prof: this course has along history. and the purpose is really towonder with you about the potential effectiveness ofenvironmental law. and i really want you toimagine that we have no environmental law.
applied foundation mesothelioma research, by the end of the course,i may ask you on a final exam to design a new system ofenvironmental law that would protect us against the problemsthat i'm going to run through with you.
this is an unusual course inthat most law courses do not go through case histories the waythat we will here. so that we will be reviewingperhaps twelve or fourteen different case histories ofspecific problems. we'll be taking a look at thestatutes that evolved in an attempt to manage thoseproblems. and i will give you myimpressions about how effectiveness might be judged,how efficiency might be judged. and also really answer thebasic question,
which is what's worked,what has not, and why, as a way of thinkingabout how we're going to respond to a very new world in which youwill face, your children will face,your grandkids will face approximately ten to twelvebillion people creating more demand on resources,more pollution, rising rates of consumption,rising rates of waste. how are we going to managethese types of problems? that's really the essentialpurpose of the course.
you'll see on the syllabus thati want to run through quickly with you that today i'll giveyou an overview of the material that we'll cover over the nextseveral months. on thursday,we'll review principles and strategies in environmental lawand i'll give you a quick cook's tour of a variety of differentstatutes, as well as the decisionstandards that are embedded in those statutes. then we will take a look overseveral weeks at the problem of
national security and theenvironment, and really what happens whenthe military spends trillions of dollars per year in the world,what happens to environmental quality? the public sector has not beenthe target of twentieth century environmental law,but it has been a very important force in shaping theenvironment that we now are coping with. we'll look at nuclearexperimentation.
and i've come to believe thatthe atmospheric weapons testing program of the 1940s and 1950sreally demonstrates one of the greatest success stories that wehave in environmental law, following the recognition thatthe radionuclides that were created and blown into theatmosphere, worked their way into thestratosphere, they encircled the globe. and when they intersected rainclouds, they would fall to earth.
they contaminated the soil,they contaminated the water supplies. they contaminated also foodsupplies, agricultural crops, and made their way to thedinner tables of everybody on the earth. the radionuclides eventuallybecame embedded in human tissue. depending on the nuclide,it would vary between bone or fat tissue, perhaps the liver,and pose very well-known threats.
so we'll review that story,because there are really fundamental lessons of ecology,fundamental lessons of environmental health that we'vereally forgotten. we've forgotten as we'veattempted to manage air, water, food,as well as consumer product safety or large tracts of lands. so why have these lessons thatwere very clear by 1963, why have we forgotten thoselessons? that is the purpose of thatsegment.
and for each of these casehistories, i'll be reviewing the specificstatutes that applied at the time and talk about how theyevolved and give you a sense of how you would evaluate whetheror not they've worked, how effective they were. we'll take a look too atpreparation for warfare. it's not only the waging of warthat creates great environmental destruction;it's also the preparation for warfare, the training,the production of weapons,
the enrichment of uranium. so that if you look at the 25to 30,000 different military bases and installations aroundthe world, you'll see extremely severe contamination. so thinking about how thatshould be managed, how it might be prevented,will also be the subject of several lectures,as well as site restoration. so we'll be looking atpredominately public sector issues in this first segment ofthe course.
and then we'll take a look atthe private sector, which has been the target ofmost twentieth century we'll take a look at globalmarkets and the challenge that they pose in managing chemicals. and the management of chemicalsis a very tricky business in that it demands a high degree ofsensitivity about where chemicals are released to theenvironment. where do they go? how do they move?
are they persistent? where do they end up? and how are people exposed? calculating the magnitude ofexposure is really fundamental to understanding what the riskis. and most environmental laws arestructured to manage chemicals based on this idea of risk. so to understand the risk andto manage it, you have to understand all ofthese intermediate issues,
such as where was it released? where does it go? how does it get into yourenvironment? and what are the likely healtheffects? and the word likely is veryimportant, because it implies that we need to be thinkingprobabilistically. what's the probability ofdamage occurring down the road, whether or not it's ecologicalor human health related? so we'll be thinking about thedifferent forms of law that have
evolved to try to deal with thiskind of a problem. some set risk-only standards,some are risk-benefit balancing, some are cost-benefitbalancing and more utilitarian in their structure. so what is the right standardto apply for very specific problems? we will then take a look at avariety of issue areas, including what i think of asindustrial agriculture. the majority of our food ishighly processed.
