Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-1970

Most Americans—even environmentalists—date the emergence of laws protecting nature to the early 1970s. But Karl Boyd Brooks shows that, far from being a product of that activist decade, American environmental law emerged well before the first Earth Day, often in unexpected places far from Capitol Hill.

Surveying the landscape from the end of World War II to Earth Day 1970, Brooks traces a dramatic shift in Americans’ relationship to the environment and the emergence of new environmental stat...