Dave Owen (UC Law, San Francisco) and Eric Biber (University of California, Berkeley – School of Law) have posted Fixing Wildfire Law (Boston College Law Review, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Wildfire law in the United States is an uncoordinated mess. Air quality laws generally do not address wildfire, even though wildfire smoke is one of the nation’s largest sources of air pollution. Where air quality laws do apply, they can thwart successful management strategies. Public lands laws also create perverse incentives, and the debates surrounding those laws can seem stuck in decades past, when logging companies and a Forest Service oriented toward clearcutting fought ongoing bitter battles with environmentalists. Land use law has mostly been ineffective in managing development in wildfire-prone areas. And insurance law, which is increasingly entangled with wildfire, has created a mix of rising prices and public liabilities, problematic incentives, and insurance-market breakdowns. These areas of law are largely disconnected, and policymakers and researchers do not tend to even think of wildfire law as something that could be a coordinated field.
This article proposes reforms designed to address these challenges. It identifies ways in which different parts of the nation’s wildfire-law challenges are unavoidably intertwined. And it describes how a combined set of federal- and state-law reforms could help bring wildfire smoke within the coverage of environmental law, improve public and private lands management, and stabilize insurance markets. These reforms will not make the challenges of wildfire management go away; instead, wildfire management is a perpetual task that can only be addressed imperfectly. But the reforms could lead to a future in which wildfire management is less contested and more successful, and in which forests are more resilient and extreme smoke events happen less often.
Recommended!
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