it is chemically dependent,particularly on fertilizers and pesticides and preservatives anddyes of different sorts. so what does that mean? the food packaging industry isincreasingly of interest to me in my own research. so i'll share with you severalideas about how plastics make their way into your life. right now, the syntheticchemical industry is dominated by the plastics industry;it constitutes seventy percent
of the synthetic chemicalindustry in the united states. and each year,one hundred billion pounds of chemicals are produced andreleased to the environment. and among all plastics,among those one hundred billion pounds, only five percent arerecyclable. so we are building up a wastestream that is coming back to haunt us. if i took tissue samples fromeach of you, probably ninety-five percent ofyou would have residues
phthalates or bisphenol a,which are plasticizers in your body. and scientists,including hugh taylor right here at the yale medical school,is now recognizing that these are very effective chemicals atexceptionally low doses, part per trillion doses,in sending a signal to cells that estrogen has arrived oranother hormone has arrived. so that they are triggers ofhormonal activity in many different species of animals aswell as humans.
so what does this mean? in one way, it means that we'reconducting quite a chemical experiment on ourselves,but also on future generations. so what should we be doingabout it? how should we be managing thechemical universe? this chemical universe,by the way, in international commerce includes about 80,000different compounds at present. two to three thousand newchemicals are produced and released to the environment eachyear.
and they take many differentforms, pharmaceuticals, plasticizers,different metal compounds in millions and millions ofdifferent products. so that these chemicals have nomechanism in law, even in the united states,to test what their effect is and what the risk might be toeither environmental quality or to human health. so what should we do aboutproblems like that? we'll take a look at airquality law, and particularly
the concentration of the cleanair act on really very few chemicals. there are six chemicals thatbecame a target of national air quality law and regulation. this is administered by theenvironmental protection agency, and they decide which chemicalswill appear on their radar screen. they decide what monitoringprograms are necessary in order to detect where they go,how they move,
how they behave in theenvironment and how dangerous they are,who might be at risk. one good example of that mightbe diesel exhaust. and you may know that the oldertrucks, the less efficient diesel vehicles,tend to spew large particulate matter from their tailpipes. and these larger particulates,ten microns in size and larger, are visible. it's one of the chemicalthreats that is visible.
it's one of the easier ones toidentify. in fact, with diesel exhaust,you cannot only see it, you can taste it,you can feel it burning in the back of your throat. so most people understand whenthey are exposed to diesel exhaust. well, one of the interestingintents of the epa was to reduce the particle size,to reduce the larger particles. and what happened when theengines became more efficient to
accomplish that was theyproduced more, but smaller particles. so the finer particles,less than one micron in size, not thinking that these finerparticles can be more deeply inhaled into the lung,they reside there, they get stuck to the sides ofthe airways, particularly in those that havebackground illnesses such as asthma,emphysema, lung cancer. so that these particles don'tget expired, so that exposure
becomes more persistent. the danger to health isincreasing. there's an interestingcorrelation, and i'm not saying that it's acausal relationship, an interesting correlationbetween the increasing number of these finer particles withrising rates of respiratory illness in the united states andin different parts of the industrialized world. so why might that be?
well, let me give you oneanalogy. if you thought about anaquarium and you fill that aquarium up, regardless of itssize, with softballs. and then you calculated thesurface area of those softballs. and then you took the softballsout and you filled the aquarium up with, say,peas. and you calculated the surfacearea of the peas, being analogous to the finerparticle size. you'd find a many-fold increasein the surface area of the peas
than you would of the softballs. and because the carbonparticles that are these core elements of particulates,because they're sticky, they tend to lock onto avariety of different organic compounds called volatileorganic compounds, which are also regulated by epa. so that the carbon core becomesthe vehicle for bringing a whole array of different chemicalsinto your lung, very, very fine particles insize.
