Lessons for a Warming Planet
A Vital History of US Environmental Law
Published on 21. April 2026
Book
Hardback
328 pages
978-1-4798-0281-4 (ISBN)
Description
Shows the foundational role law has played throughout U.S. history in both environmental exploitation and protection and offers crucial lessons for addressing contemporary challenges
The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States reflects tales of countless contrasting and overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Law has cultivated both the planet's biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health. U.S. laws have driven both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation.
Lessons for a Warming Planet showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of U.S. environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States, reaching as far back as North America's colonization and ending with the present. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced environmental change.
Camacho and Daniels provide a fascinating and insightful history of environmental law. They ask readers to consider: What lessons can we draw from environmental legal history for contemporary challenges like climate change, AI, and emerging biotechnologies? In looking to the past, Lessons for a Warming Planet illustrates how prior generations each used legal imagination to navigate seemingly insurmountable environmental threats.
The relationship between humans and the environment in the United States reflects tales of countless contrasting and overlapping trends, movements, and tensions. Law has cultivated both the planet's biggest environmental threats and its most creative innovations for protecting human and ecological health. U.S. laws have driven both exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation.
Lessons for a Warming Planet showcases the fundamental role the law has served in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States. Authors Alejandro E. Camacho and Brigham Daniels explore the full arc of U.S. environmental legal history across five major periods in the United States, reaching as far back as North America's colonization and ending with the present. Through this rich history, the book considers the ways leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have both been catalyzed by the law and have advanced environmental change.
Camacho and Daniels provide a fascinating and insightful history of environmental law. They ask readers to consider: What lessons can we draw from environmental legal history for contemporary challenges like climate change, AI, and emerging biotechnologies? In looking to the past, Lessons for a Warming Planet illustrates how prior generations each used legal imagination to navigate seemingly insurmountable environmental threats.
Reviews / Votes
"Lessons for a Warming Planet provides an expansive treatment of the impact of environmental law in its broadest sense on our nation's lands, resources, and peoples. In doing so, it offers a valuable perspective on our present-day contestations over natural resource extraction, climate, equity, and environmental protection." - Alexandra B. Klass, University of Michigan Law School"A comprehensive, lively, and timely history of U.S. environmental law by two of today's most insightful legal experts. The authors give hope for a more sustainable future by showing how, even during eras of unconstrained development, innovative legal arguments and initiatives can ultimately give rise to the type of critical environmental protections needed today." - Barton H. Thompson, Jr., Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law, Stanford Law School
"Professors Camacho and Daniels provide an engaging history of U.S. environmental and natural resources laws, and a fresh framework for understanding what features and challenges have emerged and endured in our laws over the past 250 years. Their insights into law, history, and culture provide important lessons for the future of U.S. environmental law." - Sean Hecht, Managing Attorney, California Regional Of?ce, Earthjustice
"This book appears at a time when the United States Government seems determined to abandon or reverse any energy and environmental policy that mitigates global warming and it could not be more needed. Examining American legal history from the earliest impact of European settlement to the present, the authors explore the broad array of policies that have been adopted both to encourage and rein in the impacts of economic exploitation on nature. The results of this unusually deep assessment of the evolution of environmental law take us well beyond the march of legislation and litigation and inspire new thinking about how to address the current crisis." - Mary Nichols, Former California Air Resources Board Chair and California Natural Resources Agency Secretary
"Lessons for a Warming Planet is a remarkable and ambitious book. It manages to recast the entire field of environmental law to show that law and policy has always affected the environment, from the beginnings of the republic to today. Its categorization of five major periods of environmental history provide an accessible way to understand which issues were most salient and how contestations over power, technology, economics, and politics helped shape their resolution. As we face our greatest existential environmental threat ever, Camacho and Daniels remind us that there are important lessons to learn from this history." - Ann Carlson, Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, UCLA School of Law
"Addressing environmental damages caused by climate change and artificial intelligence, among other challenges, Lessons for a Warming Planet is a thorough survey of environmental legislation throughout US history." - Foreword Reviews
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
15 b/w images
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-4798-0281-4 (9781479802814)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Alejandro E. Camacho | Brigham Daniels
Lessons for a Warming Planet
A Vital History of US Environmental Law
E-Book
04/2026
NYU Press
€24.49
Available for download
Persons
Alejandro E. Camacho (Author)
Alejandro E. Camacho is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author, with Robert Glicksman, of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework.
Brigham Daniels (Author)
Brigham Daniels is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.
Alejandro E. Camacho is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author, with Robert Glicksman, of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework.
Brigham Daniels (Author)
Brigham Daniels is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law.