Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels. Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law. New York: New York University Press, 2026.
In Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law, authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels intervene in debates on contemporary environmental legal scholarship by advancing the centrality of law both as a driver of environmental degradation and as a tool for its mitigation in the US. They make a compelling argument on the relevance of turning to environmental legal history today to, on the one hand, understand how this troubled relationship came to be and, on the other, uncover the legal change that is needed to address the most pressing environmental challenges of our era, such as climate change. The book traces a full historical timeline of US environmental legal developments across five major periods – from early colonization and resource allocation to the contemporary era marked by intense political contestation and scientific breakthroughs – highlighting how legal frameworks have complexly interacted with early environmental thought and the emergence of political coalitions, social movements, technological change, and scientific developments. Situated at the intersection of legal history, environmental governance, and socio-legal studies, the book offers an analytically rich account of how legal imagination and legal experimentation have shaped responses to environmental risks and harm, with tangible effects over time. This review assesses the book’s core contributions and its relevance for scholar and practitioners grappling with contemporary environmental governance challenges.
The book is structured around a five-period historical framework that organizes the evolution of US environmental law from early resource allocation (1781–1880s) to the contemporary “contested era” (1981–present). This latter period is characterized by the paradoxical coexistence of increasingly robust scientific evidence of anthropogenic environmental change and intensifying political backlash, ideological polarization, and contestation over environmental regulation. Through this periodization, Camacho and Daniels develop a cumulative argument exemplified by key legal milestones about the dual, contradictory role of law as both enabler of environmental exploitation and depredation and a mechanism for its regulation and repair. Each era foregrounds shifting configurations of state power, private property rights and elite economic priorities, and emergent social pressure and advocacy that seek to shift course. In this way, they show how legal change is co-produced by the interplay of evolving forms of environmental knowledge, technological change, and the configuration of political coalitions that problematize and articulate around specific issues.[1]
The book’s first central contribution is its broader choice of periodization. In effect, by extending the examination of environmental law beyond what is generally considered, the authors highlight patterns of exploitation and extraction at the core of colonial and economic development structures that are still prescient today. The authors thus show that the effects of law on the environment long precede the most recent eras and go beyond environmental degradation regulation and conservation endeavors: “Sweeping legislative actions and judicial interpretations of property law and other historical doctrines dating back to at least the sixteenth century sanctioned, if not instigated, massive actions of environmental and human exploitation in what is now the United States. In rare cases, early conservation efforts arose, but these efforts became increasingly common and impactful as time marched on.”[2] They remind concerned readers of the underlying assumptions and power structures that underscore environmental law, thereby attending to the critical argument that environmental law and governance cannot continue to rest on the closures that continue to enable and deepen socio-environmental crises.[3] Critical environmental law and legal geography have shown how the distinctive legal practices of naming, classifying, delimiting, ruling, governing, and ordering through rules, rights, and prohibitions are not devoid of power; rather, they define and construct “outsides” and “insides,” attaching legal and social meaning to spaces, places, environments, and subjectivities that condition what the world is like.[4]
Across the historical arc presented by the authors and drawing on a rich range of historical legal cases, the book demonstrates the “ebb and flow” of environmental legal developments. Moments of environmental crisis repeatedly generate new legal tools and regulations in response, which are mirrored by moments of political backlash and private capture, exposing their persistent limits. Central to this relationship has been the co-evolution of law and forms of social and political mobilization and coalition formation, which converged around and problematized central environmental issues. While this dynamic movement between the law and its context is all the more salient in the “Environmental” and “Contested” Eras, an important contribution that the book makes is precisely to highlight the role that diverse actors and social trajectories play in shaping legal change.[5] A history of legal change could be a history of doctrinal, institutional, and normative change driven by legal and political elites, simply put. Here, however, the authors present readers with details on how ideological dispositions, cultural traditions, formal and informal coalitions, and scientific knowledge advancements in public health, biology, geology, climatology, and other fields configured novel environmental legal arrangements. In this way, the authors bring forth the conceptual force of “legal imagination” to highlight both the subjacent mental constructs that animate legal thinking, and the necessary cross-pollination from other sources of knowledge that have been and continue to be necessary in the face of increasingly complex environmental problems: “Foraging in the realm of ideas requires an initial planting of seeds, however eccentric or outlandish they may initially seem.”[6] This manifest socio-legal approach is pertinent, especially when dealing with the environment in concrete and material terms. Indeed, as critical environmental legal scholars argue, disembodied and abstract legal thinking, that is, “the law in the books,” tends to perpetuate foundational dichotomies and hierarchies in the human-environment interface, calling thus for more embedded, situated approaches that highlight the interdependencies as well as the contingency of environmental legal and governance frameworks.[7]
Lessons for a Warming Planet thus contributes to environmental legal scholarship and socio-legal studies by embedding environmental legal history in the US in a longer timeframe and simultaneously projecting a forward-looking analytical resource with valuable lessons for approaching today’s crises. While centered on the US, the book can be of interest to scholars from other places as the authors provide a framework for understanding the social, political, economic, and environmental conditions under which legal systems change and adapt to complex challenges. While the book foregrounds the significance of interdisciplinary approaches, its analysis would be strengthened by a more explicit exploration of the tensions that emerge beyond a single national jurisdiction. As the authors note towards the end, environmental degradation and climate change are inherently transboundary phenomena that activate the complex interplay between scales (local, regional, global), competing agendas, and value systems. Engaging more directly with these cross-scalar frictions would allow the authors to extend their compelling account into a more globally attuned analysis, particularly in relation to uneven power relations, deepening inequalities, and regional asymmetries that the US has played a crucial role in shaping.
Overall, the book offers an insightful contribution, combining historical depth with legal and socio-political analysis, which is of particular value to scholars of environmental governance, legal history, socio-legal studies, and political ecology, as well as policymakers seeking a historically grounded analysis of institutional change. This book is also valuable to activists and social movements seeking inspiration for advocacy and public engagement, as well as lessons on how to interface with legal institutions in this urgent time.
[1] Sheila Janasoff, Ordering knowledge, ordering society in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order (Routledge, 2004), 13-45.
[2] Camacho and Daniels, Lessons for a Warming Planet, 192.
[3] Louis J. Kotzé, Environmental Law and Governance for the Anthropocene (Hart Publishing, 2017).
[4] David Delaney, Law and Nature. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[5] Eve Darian-Smith, Laws and Societies in Global Contexts. Contemporary Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
[6] Camacho and Daniels, Lessons for a Warming Planet, 211.
[7] See Louis J. Kotzé, Preface: Discomforting conversations in the Anthropocene in Environmental Law and Governance for the Anthropocene (Hart Publishing, 2017), vii-xv, and Anna Grear and Louis J. Kotzé, Research Handbook on Human Rights and the Environment (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015).
*Cover Image: Book cover of the book.
[Cover Image Description: Book cover featuring at the top, the title, “Lessons for. a Warming Planet” in large, bold, uppercase letters in a bright orange-red color. Below the title is the subtitle, “A Vital History of US Environmental Law.” The center of the cover featuring a striking circular image resembling a cross-section of a tree trunk.]
Edited by Amelia Diehl, reviewed by Evelyn Ramiel.