so that many times,the absence of excellent scientific information can leadthe government into making decisions that are actually nothealth protective or environmentally protective. so we need to be very consciousabout the importance of doing excellent science,not just science about where chemicals move in theenvironment, but their effects on humanhealth. if you went to epa's websiteand you looked for the purpose
of the environmental protectionagency, the number one purpose that yousee on their website is to protect human health fromdangerous elements in the environment. that's kind of curious. many people think of theenvironment as not being that closely associated with humanhealth. we'll look at food safetyissues, and we'll look at the rise of the organic foodindustry,
which i believe is a veryimportant success story in the twentieth century,particularly the result of the food production act of 1990,although there was a delay in adopting standards for organicfoods until the year 2000. but the organic sector in thefood market now is the largest growing of any other sectorbesides bottled water, if you include water in thefood industry. this is very interesting. so the idea of certification,of government-sponsored
certification as potentiallycreating new markets for products that are healthfriendly or environmentally friendly. we'll look at the strengths andweaknesses of the certification scheme,not just related to food, but also to paper and forestproducts and a variety of other areas,especially related to buildings. we'll take a look at thehistory of tobacco regulation. and there's a special legalparadigm that applies to
tobacco. but again, it's one of thesetypes of threats to human health and environmental quality thatwas really very lightly treated, very lightly regulated duringthe twentieth century, and only now are we seeing thefood and drug administration being empowered to take tightercontrol over the way that products are marketed. we'll take a look at theadvertising strategies of tobacco companies and see avariety of similarities to other
products,such as toys or candy or different kinds of foods towardchildren. so that hooking children earlyon to try to cultivate their taste toward foods that are highin salt and sugar and fat, there are some very interestingsimilarities there between the way the tobacco industry wasvery anxious to encourage the youngest in society to trytobacco products, knowing that exposures for veryshort periods of time could become addictive.
we'll take a look after springbreak at land use issues. we'll switch from chemicalproblems and pollution problems to land use issues. and we'll be particularlyinterested in legal strategies for conservation,different approaches to set aside lands to protectbiological diversity, to protect watersheds in aneffort to improve environmental quality. we'll look also at wildernessand national park law and a
variety of other statutes thatapply to the u.s. national forest lands,the bureau of land management. and we'll also look atconflicts between land use and development and the importantvalue that we hold for private property rights in our society. we'll also think about urbanismand sprawl and different smart-growth techniques to tryto control the rate of development in suburban areas. we'll also look at the idea ofenvironmental justice,
which really grows from arecognition of different groups, different areas receiving orbeing exposed at a higher level to either chemicals or differentkinds of environmental insults. so that we'll run through avariety of cases where groups claim that they are moreexposed, more at risk than others,they're bearing a disproportionate burden of harmor threat. we'll also look at the risinginterest and rising incorporation of leedcertification into u.s.,
national, and state law. so buildings are certified nowto be green at different levels. the school of forestry andenvironmental studies building, the new kroon building,for example, is applying for the highestlevel of leed certification, it's called platinum. so we'll look at the evolutionof that certification scheme and i'll be actually quite criticalof the scheme and the way that standards are being adopted bydifferent governments that
become the foundation for theallocation of property tax breaks,but also direct subsidies from both the federal government andstate governments. we'll take a look then near theend of the term at the past and future of nuclear power and thestatutes and regulations that surround nuclear power,particularly the statutes that provided really large subsidieswhen compared to subsidies allocated to renewable energysources. we'll take a look at a varietyof different emissions trading
schemes,and renewable energy policies, and then end the course with areflection across these different cases about what we'velearned. so that's the game plan. and i wanted to spend just acouple minutes talking about course requirements. the course is structured tohave a final examination worth forty percent of your grade. but also, there is a paper ormidterm option that would
constitute fifty percent of yourgrade. and then a discussion sectionwill be held each week for fifty minutes. so everybody will need to signup for a discussion section, and that would be worth tenpercent of your grade. i'll talk more as we movethrough the term about the term paper option. there are four books that havebeen ordered and i believe are all in.
