon Books, 1963), xi-xiii,
quoted in Nash, American Environmentalism, 192.
2 3 Ibid.
2 4 Lazarus, “The Greening of America and the Graying of Environmental Law,” 79.
2 5 Mark Neuzil, The Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 192-93.
2 6 “The Cities: The Price of Optimism,” Time, 1 August 1969, 41.
2 7 “Sad, Soiled Waters: The Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie,” National Geographic, December 1970,
743-44.
2 8 Neuzil, 194-95.
2 9 Brooks, 9, n.22.
3 0 Sax “Preface,” xvii.
3 1 Ibid.
3 2 Ibid. DiMento argues that “Central to the city outcome was the convergence, before and relatively
early in the evolution of environmental and preservation law and policy, of the city planning goalsof ‘slum clearance’ and redevelopment (later, urban renewal), on the one hand, and the transportation goals of eliminating congestion and improving vehicle mobility, on the other.” Joseph F. C.
DiMento, “Stent (or Dagger?) in the Hearth of Town: Urban Freeways in Syracuse, 1944-1967,”
Journal of Planning History, 8 (2009): 133.
3 3 Sax, xviii.
3 4 Ibid.
3 5 Lazarus, “The Greenings of American and the Graying of Environmental Law,” 80.
3 6 384 U.S. 224 (1966), 225-30.
3 7 384 U.S. 224 (1966), 226.
3 8 384 U.S. 224 (1966), 226-29.

40

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio
3 9 384 U.S. 224 (1966), 230.
4 0 Lazarus, “Human Nature, the Laws of Nature, and the Nature of Environmental Law.”
4 1 Some of the above mentioned frustration had to do with the newness of such legal action. For
example, environmental plaintiffs initially spoke of what they were doing as “ecological jurisprudence.” But in the course of their first trial, one of the opposing lawyers complained to the judge
that he did not know where to look up precedents for the plaintiffs’ cause of action in the legal
literature. In many instances, plaintiffs themselves were effectively blocked from taking any actions.
Sellers “Body, Place and the State,” 55.
4 2 The EDF essentially consisted of the core group within the Bookhaven Town Natural Resources
Committee who had been involved in the trial, Christopher Sellers points out. It included: theYannocanones; Wurster; a handful of other scientists; a publicity officer from nearby Brookhaven
National Laboratory; a state game official; one other lawyer; and Arthur Cooley, the high school
biology teacher who had orchestrated the meetings of the BTNRC. Interestingly Sellers points outthat “ [a]bsent at these founding meetings were the black as well as white high school students
whom Cooley had recruited into BTNRC activities, as well as the housewives who had actively
participated, with the exception of ‘Recording Secretary’ Carol Yannacone.” In short, he is criticalof the nature of “almost uniformly white, male, and well-to-do . . . [which] reversed the sense offrustration that the founders remembered from their days with the BTNRC.” Sellers “Body, Placeand the State,” 55. See also, The Birth of Environmentalism by Robert Taylor.
4 3 Joseph F. C. DiMento, “Stent (or Dagger?) in the Heart of Town,” 139.
4 4 Ibid.
4 5 Brooks, 182-84.
4 6 Ibid., 11, 183-84; J. Willard Hurst, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber
Industry in Wisconsin, 1836-1915 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Robert W. Gordon,“J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography” Law andSociety, 10 (1975): 9-55.
4 7 Andrews, 199.
4 8 Ibid.
4 9 Nash, 206.
5 0 Commoner, 51, quoted in Nash, 208.
5 1 P. R. Janssen, “The Age of Ecology,” Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environmental
Activists, ed. J.G. Mitchell and C. L. Stallings (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 53-54.
5 2 For research on student major concerns in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, see Riley E. Dunlap
and Richard P. Gale, “Politics and Ecology: A Political Profile of Student Eco-Activists” Youthand Society, 2 (June 1972): 379-97; and Bayer and Dutton, “Trends in Attitudes on Political
Social, and Collegiate Issues Among College Students: Mid 1960s to Mid 1970s,” Journal ofHigher Education (March-April 1976): 159-71.
5 3 Sellers “Body, Place and the State,” 31.
5 4 Rome, 553. The following works see the sixties as a decade of polarization: Leo Ribuffo, “Why Is
There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything
about It?” American Historical Review, 99 (1994) and Rebecca Klatch, A Generation Divided: The

41

Forgotten Paths to NEPA
New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
5 5 Rome, 553-54.

