The Nature Business

This chapter begins with the introduction of Robert Kafin and his law partner, Ed Needleman who had been talking to Ted Hullar from the Sierra Club, David Newhouse from the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), and Courtney Jones, a philanthropist from the Lake Champlain town of Westport at Harold Hochschild's Great Camp in October 1971. The chapter describes Kafin's career shift and how he learned what was going on in the Adirondacks. Kafin saw that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other new federal laws were broadly written and not widely understood, especially by law firms north of Albany. The chapter reviews how the Adirondack Pack Agency Act added a big new state law to that pile. These laws could be used to shape or stop development. The chapter then shifts to describe how the Adirondack Project established Kafin & Needleman as the people to talk to if you wanted to block development in the Adirondacks. It also reviews the implications of Horizon and Ton-Da-Lay development for the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). Ultimately, the chapter examines the power and influence of some lawyers in relation to the APA.

Response to the Journal of Forestry Article: “US Forest Service Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act: Fast, Variable, Rarely Litigated, and Declining”

The Fleischman et al. (2020a) article on US Forest Service (FS) implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) correctly identified a decline in the number of NEPA analyses, but several conclusions were not supported by the data used. After analyzing their and other relevant data, we reached substantially different conclusions. Using FS budget data, we found budgets supporting NEPA analyses to be flat to increasing. Likewise, using FS accomplishment data, we found several FS land-management activities increased as others remained flat or decreased. The three types of NEPA analyses took statistically significant different times to complete, and time to complete analyses declined little over 15 years. We also found that litigation rates varied substantially by NEPA analysis type, resource purpose, and FS region. Conducting NEPA analyses is a necessary step in federal land management. However, resources invested in NEPA analyses represent an opportunity cost, and the success of the FS is better measured by on-the-ground accomplishments rather than number of NEPA analyses produced. Study Implications National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analyses are required for management of National Forest System (NFS) lands. The Forest Service (FS) devotes substantial effort to conducting NEPA analyses, and the use of NEPA analyses in litigation against NFS management activities is well documented. Land managers and the public need an accurate understanding of how the FS is implementing NEPA. A recent Journal of Forestry article about NEPA assumed that NFS budgets and land management activities declined with the number of NEPA analyses. By contrast, data from the FS shows (1) NFS budgets have been flat to increasing, (2) several NFS accomplishments have been flat to increasing, (3) the time to complete a NEPA analysis varies substantially by the type of analysis, (4) the amount of time the FS takes to complete NEPA analyses has declined very little over the past 15 years, and (5) litigation of NEPA analyses varies by the type of analysis, FS region, and resource purposes. Although conducting environmental analysis is a necessary step in federal land management, completing NEPA analyses is not a substitute for accomplishing on-the-ground management activities, and resources invested in NEPA analyses represent an opportunity cost to the FS.

Features of civil liability for environmental offenses

The paper considers the question of the peculiarities of the regulation of civil liability for environmental offenses. A significant step forward in strengthening the importance of the institution of legal liability for environmental offenses in Ukraine was enshrined in the Concept of National Environmental Policy until 2020, the principle of “environmental responsibility, which requires liability for any violations of environmental legislation”. This principle, according to the above concept, is included in the list of fundamental principles on which the national environmental policy in Ukraine should be based. The purpose of the study is to define the concept of legal liability for environmental offenses, to establish its features, types and relationships with other concepts, to clarify the content of environmental offenses and ways to prevent its commission. Legal liability for environmental offenses is an important legal institution to ensure law and order in the field of ecology, environmental safety, protection of human rights and freedoms, which has both general features of legal liability, developed by theory, and specific features due to the subject of regulation. Liability for environmental offenses arises only due to the existence of such an environmental offense, which is characterized by a number of features and a special composition, which includes such mandatory elements as object, subject, objective and subjective side. The absence of these elements excludes grounds for liability. At the level of the application of liability to offenders, the state must address the issue of preventing the commission of these offenses. The causes and conditions of committing specific crimes or administrative offenses must be established and ways to reduce their number must be established. Civil liability is an important means of restoring violated rights and compensation for damage caused by the offense. Thus, environmental liability is a new independent type of legal liability, which has not yet been enshrined in law, but has already received the support of many legal scholars and is currently a promising area for the development of the institution of liability.

Fiscal Policy Measures of Air Protection: Ukrainian Realities and the EU Experience

Nowadays environmental protection and the rational use of natural resources have become priorities of the state-building strategy in almost all developed countries of the world. Effective financing of these activities is required for the development and adoption of national targeted, local programs for environmental protection, for the sustainable development of society, for the rational use and reproduction of natural resources. The article is devoted to the research of the current tendencies of the use of fiscal policy measures in the implementation of the national environmental policy in the sphere of atmospheric air protection in Ukraine. The ways of improvement of environmental taxation and development of the main ways of development and expansion of the system of ecological taxation and ecological governance in Ukraine were discovered. Keywords: atmospheric air, environmental air safety, fiscal policy, environmental taxation, implementation of the national environmental policy,