there's one that was shippedyesterday and should be in this afternoon. david kessler's a questionof intent, which provides a reallywonderful review of the history of tobacco law and regulation. michael pollan,the omnivore's dilemma. a good part of my career hasbeen spent thinking about food quality and food safety,so we'll take a look at pollan's work.
we'll read also a book that ipublished just a few months ago called green intelligencethat will run through a variety of these cases that we'llexamine during the class. and then we will take a look atweinberg and reilly's book called understandingenvironmental law. course themes that i intend todraw through these cases include those that are on the back ofpage two, or the bottom of page two. how is law related to scienceand uncertainty?
what causes environmentaldamage and health loss? where should the burden ofproof of causality lie? on the public sector or on theprivate sector? on the individual? so that understanding the ideaof burden of proof is a fundamental aspect ofunderstanding environmental law. we'll also take a look at theimportance of secrecy and the control over information orknowledge. so i think of this as beingreally an analogy between the
public sector and the privatesector. in the private sector,secrecy is a very important component in that trade secrecyprotects a company's understanding of productingredients or perhaps how it's processed or produced orshipped. whereas classified informationin the public sector protects sensitive information. in both cases,the idea is to protect competitive advantage,either in international affairs
or in the marketplace. so we'll see how that plays outin many of these cases. we'll also think about theprinciple of democracy and how participation rights varydepending upon which law we're looking at. and as participation rightsexpand, decision-making becomes more complicated. and what that means is that itoften slows down and it's harder to reach a mission of improvedenvironmental quality.
we'll look at property rights. and rights in law are anessential component, but also obligations are anessential component. so when i think about law,i think about how rights are specified,how obligations are specified, and what are the sanctionsapplied for deviance, and where does the perceptionof legitimacy for that law come from? so we'll be asking those set ofquestions for each of the laws
that we review. we'll take a look too at theprinciples of equality and justice and spend a lot ofattention looking at disproportionate allocation ofburdens or damages or pollution, where dangerous facilities arelocated. we'll also take a look at theidea of risk and precaution. so what is acceptable risk? once it's calculated,how do you determine what is acceptable?
if you look across the laws,the different statutes have very different definitions ofwhat acceptable risk is. we'll also think a lot aboutthe idea of precautionary law, as opposed to utilitarian law. so law that builds in safetymargins or buffer zones to protect against miscalculationsof risk. we did not do that when webuilt nuclear power plants, and we've had several severeaccidents in the world, most notably chernobyl thatwe'll take a look at when we
look at the nuclear power plantcase. so that thinking about whenshould the government be allowed to balance risks or costsagainst benefits, and when should a fixedstandard of allowable risk drive a decision? those are very difficultquestions. so that said,i'd like to just briefly run through a set of slides herethat i think are reflective of the material that we'll bereviewing.
and i wanted to start with thisset of images from thomas cole, a well-known landscape artistfrom the nineteenth century, one of the hudson river schoolpainters. just to give you a sense ofwhere i came from, my background as anundergraduate was in history. i had a fascination for englishliterature, but also the history of art,but a very specialized form of art,which was nineteenth and early twentieth century landscape art.
and i was always fascinated bythis series called the course of empire by thomas cole. in the very first painting onthe lower left, you see what's thought of asthe savage state. and this is thomas cole'sobvious interpretation of the evolution of civilization. so the savage state is wild,it's hostile. i think of it in a way as beingwild lands, and i've always had a strong fascination for wildlands.