Bibliography
Primary Sources

Baldwin, Malcolm F., and James K. Page, Jr., eds. Law and the Environment. Conservation Foundation
Series. New York: Walker, 1970.
Bayer, Alan E. and Jeffery E. Dutton “Trends in Attitudes on Political, Social, and Collegiate Issues
among College Students: Mid 1960s to Mid 1970s.” Paper Presented at the Annual Conventionof the American College Personnel Association, Atlanta Georgia, 5-8 March 1975 (later publishedin Journal of Higher Education 47 (1976): 159-71).
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
“The Cities: The Price of Optimism,” Time, 1 August 1969, 41.
Commoner, Barry. “Beyond the Teach-In,” Saturday Review, 53 (1970): 50-56.
Dunlap, Riley E. and Richard P. Gale. “Politics and Ecology: A Political Profile of Student EcoActivists,” Youth and Society, 3 (1972): 379-97.
Mitchell, J.G. and C. L. Stallings. Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environmental Activists(New York: Pocket Books, 1970).
New York Times, 23 March 1970.
Nixon, Richard M. and Edmund Muskie. “A Statement from President Nixon and Senator Muskie,”
Fortune, February 1970, 92-93.
Rodgers, William H., Jr. “The Persistent Problem of the Persistent Pesticides: A Lesson in Environmental Law,” Columbia Law Review, 70 (1970): 567-611.
“Sad, Soiled Waters: The Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie,” National Geographic, December 1970, 74344.
Sax, Joseph. Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1971).
Sive, David. “Some Thoughts of an Environmental Lawyer in the Wilderness of Administrative Law,”
Columbia Law Review, 70 (1970): 612-51.
Udall, Steward. The Quiet Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963).

Secondary Sources

Andrews, Richard N. L. Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American
Environmental Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Brooks, Karl B. Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-1970. (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 2009).

42

Joseph DiMento and Kazuto Oshio
DiMento, Joseph. The Global Environment and International Law (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2003).
———. “Environmental Law: Its Roots, the 1960s, in the USA and . . . ” A Paper Presented at Sophia
University, Tokyo, Japan, November 2007.
———. “Stent (or Dagger?) in the Hearth of Town: Urban Freeways in Syracuse, 1944-1967,” Journalof Planning History, 8 (2009): 133-61.
Dunaway, Firis. “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics ofAmerican Environmentalism,” American Quarterly, 60 (2008): 67-99.
Dunlap, Thomas. DDT: Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1982).
Fairfax, Sally K., Lauren Gwin, Mary Ann King, Leigh Raymond and Laura A. Watt. Buying Nature: The
Limits of Land Acquisition as a Conservation Strategy, 1780-2004 (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2005).
Gottlieb, Robert. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).
Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1959).
———. Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Lazarus, Richard J. “The Greening of America and the Graying of Environmental Law: Reflections on
Environmental Law’s First Three Decades in the United States,” Virgi nia Envi ronmental Law
Journal, 20 (2001): 75-106.
———. “The Making of Environmental Law: Past, Present, and Future.” Featuring: Russell E. Train,
James Gustave Speth, and Richard Lazarus, Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, 28 September 2004.
———. “Human Nature, the Laws of Nature, and the Nature of Environmental Law,” Virginia Environmental Law Journal, 24 (2005): 231-62.
Lear, Linda. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Holt, 1997).
Magoc, Chris J. Environmental Issues in American History: A Reference Guide with Primary Documents (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).
Merchant, Carolyn, ed. Major Problems in American Environmental History: Documents and Essays(Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1993).
———. American Environmental History: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007).
Miller, Char ed. The Atlas of U.S. and Canadian Environmental History (New York: Rutledge, 2003).
Neuzil, Mark. The Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2008).
Opie, John. Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt
Brace, 1998).
Percival, Robert V., and Dorothy C. Alevizatos, eds. Law and the Environment: A Multidisciplinary43Forgotten Paths to NEPA
Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).
Rechtschaffen, Clifford and Denise Antolini, eds. Creative Common Law Strategies for Protecting theEnvironment (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Law Institute, 2007).
Rome, Adam. “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of
American History, 90 (2003): 525-54.
Sax, Joseph. “Blue Planet Lecture,” Tokyo, Japan, October 2007.
Schoenfeld, A. Clay. “The Press and NEPA: The Case of the Missing Agenda,” Journalism Quarterly,
56 (1979): 577-87.
Sellers, Christopher. “Body, Place and the State: The Making of an ‘Environmentalist’ Imaginary in the
Post-World War II U.S.,” Radical History Review, 74 (1999): 31-64.
Stoll, Steven. U.S. Environmentalism since 1945: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/
St. Martin’s, 2007).
Warren, Louis S., ed. American Environmental History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).

44