Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The social production of business offenses
- 2 Bringing the law back in: an integrated approach
- 3 The politics of water: pollution policies to 1970
- 4 Contradiction and change: environmental consciousness and the mobilization of law
- 5 Legislating clean water: changing conceptions of environmental rights
- 6 Controls and constraints: from law to regulation
- 7 Enforcement: the social production of environmental offenses
- 8 Ecology, economy, and the evolution of limits
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Contradiction and change: environmental consciousness and the mobilization of law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The social production of business offenses
- 2 Bringing the law back in: an integrated approach
- 3 The politics of water: pollution policies to 1970
- 4 Contradiction and change: environmental consciousness and the mobilization of law
- 5 Legislating clean water: changing conceptions of environmental rights
- 6 Controls and constraints: from law to regulation
- 7 Enforcement: the social production of environmental offenses
- 8 Ecology, economy, and the evolution of limits
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In June 1969 fire and water mixed in an unlikely combination when the lower Cuyahoga River near Cleveland exploded into flame, causing extensive damage, including the near incineration of two bridges. Due largely to thousands of gallons of oil leaked from an unidentified source, one of nature's most powerful forces had come to mock one of its most vital resources – to say nothing of the nation's pollution control efforts. None of this, of course, could have happened without the intervention of humankind's evolving forms of social organization and technological achievement. Then again, without such sociotechnical evolution, neither could the species have put representatives on the moon, a widely admired feat the U.S. government first accomplished later that same summer.
Both events appeared to stretch the limits of the possible. But they tore in opposite directions, underscoring a contradictory logic embedded in social relations. The limits that had constrained environmental law manifested a fundamental tension between economic growth and environmental stability. In favoring growth, however, these limits acted to reproduce contradictory outcomes that increasingly threatened political economic stability.
Contradictions in policy and economy
The underlying contradictory logic was displayed at all levels of human action, from the interpersonal to the institutional. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1958: 253) had noted in The Affluent Society, “They [the American family] picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream. … They may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessing”.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Limits of LawThe Public Regulation of Private Pollution, pp. 84 - 129Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991