when i was a child,my dad always took me camping or hiking up in the whitemountains in new hampshire or the adirondacks or up invermont. they really caused me to havenot just a fascination with it, but also a love of it. thinking about how societymight move from the savage or the wild state to the pastoralor the arcadian state is well depicted in this painting. and many people,when they're shown a variety of
different landscapes if thelandscapes vary between the highly dense urban environmentall the way to the wild environment,they prefer the pastoral, the agrarian landscape. the consummation ofempire is the next slide in the series, the urban setting. and i also have had afascination with urban areas and have lived in philadelphia,i've lived in new haven, i've lived in sao paula inbrazil and in san francisco,
and eventually settled here inconnecticut. but it's this juxtapositionthat i find so interesting, a love for the wild as well asa love for a vibrant, urban core. and what happens in between interms of suburban sprawl will become central to several of thecases that we look at. cole then went on to thinkabout what happens if markets are completely unregulated --destruction, damage. so we'll spend a good amount oftime thinking about how to
predict damage and how importantthis is in the structure of environmental standards. and then desolation. and many today have this imageof desolation 100,200 years down the road in response to globalclimate change. so really, this set ofpaintings structured my thinking in a variety of different ways. it made me wonder about whatthe potential of law is. what capacity do we have tounderstand serious threats to
the environment and to humanhealth, particularly over long periods of time? what demands on science doesthat make? and how can we use law toeffectively reshape human behavior in a way that would bemore sensitive, that would ensure that when wehave twelve billion people in the world that we will haveadequate food supplies, we will have sufficient water,it will be equitably distributed,we will have clean air,
and children,grandchildren, future generations will have anenvironment that they can be proud of. i am certainly not proud of theenvironment that my generation is leaving to your generation. and that really is,that's the reason that i'm standing here in front of youtoday. i've decided in my career thatrather than working for government,rather than working in the
private sector,that i would spend my life, the bulk of my career,training future leaders, whether or not you move on intothe public sector or the private sector,nonprofit world, to think, i hope,differently about environmental quality and how you might shapeit. so the central questions herethat we'll be looking at, what's our capacity to manageenvironmental quality? what role has and could lawplay in determining the future
of environmental quality? and what's worked well,what's failed, and why? if we can't answer thesequestions, i would hazard to say that wedon't have much hope of making a dent in the kinds of problemsthat we'll be facing over the next century. so the problems considered inthe course, national security,land use, food safety,
plastics, green building,pesticides, air pollution,tobacco, wild lands, national parks,coastal development, conservation policies,urban and suburban growth, transport energy,and drinking water. in my mind, what's worked welland why? well, the nuclear weaponshistory i think is quite fascinating. there are some wonderfullessons there about how we used
state-of-the-art science in the1950s to recognize a serious threat to human health and howwe intervened and eventually how john f. kennedy decided to ban the useof testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere that wasresulting in strontium-90 in the bones at high concentrations,particularly among the youngest, the children. population control has been asuccess. compared to the projections ofthe 1970s by paul ehrlich and
julian simon and others,it's quite striking that the geometric projections havediminished substantially, particularly in developingparts of the world. the phase-out of chlorinatedhydrocarbons, including ddt and aldrin andchlordane and dieldrin, heptachlor back in the 1970s. these became one of the veryfirst targets of the environmental protection agency. and because they are fatloving, they're lipophilic,
they persisted,they moved through the food chain. they moved into our bodies. and you and i are stillcarrying around residues of many of these chlorinatedhydrocarbons. your concentrations are lowerthan mine are. but your concentrationspredominately came from your mother via breast milk. that's the mechanism oftransfer across generations for
some of these compounds. so phasing them out was a veryimportant thing to do. lead in gasoline and paint werephased out as well. chlorinated fluorocarbons thatwere and are responsible for diminishing the ozone layer thatexists in the upper stratosphere,so that reducing cfcs and similar ozone-gobbling compoundshas been a success story, at least the rate of loss hasbeen stabilized. polychlorinated biphenylreduction,
these are chemicals originallythought to be beneficial because they acted as a refrigerant andflame retardant for electronic technologies,such as electrical transformers. so that phasing out pcbs thatwere building up in the tissues of wildlife,particularly large mammals, as well as birds,and also in human tissues, has been a very importantsuccess story. recognizing the threat ofasbestos in producing a very rare form of cancer calledmesothelioma was a very
important step,as well as the increasing restriction on tobacco,so that we're seeing a decline in some forms of lung cancer inresponse to the tobacco restrictions. and we're also seeing veryinteresting declines in the rate of addiction in those parts ofthe country where advertising has been most heavily restrictedand public service campaigns have been mounted to warn peopleabout the dangers of tobacco. we've also made some greatstrides in the area of food
safety, particularly in terms ofreducing microbial contamination. and also, the stellar successstory about the rise of organic food i think is something totake note of and to learn from. so what are the most persistentproblems, the ones that have been hardest to deal with,and why? fossil fuel consumption,renewable energy innovation in part due to our lack ofsubsidies relative to subsidizing fossil fuels as wellas nuclear power.
