Keith H. Hirokawa, Cinnamon Piñon Carlarne, and Lauren A. VanWagoner (all Albany Law School) have posted The Inevitability of Local Environmental Law (Fordham Environmental Law Review) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The United States is entering a new era of environmental law. Within the first months of his second term, the Trump administration issued a mass of executive orders, memoranda, and policy changes that seek to roll back environmental protections, in many cases to the point of erasure: shuttering agencies, dissolving the EPA’s research arm, terminating life-saving translation services, defunding public health initiatives, and eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs nationwide. Given the scale of this federal retreat, this Article argues that local environmental governance is not merely necessary, but inevitable.
Local environmental law is the original form of environmental law. When federal environmental law emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, the evolving federal statutory and regulatory regime often eclipsed local environmental law. But local environmental law persisted and continued to provide essential tools for addressing persistent environmental challenges. Local governments cannot replicate federal scale, uniformity, or scientific capacity, and this Article does not claim otherwise. Instead, it locates the inevitability of local environmental law in what only local governance can offer: belonging. Belonging, understood as membership, ownership, and the fulfillment of place-based identity, generates knowledge, responsiveness, efficacy, and legitimacy that federal governance structurally cannot reach.
This Article begins by cataloging the current administration’s dismantling of federal environmental and public health protections, from EPA deregulation to the erosion of FEMA, NOAA, and USAID. It then makes the affirmative case for local environmental law, examining how belonging drives four governance imperatives: recognizing difference among and within communities, protecting vulnerable populations, sustaining informed and engaged communities, and centering equity. The Article concludes that as federal environmental leadership recedes, communities and their local governments are left to govern through the very things federal law has never been able to offer: local knowledge, local relationships, and local belonging.
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