Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Miller on the Relationship Between Nature and the City
Stephen Miller (Idaho) has posted Boundaries of Nature and the American City (Book Chapter) on SSRN. Here's the abstract:
This
chapter presents a framework for understanding how legal approaches have
guided and defined the relationship between nature and the city since
the wilderness movement. The purpose of presenting a selective and
concise, but by no means exhaustive, version of these changes is
twofold: first, this chapter satisfies a need to identify the dynamics
that govern and organize the disparate policies through which we
navigate the boundaries between nature and the city; second, because the
city and its legal tools will be tasked with driving human adaptation
to climate change, this chapter will serve as a guide for further
exploration into the capacity and potential of these legal tools in a
changing environment.
The five approaches to city boundaries
explored here illustrate the variety of tensions constructed in the law
between humans, nature, and place. The first two approaches, both of
which fit under the larger rubric of growth management or smart growth
policies, primarily concern the city’s sprawl into nature. These
approaches are driven by a felt need to maintain the boundary between
human, civilized places and nature. The first approach uses legal tools
that would bind a city geographically through preservation of natural
elements at the city’s border, such as open space acquisition, land
trusts and conservation easements, agricultural easements and working
landscapes, transfer of development rights, greenbelts and urban growth
boundaries, and large-lot zoning. A second approach to sprawl has been
to restrain the speed of the city’s geographic growth through land use
tools such as tempo and sequencing controls, and linking land use and
transportation planning.
Beyond addressing sprawl, a third
approach to boundaries of nature and the city has sought to revitalize
neglected natural elements located geographically within the city —
rivers, native species, and agriculture — enhance them, and integrate
them into city life. A fourth approach has sought to change how
cities’ built environment relates to nature by reducing and mitigating
the built environment’s effects on nature. This has included use of
legal tools such as mandatory environmental review of new projects, new
legal regimes governing how the built environment’s use of resources
affected nature globally through climate change, as well as regulations
of even small parts of the built environment, such as street lights,
that can have an outsized effects on wildlife. A fifth approach has
sought to change how a city’s community relates to nature, including
using law to address environmental justice and empowering sub-local
communities to seek environmental benefits.
After reviewing
these five approaches to boundaries of nature and the city, the chapter
concludes by evaluating how the relationship between nature and city is
being redefined through rapid population and ecosystem migrations. As
both nature and the city morph and change, new, forward-looking legal
tools will be needed to renegotiate nature and the city’s boundaries at
both the hyper-global and hyper-local levels.
Steve Clowney
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/property/2013/08/miller-on-the-relationship-between-nature-and-the-city.html