radioactive materials,the concentration of radioactive materials,particularly for the production of weapons,has created some of the most hazardous sites in the world. so hanford, washington,the hanford works in washington,as well as the oakridge laboratory or savannah river ingeorgia, these are seriouslycontaminated sites. waste management has also beena persistent problem.
our recycling efforts haveclearly failed us. most people don't know thedifference between a plastic that is stamped with a numbersix and a plastic that is stamped with a number three. and in fact,i'll challenge you right now to go through one week of this termwithout buying any plastic. and if anybody is capable ofdoing that by the end of the term, i will take you out forlunch. i've made that offer for thepast five years and i have not
spent one dime on lunch as aresult. transport, personal transportas opposed to public transit facilities, is a persistent andgrowing problem. we now have one vehicle in theunited states for every person who is eligible to drive. that's nearly 250 millionvehicles. we have more vehicles percapita in the united states than any other place in the world. and we drive more miles perperson than any place in the
world. the failure to develop publictransit facilities is quite striking. parks and protected areas,we are not protecting areas the way that we were back in the1970s and the 1980s. so why have we slowed down? why was the government in theprocess of acquiring lands in the 1960s, '70s,and '80s and building parks and building large corridors forwildlife?
to conserve biologicaldiversity, but also to provide wide-scale recreationalopportunities. so why have land acquisitionefforts been stalled? biological diversity loss isalso growing, in part because of the chemicalthreats that i described earlier in the lecture. there are nearly 450 millionacres of the united states landscape that are routinelysprayed by biocides, pesticides of one sort oranother.
there are 1,000 differentbiocides that are each licensed independently. so at that scale,how could we not think that we would be threatening differentspecies? also agriculture. one of the great drivers ofloss of biological diversity in the world is agriculturaldevelopment. and you can see this in theamazon, where tropical rain foreststhat are some of the richest and
most biologically diverseecosystems in the world are being ripped up and planted withsoybeans for either food or fuel production. so we'll take a look at some ofthe key drivers behind biodiversity laws. marine species exploitation,we'll take a look at the decline of a variety ofcommercial fish. we'll also be taking a look atthe tendency of large predatory fish to absorb mercury.
so mercury is emitted frompower plants. it's also emitted fromincinerators. it goes into global circulationjust like ddt would. it also rains down on the earthand it bio-accumulates in large predatory fish. by the end of the term,you'll understand which fish are safe and which are not,and why. and you'll also question thebush administration's decision to lighten the regulation onmercury emissions and how
dangerous that has become,particularly for the youngest in society. we'll take a look at indoor airquality. and one aspect of this issuethat i'm quite interested in is the environmental protectionagency spends probably ninety-five to ninety-eightpercent of its time and budget thinking about the environmentas being the outdoor whereas we in the united statesnow spend on average more than ninety percent of our timeindoors.
and as somebody that is a dadand cares about the future of the environment and humanhealth, that's got me worried. people are spending less timeoutside. they're experiencing nature ata lower rate than ever before. they are spending more time infront of computers in indoor environments than ever before. and epa does not do much toregulate the environmental quality of indoor environments. so the reasons for that aresometimes obvious and sometimes
not. one clearly is a respect forprivacy and private property rights. but it means that anybody isallowed to carry chemicals into the indoor environment,including cleansers or pesticides or plastics that canget into their bodies. and there is basically noregulation to prevent that. hazardous sites,the number of hazardous sites now in the united states is morethan 350,000 on epa's list.
there are 50,000 differenthazardous sites that have been severely contaminated that areunder the jurisdiction, meaning the responsibility,of the department of defense, the department of energy,and the department of the interior. there are 340,000 sites thatare owned in the private sector that have been classified by epaas hazardous. so the rate of cleanup of thesesites is not even one percent of the rate of discovery of newhazardous sites.
so this problem of basicallydisregarding the chemical abuse of the landscape,feeling comfortable to throw chemical mixtures out the backdoor without concern for their persistence and movement,this is something that your generation will have to dealwith. product labeling will also be asubject that we'll take on. basically, if you lookcarefully at product labels, you'll see claims of producteffectiveness, product appeal associated withcolor or functionality.
you will not see much in theway of claims or a demonstration of hazard or guidance about howyou might manage the hazards. so that product labeling couldbe an effective way of conveying information to the public,to inform consumers to make choices that are moreresponsible. so how should we adjust productlabeling law in a way that makes sense? i asked this question withrespect to pesticides several years ago and found somethingquite interesting.
if you look at a pesticide bag,for example a fertilizer bag in say a home depot. you'll see the green lawn withthe children playing on the lawn and bright colors on the frontof the bag. and then the back of the bag inprint that may be eight point, it may be six point in size,print that i have to take my glasses off and get very closeto be able to read. the warnings are illegible andunintelligible to a very large proportion of society.
and there are some twelvepercent of the u.s. population, not aninsignificant number in a population of 310 millionpeople. so ten percent that have nocapacity to read type that is less than ten point in font. that means that those warninglabels could never be effective for that population. if you add on to thatpercentage, the group that is illiterate,the group that does not have
enough education in order tounderstand what the risk is and how they might manage the risk,gradually, you get up to a percentage that's close to fortypercent of the u.s. population does not have thecapacity to understand a message of hazard or the capacity tointerpret how to manage that hazard in a way that would causethe environment to be protected or human health to be protected. so the statutes we'll look at,i'm not going to go through all of these now,but we'll go through the major
statutes and the book. weinberg and reilly will giveyou a very concise, quick overview of the keyprovisions of these statutes. and i will show you how thestatutes apply individually to the various cases. we'll take a look,not just at the chemical management statutes,but also the federal land and resource management statutes,such as the wilderness act, the endangered species act,the national park service
organic act,and several others. additional crucial statutesthat you might not think about as being environmental in natureinclude patent law, governing trade secrecy,the freedom of information act that gives you the right torequest from the government information about public policyor about the environment. i'll pause here and just askhow many of you have made requests under the freedom ofinformation act to a government agency?
that's very interesting. the majority of people that dothat in society are highly specialized. they work in the private sectoror they are lawyers, they're using them as the basisfor lawsuits. so the freedom of informationact was intended to democratize information that was held insidelibraries and government agencies. but it's been highlyineffective in a variety of
ways. the national security act,the war powers act, the administrative proceduresact, homeland security, the patriot act,and different budget statutes, ranging from subsidies toauthorizations for funding for epa. and these statutes areabsolutely crucial. so you can imagine a law beingpassed, that -- let's say the law had the intent to protectthe environment from a new
plastic compound. so that law might be passed andit might demand that the chemical be tested thoroughly. it might demand that it belabeled in a way that would ensure that it would be managedmore effectively. it might assign penalties fordeviance. but in congress,if congress doesn't allocate the money to epa,the program will fail. so the industry recognizes thisquite clearly,
that they have not lost thebattle if a law is passed. they will have an opportunityyear after year to go back to congress and try to blockallocation for monitoring that issue, for enforcing that issue. and that explains a lot of theineffectiveness of twentieth century environmental law. so on thursday,we'll come back to a discussion about different types ofstrategies to protect the environment,different decision standards
that are embedded in differentstatutes. and we'll particularly take upthis issue of distributional effects. how some chemicals behavedifferently than others, they result in exposures tosome groups that are higher than others. and also thinking about howcosts as well as benefits are allocated quite differently insociety by environmental laws. so i'm going to pause there andjust take a couple of minutes
for any questions that you'vegot. yes? student: > prof: could you repeatthat please? prof: yes. after the lecture each day,the lecture slides will be posted online. also, i will use the classesserver quite regularly. some of the readings that youwill have assigned to you will
be on the classes server,so that some of the discussion sections as well may usestrategies to pose questions and i'll require your responses onthe classes server as well. student: and will youhold office hours? prof: will i hold officehours? i will hold office hours,and i will announce those on thursday. student: okay. prof: anything else?
well thank you very much forjoining me.
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